January 8, 2022 by A.S. Van Dorston

It’s a real gift these days to have a favorite author who is so prolific. Neal Stephenson may not churn out a book every year, but he when he does reliably come out with something every 2-3 years, it’s guaranteed to be substantial, something that could take up nearly a month of your reading time. Since Cryptonomicon (1999), his books have averaged just under a thousand pages each.

While Stephenson famously deep dives into rabbit holes to the extent that entire chapters are often little more than info dumps, his creativity shows no signs of losing it’s spark, especially with his previous book, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (2019). Technically a follow-up of his technothriller Reamde (2011), it turned into a pretty mind-blowing postcyberpunk exploration of post-mortum digital consciousness and world building, and my favorite since his near-perfect run of Snow Crash (1992), The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995) and Cryptonomicon. Full disclosure, Stephenson temporarily lost me with his three part, eight volume historical fiction series The Baroque Cycle, something that I mean to circle back to, but am not excited to do so.

Termination Shock addresses themes first touched on with his second published book, the eco-thriller Zodiac (1988), and the technothriller Reamde. The believable portrayal of near-future climate change (he’s careful not to get too specific, but it seems roughly 10-15 years in the future) isn’t quite as subversive or edgy as his earlier writing, which is natural. Youthful outrage evolves into fascination with history and the complex interaction of technology, economics, and politics, not quite as lefty as he once appeared, apparently having a soft spot for vaguely libertarian capitalist figures. He did, after all, work as an advisor for Jeff Bezos for seven years during the early days of the Blue Origin spaceflight company.

While this is still a fictional world, certain things are based in real issues. Just before I started the book I had moved to central Texas. The mass migration of people leaving their homes in the Houston area during a heatwave because their air conditioners were wrecked by fire ants is a real thing! My septic inspector warned me about fire ants being attracted to the frequencies of the electronics of air conditioners and the septic system. And wild boars are running rampant — several had crashed through the barbed wire fencing of our property and our neighbors in the past, one that was 450 lbs, still small compared to Snout, which brought down an entire plane. T.R. Mick’s Mobility Center with a hundred gas pumps and famously clean bathrooms is clearly based on the Buc-ee’s chain. As usual, Stephenson has done his research.

Among the many new topics Stephenson tackles is the somewhat obscure martial art of gatka, practiced by Sikh-Canadian Deep Singh, known as Laks, and later as Big Fish. Both the training and active combat are well done and interesting, bringing to mind the martial arts and swordfighting bits in Johannes Johns’ The Redwood Revenger trilogy. Laks’ journey to India, the “Line of Actual Control” between India and China, and eventually back to North America, is kept separate from the rest of the storylines for much of the book.

The first half of the book (a relatively succinct 720 pages, his “shortest” in quite a while), is relatively slow going, taking it’s time for character development of a pretty diverse cast, including Queen Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia of the Netherlands, who was invited to Texas for a mysterious meeting with billionaire-mogul T.R. Schmidt. For some comic relief, she sizes up local ex-military and professional feral hog nemesis Rufus: “low drag and, the more she saw of him, extraordinarily high lift. But it would never cross the poor man’s mind in a million years and so she would have to slip a Xanax into his Shiner Bock and then throw herself at him.”

Assessing dateability of the men in her circle in aeronautic terms of “drag/lift” is so Stephenson. His characters attempt valiantly to behave like normal humans, but really just want to info dump everything they know about various esoteric topics. It’s kind of endearing. The action picks up in the second half, but more info dumps could have been trimmed for the benefit of pace and excitement, as I found myself speed-reading through several sections to power through to the end.

Surprisingly, the end is fairly anti-climactic, a sharp change from the likes of Seveneves (2015) and Fall, which explode into mind-expanding speculative fiction at it’s best. But here, the books’ title “termination shock,” the consequences of suddenly stopping a massive solar geoengineering project, are not addressed at all. I suspect that Stephenson is only halfway done with the story, and I imagine his agent telling him, “enough Neal,” no one has time for a 2,000 page book, we’re publishing this.” However no sequel has been mentioned, so perhaps the future implications are meant to be left to our imagination. No matter what one’s level of tolerance is for “Nealsplaining,” it’s generally all worth it, and whatever he comes out with next, I’ll be pre-ordering it.