Enjoyable middle book in Kim Stanley Robinson's series. It focused a little too much on Frank, and not enough on the other characters introduced in 'Forty Days of Rain'. I enjoyed the read, and enjoyed learning about environmental science - I would often put down the book to check on an event or theory mentioned. ( )

It was not until I did some follow-up research that I realised 'Fifty Degrees Below' was the central book of a trilogy. In that case, it did very well for having a beginning that was engaging to pick up and and middle that largely sustained my interest but it felt very lacking in the end department!

The protagonist, Frank Vanderwal manages an intriguing balance of holding down a responsible job in an organisation devoted to finding effective measures to combat climate change while experimenting with splitting his private life between his van, a tree house and the bathroom of a gym rather than the more traditional house style of living.

Initially this, combined with the backdrop of a Washington DC that had been devastated by floods and was now facing an extreme winter, was fascinating. Somewhere in the later portion of the book though, perhaps round about the time Frank got hit in the face and suffered concussion, it began to feel that it was dragging along.

Perhaps reading the first and last books as well would give a better appreciation of the whole but I would rather have had things wrapped up a 100 or so pages earlier rather than be faced with another thousand pages to read before I can appreciate the whole. ( )

The best of this series. The author spends a lot of time exploring the psyche of the main character and his attempts to get in touch with his primitive instincts. I found it to be quite insightful and valuable in light of that. The main plot of the environmental crisis is interesting but not enough to carry the book without the above elements. ( )

This second part of Robinson's eco-trilogy has a lot more action than the first, but is perhaps just a little bit too long. Excellent stuff overall, in any case. ( )

Fifty Degrees Below is the sequel to Forty Signs of Rain, and continues Robinson’s story of abrupt climate change in the near future. In Fifty Degrees Below, we’re facing the first couple of winters of a slide into a new ice age (like the Younger Dryas–see my post on Forty Signs of Rain for links to more information about abrupt climate change).

In Fifty Degrees Below, Washington, D.C. is hit by no-fooling Arctic temperatures, temperatures that few people outside of northern Canada, Siberia, or Antarctica know how to deal with, and that stick around for months. The winter seems to have finally convinced people that now is the time to try and reverse the effects of mass industrialization and consumerism, and try and get a grip on abrupt climate change. (I would have said global warming, but apparently, in the world of fiction, global warming is going to lead to an ice age. I am not sure of the science because I am not a climatologist, meteorologist, or hydrologist.)

At this point, I think I’ve given up trying to impose a traditional plot structure on this series. It’s starting to seem like Robinson is trying to model this story on the way things happen in real life. What I mean is that there are a lot of characters, each of whom have a piece of the narrative, who may or may not be working together or even towards the same goal. It’s reminding me a lot of when I read Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. There were unifying elements, but it was very hard to summarize the plot.

In a way, you could say that everything that has happened in these books is peripheral. And I’m really enjoying that. There have been a lot of times when I’ve read a book, and the hints about what is going on in the background are as interesting or are more interesting than what’s happening to the plot. This might be a further sign of my Wikification, because I want to pursue all the tangential plot elements, back stories, and histories that the narrative introduces.

(This review originally appeared on my blog, the Textual Frigate)