Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain

Having tackled the environmental politics of Mars and Antarctica, Kim Stanley Robinson took on the challenge of global warming. Forty Signs of Rain is the first instalment of a trilogy and should not be judged as a stand-alone novel. Most of it is devoted to establishing characters and the political and scientific background for a climatic drama that only begins towards the end of the book.

The central theme is the politics of science. Robinson takes us inside Washington’s corridors of power, following three main protagonists: Charlie, climate adviser of the ecofriendly senator Phil Chase (revived from Robinson’s earlier novel Antarctica); Frank, a sociobiologist employed in reviewing grant applications at the National Science Foundation; and Charlie’s wife and Frank’s colleague Anna, who befriends the Washington representatives of Khembalung, an island nation threatened by rising sea level.

The writing is leaner and faster-paced than in Robinson’s other big books, yet, as usual, includes dollops of scientific explanation, emplaced either in a protagonist’s consciousness or as chapter prologues; a practice Robinson has defended as enabling more thorough examination of subject matter than is possible in a straight-line narrative. A detailed subplot concerning a new pharmaceutical procedure appears only tenuously connected to the subject of climate change, but, in the light of Frank’s ruminations upon game theory, illustrates the dubious ethics underlying the funding of research. Much of the politics and psychology is spelt out to an extent that might seem unsubtle were it not justified by the analytical mindset of the protagonists, though Robinson allows us to note for ourselves the irony that the one person (Charlie) making a serious effort to modify US climate policy for the benefit of future generations is saddled with the daytime care of an unpredictable infant (who’s the source of much incidental humor).

The scarcity of external description through much of the book also seems calculated to convey the scientists’ inhabitation of a life world of abstract ideas, ICT, and indoor spaces. External nature is present mainly in pervasive repetition of how hot and humid it is outdoors – until meteorological events breach the cerebral space of science and politics with lucidly narrated drama.

The book ends with a whole raft of unresolved subplots as well as the big question – ‘What’s the climate going to do?’ – to catapult the reader into the next volume. On Robinson’s previous form, one would expect the sequels to this thoughtful and compelling first act to unfold a crisis of awesome scale and yet hold out a creative glimmer of hope.

This review was first published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2005