Cross posted from the Words&Dirt blog. I'm a longtime reader and fan of lesswrong, but not a regular poster. My best friend submitted this review of Neal Stephenson's 2021 book 'Termination Shock' into the ACX book review contest this year. It didn't make the finalists, but I thought the community here might get appreciate it anyway. The author (Miles) and I would love to here your perspectives on the book, review, and more generally, solar geoengineering.

Double Take: The Edifying Ambiguity of Neal Stephenson’s “Termination Shock”

I. Grabbing the Wheel

It’s like, we’ve been in a car with a brick on the gas pedal and no one at the wheel, careening down the road, running over people and crashing into things. We’re still in the car. We can’t get out of the car. But someone could at least grab the wheel. (655)

This passage doesn’t show up until the final act of Neal Stephenson‘s Termination Shock, but it’s a useful image for introducing the book’s premise. Imagine the late 2040s, just two and a half decades from now. Humanity has continued to do diddly-squat about climate change. Life is becoming increasingly difficult for people across the globe, primarily due to rising temperatures and sea levels. Frustrated with our collective complacency, a Texas billionaire decides to “grab the wheel” by building a giant gun in the ground, complete with six 240-meter barrels that point straight up toward the sky. Every eight minutes, this gun fires a “bullet” that is actually a miniature rocket. These rockets use molten sulfur as fuel, which converts into sulfur dioxide exhaust as they sail through the stratosphere. Once injected into the stratosphere, the sulfur dioxide reflects some portion of the sun’s light back into space, thereby reducing the amount of heat entering Earth’s atmosphere and bringing down global temperatures. From this starting point, Termination Shock introduces a host of characters whose lives intersect with this project, depicting the challenges they face amidst growing geopolitical tensions.

Depending on your familiarity with the climate literature, this scenario may strike you as completely bonkers, predictably inevitable, or somewhere in between. But for anyone unfamiliar with the idea, “solar geoengineering” (AKA “solar radiation modification” or “SRM”) is a very real technology with a theoretical hist...

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