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It was done by Neal Stephenson There is no problem in getting speculative science fiction from its best-selling science fiction that explores how people can respond to new technologies that are revolutionizing the world. But sometimes his inventions are not true of what happens when real people face a real apocalypse.
“We could have had the idea of a pandemic that killed a double American who died in World War II, and in a shorter amount of time, and yet there’s still a huge number of people in this country. Don’t think it’s real,” Stephenson told senior correspondent Adam Rogers today RE: WIRING. “Even after Trump and everything else, I didn’t see that coming.”
“Then I look at climate change; climate change is a much more abstract and difficult-to-understand scientific concept, even for people who have learned it scientifically,” continued Stephenson in his seventeenth book. Closing Shock, comes out next week and addresses the issue of global warming. After seeing public cognitive dissonance over Covid-19, Stephenson sees no reason not to expect the same thing for climate change. “The consequences are far more far-reaching, and much more abstract, than making a friend or neighbor or loved one sick or dying from this disease,” he said. “You have to be pretty realistic, which means pessimistic.”
In his new novel, Stephenson depicts a world that is biased into a climate apocalypse, and an oil billionaire takes matters into his own hands – building the world’s largest gun to throw tons of sulfur into the atmosphere, an attempt at solar geoengineering to reflect sunlight. . It’s a tactic that some (not fictional!) Scientists believe cool the planet, saving human lives, global biodiversity and properties allegedly threatened by Texas hurricanes.
“The program is already one thing,” Stephenson said of how the novel opens. “So most of the book looks at how people around the world, from different countries and from different walks of life, are responding to what this guy is doing.”
It was important for Stephenson to finally write about the climate. “Nothing else matters in comparison. It will be a problem for 100 years, ”he told Rogers in advance WIRED in an interview. “I’m a guy who has found a niche to write fiction about technical and scientific issues. It seemed strange to me that I had to get to the end of my career and never have to take a hit ”.
An individual billionaire found Stephenson a useful trope, he told the RE: WIRED audience. “We’ve gotten into a very weird place where things work in our society where millionaires are the answer to everything,” he said. “Fifty years ago, if something big had to happen, we would look at the government, or we would look at the private industry.”
Rogers noted that solar geoengineering is a controversial idea and asked Stephenson if it was a “great approach,” as the author argued. In a 2011 WRED piece that’s science fiction writers need supply. “It may be,” Stephenson replied.
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