Neal Stephenson’s ‘Termination Shock’

Geoengineering and the end of the world.

“Termination Shock” is Neal Stephenson’s ambitious, sprawling, engrossing latest novel — the tale of an eccentric Texas truck-stop magnate who unilaterally begins a program of geoengineering in a bid to cool the Earth by doping the stratosphere with sulfur.

https://nealstephenson.com/termination-shock.html

As you’d expect from a Neal Stephenson novel, Termination Shock bristles with delightful ornaments and esoteric adventure scenes. For example, Stephenson uses a border skirmish between China and India to illustrate the geopolitical consequences of retreating glaciers — but not just any skirmish. This border war is governed by a treaty that prohibits the use of any weapons save sticks and rocks, and is fought by livestreaming teams of martial artists using Sikh gatka combat techniques against kung fu staff-fighting, all at altitudes so high that it’s easy to pass out from moving too fast.

But the main events of Termination Shock revolve around TR Schmidt, the Texas truck-stop billionaire, and a giant gun he’s built to fire giant sulfur capsules into the stratosphere every eight minutes, 24 hours per day, 7 days a week.

Schmidt’s geoengineering experiment doesn’t have the approval of the world’s governments, but…