Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson (2021) (read in 2022)

“The United States—which used to intervene in such situations—was a basket case and global laughingstock;”

“T.R.’s phone had buzzed, and he had put on reading glasses. He looked at Willem over the lenses. “My granddad built a mine in Cuba. Castro took it away from him. Does that mean he shouldn’t have built it?” While Willem pondered this not uninteresting philosophical conundrum, […]”

“The initial pushback against what T.R. was doing here had more recently been muted by countervailing arguments around the idea of termination shock: the fear that if the gun stopped, it would lead to a backlash in the world’s climate system.”

““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. T.R. ain’t the perfect man to grab it, but I don’t think his whole plan is just to fuck up the Punjab and starve India.”

“[…] they controlled a trillion dollars that had been earned by injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

“The first wave is a stopgap measure. Hurling enough SO2 into the stratosphere to begin making a difference. All well and good; when a house is on fire, you throw water on it. The second wave will be about tuning the distribution of the veil so as to achieve the results . . .” Saskia looked him in the eye. She got the idea he was about to conclude the sentence with “we want” but after the briefest of hesitations he said “that are most beneficial.””

“During that time there was surprisingly little to do. She and Johan had trimmed the plane so that its weight exceeded the lift produced by its wings; in accordance with the laws of physics, this caused it to lose altitude in a steady and predictable manner.”

“The man began to unlimber his Kalashnikov but then there was a bang that made the queen go deaf in one ear. She looked up at Amelia in time to see her discharge a second round at the pig. The pig fell over and stopped moving, apart from some jerky nervous system mayhem about the legs. The man turned half around and favored Amelia with a nod. “Double tap was definitely your correct move, sister,” he remarked in a world-weary but agreeable tone, and once again turned his back on them.”

“For years he’d been hunting Snout all over Texas. Now he knew almost exactly where the creature was. It could only move so fast. He and his herd would leave in their wake a wide trail of shit and damage; it would be as easy as tracking an armored division across a golf course.”

“Amelia was able to produce from her bag a pair of ordinary (not electronically enhanced) sunglasses with an old-school military look to them. Fenna unfolded them and slipped them onto Saskia’s face, carefully guiding the ends of the bows into the tight gap between her temples and the spandex hood.”

“Fenna was braless, wiry, and heavily tattooed, so any lurkers watching from the scrub along the banks would have seen more, but not for long.”

“Fat orange and yellow extension cords coursed over the sand, obliging her to pick her feet up as she walked.”

“Could anything less sustainable be imagined? She was drinking water from a bottle made of petrochemicals. At three in the morning the temperature was still so high that humans could not sleep unless they ran air conditioners powered by generators that burned more petroleum. The generators and the air conditioners alike dumped more heat into the air.”

“Rufus, of course, knew her only as Saskia, and had introduced her as such to all of the Boskeys. It was a code name; but at the same time she felt in some ways that it was her true name, and she very much enjoyed being called it.”

“The next, and last, time that Hendrik saw his father, Johannes was kneeling naked in the town square. He was blindfolded. On closer inspection, he was bandaged over the eye sockets, and the bandage was soaked and streaming with blood, because his eyes had been gouged out and tossed into a bucket along with a lot of other eyes of the wrong color. One of the young rebels had got a samurai sword and was going down the line cutting heads off. Johannes’s last words were “Leve de Koningin!” (“Long live the Queen!”).”

“They drank. Of course, they would hold the entire conversation in Dutch. “She sends this,” Willem said, and slid the queen’s note across the table. Hendrik somewhat laboriously fished out glasses and put them on, then unfolded the note and read it, as if it were an everyday occurrence for him to sit out in his gazebo perusing correspondence from crowned heads of Europe.”

“The Mississippi was about seven Rhines. When this spillway was wide open, it diverted two and a half Rhines into the lake.”

“Now, where Willem came from, a Rhine was sort of a big deal. A third of the Netherlands’ economy passed up and down one single Rhine. They had, in effect, built a whole country around it. Here, though, people were gunning their pickup trucks over a causeway bestriding two and a half Rhines just as a temporary diversion of a seven-Rhine river over yonder. It was one of those insane statistics about the scale of America that had once made the United States seem like an omnipotent hyperpower and now made it seem like a beached whale.”

“Willem glanced toward the adjoining high-rise district, sprouting from a low clutter of RVs and tents. “You’re right,” he said, “that is not a choice we have to make. Oh, fisheries are always problematic in all countries. But when we build coastal defenses, as a rule, we are creating jobs. Not obliterating valuable sources of employment.””

“Then Willem almost got them killed when he failed to notice stopped traffic on the highway ahead until it was nearly too late and had to stand on the brakes and make a controlled diversion onto the shoulder.”

“Saskia knew she’d looked to the example of Prince Harry and his American wife, Meghan, who had simply walked away, renounced their titles, and moved to the West Coast to live like normal humans.”

“This place, however, was about permanence. Permanence, and uniqueness. Every detail custom-built of polished old wood, wrought iron, sculpted marble. Original works of art wherever some decoration was wanted, living flowers arranged by human hands. That human effort immanent in every detail. Napkins folded just so, drinks hand-shaken and served with origami twists of citrus rind. People were expensive; the way to display, or to enjoy, great wealth was to build an environment that could only have been wrought, and could only be sustained from one hour to the next, by unceasing human effort. Saskia, with her staff, was as guilty of it as anyone, but she tended to forget about it until some event such as the journey down the Brazos reset her thinking.”

“That kind of thinking—adjust the climate of the entire planet just to make things good for Venice—might have been very typical of Venice in, say, the twelfth century but was not what one expected today.”

““The size of it. The sheer amount of steel in the ground. The engineering. The presence, Your Majesty, the physical mass and reality of it. Every strand of rebar was drawn out in a steel mill. Where’d the heat come from? Burning things. The cement was produced in kilns, biggest things you ever seen. How do we keep the kilns hot? Burning things. We put the steel and the concrete together to make these things, these freeway interchanges, just so cars can run on ’em. How do we keep the cars moving? Burning things.””

““With all due respect, Your Majesty, it is as sustainable, or as unsustainable, as your whole country.”

“As he said it, the twenty-six lanes of the Katy Freeway suddenly filled up with cars and trucks, countless thousands of them, moving along at moderate speed—not quite a traffic jam, but still with enough brake lights igniting here and there to temper the flow.”

“Standing at his side was his wife, Dr. Daia Kaur Chand, smartly but not flashily attired in pants and flats well adapted to a daylong program of clambering in and out of diverse vehicles.”

“[…] she astonished and delighted their hosts by greeting them in a language that Saskia had to presume was Punjabi. Mohinder and his family didn’t have a Willem on staff to do advance research on everyone they were going to encounter over the course of a day and so it was a joyous surprise to them to discover that one of their guests shared their religion and spoke their language.”

“These guys did look happy. A little older, whiter, maler, and squarer than techies in Sunnyvale or Amsterdam. Calmly, even serenely focused on what they were doing.”

““Nope, water runs right through it,” T.R. said. He took a step back, extended his arms, and gave it the full Ozymandias.

““Sulfur!” he proclaimed, in the same tone that a conquistador might have said “Gold!”

““The stone that burns!”

“Then he added, “S!,” which Saskia knew was an allusion to its symbol on the periodic table.”

“Saskia knew the term at least as well as Bob. She was slower to respond, though, since she had been trained to think hard and choose her words carefully when any topic related to the Second World War came up in conversation.”

““You can buy that much sulfur for fifteen million dollars!?” Saskia was suddenly having to restrain an irrational urge to run out and buy a sulfur pile of her own.”

“He nodded. “Currently, further work on the project is blocked because it was found to be in violation of the European Directive on Birds.”

““Excuse me, did you say birds?”

““Yes.” Michiel gave a shy, wry smile. “That is only one such violation, to tell you the truth. Also, the construction of the MOSE sea gates disturbed aquatic life on the bottom of the Lagoon. Mussel populations were impacted across several hectares. Every time such a violation is found to have happened, it triggers the European Infraction Procedure.””

““If folks all over the world are going to get riled up at billionaires messing with the climate even when we are not really doing a goddamn thing, then we got no real downside politically.””

““Even if we could get China and India to stop burning shit tomorrow, and crash their economies for the sake of Mother Earth,” T.R. said, “it wouldn’t undo what we’ve done, as a civilization, to the atmosphere since we first worked out how to turn fossil fuel into work.””

“Hell, in Afghanistan they even burn shit.”

““You’re saying that removing the carbon from the atmosphere would be a much bigger project than putting sulfur into it,” Saskia said. “We would have to make a pile of carbon the size of Mount Rainier. About thirty cubic miles. Imagine a cube a mile on a side, full of this stuff.” He rested his hand a little more gently on the carbon jar. “And now imagine thirty of those. To get that done in any reasonable amount of time—let’s say fifty years—you have to imagine a 747 cargo freighter loaded with pure elemental carbon dumping it onto the pile every nine seconds for fifty years, 24/7/365,””

““The Greens,” Saskia said, “idolize nature and will want to say that if drought or deluge happens in Mali or Nebraska or Uttar Pradesh because of their carbon-sequestering forest, why, that is nature’s decree. Gaia’s just verdict. We must bow to it. But try telling that to the victims.””

“He had shoulder-holstered his cricket bat so that its handle projected up behind his head, making him look (as he was no doubt well aware) like a character in a movie.”

““The muzzle flash’ll catch your eye,” T.R. said. “But if you look at that, you’ll miss it. Shell’s already long gone. You got to look into the space above. Next one’s in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .” Saskia just glimpsed it, moving straight up at fantastic velocity, as the muzzle flared and extinguished below.”

““He has a gift for the catchphrase,” Saskia said. “One can easily imagine him hawking these on YouTube. Texas Gold.”

““Jumpsuit Orange, if he’s not careful.”

““I have no idea as to the legalities. Do you?””

“To extend Ilham’s analogy, if this was the Fellowship of the Ring, Laks was Aragorn, part man and part elf, equally capable of hanging out with Lord Elrond at the high table of Imladris or slamming down pints in a tavern in Bree.”

“Until recently it had been necessary to drive all the way over Rohtang Pass, an infinity of switchbacks cresting at four thousand meters, then down an equal number of switchbacks into a hamlet on the upper Chenab at more like three thousand meters. From there the highway followed a maddeningly indirect route up into Ladakh, the water- and oxygen-starved province that bordered China.”

“They drove over a pass that topped out at fifty-four hundred meters, and stopped at the little village there to take selfies and inject cash into the local economy, such as it was. Then they descended to a somewhat more survivable altitude of four thousand,”

““Read it,” T.R. said, cutting him off. “I get it, this is your whaling ship, a place for everything and everything in its place. You the Captain Ahab of this little operation, then?””

“Even bicycles were almost overkill. Huis ten Bosch was just a few thousand strides from the edge of the North Sea. They could have walked to it briskly in less than an hour. On bicycles, trailed by security and support staff in cars, they covered the distance in minutes.”

““The cease-fire of 1962 put an end to armed conflict between India and China along their shared border—which remains disputed to this day. A peace agreement signed by Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru referred not to the border but to the Line of Actual Control—a diplomatic phrasing that enabled the cease-fire to be formalized without either party acknowledging the other’s territorial claims.””

““Who doesn’t like it?” Rufus asked. “Other than folks who hate geoengineering on principle?” Alastair shrugged. “Any country whose ox is gored by the knock-on effects.””

“Horseshoes and iron wheel rims clattered on the paving stones as it swept round in a wide curve—the turning radius of these things was atrocious—that took it up to the door below.”

“The dressmaker was drafting along behind Fenna, like a bike racer allowing a stronger rider to break the wind.”

“With a moment’s reflection, of course, it was clear why Ilham—who still had family in Xinjiang—would not want to become world famous doing what Big Fish’s School was doing.”

““I don’t care,” she said. “I’m not an environmentalist except insofar as it bears on those issues I do care about. Once we’ve gotten to the point where girls in developing countries are getting decent educations and being given control over their own bodies, then I’ll concern myself with T.R. McHooligan’s sulfur veil and its projected side effects. Maybe.””

“It was thus capable of servicing the very largest container ships in the world: absurdly enormous things, double the width of the biggest ship that could fit through the Panama Canal, that boggled Saskia’s mind whenever she came out here to look at them. It was the place where the economy of China made a direct umbilical connection to Europe. The ships were two dozen containers wide and drew twenty meters of water when fully loaded. Some of them, fresh in from Asia, would unload part of their burden here just so that they would ride higher in the water, making it possible for them to move on to smaller and shallower European ports.”

“High mountains rising out of the jungle in the distance. And finally a huge hole in the ground, a spiraling roadway carved into its sloping walls, the size of it incomprehensible when you saw the motes spaced out along that road and understood that they were the largest trucks on Earth.”

“Willem spent a few minutes comparing wait times on various ride share apps. All disastrous. Then he tried to sort out the train schedules, which had been thrown into disarray. Finally he just got on his bicycle and rode the few kilometers. He didn’t even have to pedal. The wind pushed him there.”

“What does all this mean for China? It means that they can go on fueling their economy with coal and suppress its nastier side effects with geoengineering schemes of their own, while enjoying political cover from several countries in the West that might otherwise have raised a fuss. Good value for the money, if you ask me.””

“The next he was looking a hundred kilometers into China.”

“She finally became aware that all attention was focused on her. She tried to say something but couldn’t get it out. Instead she flicked her fingers over the surface of her tablet and spun it around so that everyone could see it.”

““Nice enough afternoon,” he said. “Can I borrow a bicycle?””

“The Schiphol project had been shitcanned partly because of protests from animal rights activists. Such people were, to put it mildly, neither common nor welcome on the Flying S, or any other West Texas, ranch.”

“And she was said to be as fluent in Punjabi as she was in English.”

“And Marco had brought with him his friend Pau, an activist from Barcelona—a city that, like Venice, was trying to get free of the country it had been lumped into.”

“The most prominent work on display was a Renaissance painting of Ceres in her winged chariot. The very goddess after whom cereals were named. She was flying over an idealized Tuscan landscape looking for her lost daughter Proserpina. Saskia knew the story perfectly well.”

““In the scenario where Pina2bo is the only site of stratospheric sulfur injection in the whole world,” Michiel said, “and it runs at maximum capacity year-round, maybe that is the case. That is why we are bringing Vadan online later this year. And it’s why T.R. has begun work on Papua. Which adds a site in the Southern Hemisphere.” “How does that help us?” “Historically, volcanic eruptions south of the equator are associated with stronger monsoons.””

“And the great and small powers of the world will have to mark them out on their chessboards and maybe even prepare for conflict. But if you suppose any of that is new, you don’t know history.””

“Once they were established in that waterfront bar with glasses of white wine and a plate of snails, Michiel squinted across the sun-sparkled water of the cove toward the fuel dock, then pulled his sunglasses down on his nose, looked over them at Saskia, and said, “Those men are fascinated by your Beaver. As am I.””

“[…] they controlled a trillion dollars that had been earned by injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

““Absolutely. I crashed that plane to be sure.”

“Alastair raised an eyebrow. “Some would blame the pigs.”

““Or the alligator that chased the pigs. Or the refugees who chased the alligator. Or the fire ants that burned out the relays in their air conditioners. You can go on spreading the blame as far as you like. But I was flying the plane. The buck stops at the pilot’s chair.”

““Formally, it was your responsibility,” Alastair agreed. “And yet at some level you feel that the universe owes you a free jet airplane.”

““I’d never come out and say it like that. But yes.””

“The United States—which used to intervene in such situations—was a basket case and global laughingstock;”

“Saskia had to suppress an impulse to confess that she no longer had “people” in that sense of the term. She was meaning to get some sooner or later. She could support a modest staff. But, for now, she was still enjoying the simplicity and freedom of not being anyone’s boss.”

“A good many of those huge container ships were, she knew, bound to or from Maasvlakte, the only port capable of accommodating them.”

“Fahd made a faint grimace and tossed one hand as if shooing something away. “We are buying what they are selling, no more,” he said. “Chinese aid comes at a high price—a price we don’t need to pay.””

“The first wave is a stopgap measure. Hurling enough SO2 into the stratosphere to begin making a difference. All well and good; when a house is on fire, you throw water on it. The second wave will be about tuning the distribution of the veil so as to achieve the results . . .” Saskia looked him in the eye. She got the idea he was about to conclude the sentence with “we want” but after the briefest of hesitations he said “that are most beneficial.””

“Saskia peeked over the shoulder of a man with close-cropped, sandy hair and a deeply tanned neck as he fluidly worked his way through the user interface of a coffee machine. By the time he had finished, she had an idea what to do, and without too much floundering was able to get away with a decent enough macchiato.”

“But having seen shit you wouldn’t believe in Indonesia, he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That (invoking, here, a version of the anthropic principle) such simpletons only believed they were right when and if they just happened to live in places that were temporarily stable. And that it was better to live somewhere obviously dangerous, because it kept you on your toes. Willem had thought all this daft until Trump and QAnon.”

“His Green instincts, drilled into him by a life spent in a modern Western social democracy, told him to be outraged by what the miners had done to this part of the planet. But he knew that every wind turbine feeding green electricity into the Netherlands’ grid had copper windings in its generator and copper cables connecting it to the system. And that the copper had come from here.”

“Not for the first time, Willem was awed, staggered, and even a little humiliated by the sheer scale at which the oil and mining industries operated—year in, year out, in a way that was basically invisible to the people on the other side of the world who benefited from what they were doing, and who funded these works, every time they checked their Twitter.”

“Bad things tend to be localized in time and space. Harder to predict. But we can predict them to some extent. And the more sites we have operational, the more knobs and levers we have on the dashboard, so to speak. So instead of just blundering around we are managing the situation to maximize the good and minimize the bad.””

“T.R.’s phone had buzzed, and he had put on reading glasses. He looked at Willem over the lenses. “My granddad built a mine in Cuba. Castro took it away from him. Does that mean he shouldn’t have built it?” While Willem pondered this not uninteresting philosophical conundrum, […]”

““that it is just what people want of us. They want us to follow orders and put ourselves in harm’s way. On their behalf. ‘Oh look, those weirdos turn out to be useful to have around.’ We are useful, in other words, for going to the front lines and getting killed. So they are happy to overlook the turbans and so on.””

“There had been no drones shadowing him in Canada, but apparently the United States was a different story. It was, as all the world knew, a completely insane and out-of-hand country, unable to control itself. Men like the Texan could get away with anything;”

“He opened up his bag and found basic toiletries, including a small wooden comb. Traditionally this would have been tucked into his hair, but the circumstances of the wet suit and so on had not allowed it. He used this to comb out the hair that was still long and to remove strands that had naturally broken or fallen out.”

““Yes,” Bo said, waving away Willem’s annoying cavils. “Now the situation seems quite out of hand. Copper prices have spiked, threatening our economic interests. There is also concern that shipments of coal and iron ore from Australia may be threatened. In the old days we might have looked to the United States or Great Britain to intervene. But those days are behind us, I think you’ll agree.””

“The initial pushback against what T.R. was doing here had more recently been muted by countervailing arguments around the idea of termination shock: the fear that if the gun stopped, it would lead to a backlash in the world’s climate system.”

“The guy with the Bug-Solv in his eyes had got to his knees. To his credit he was still observing correct trigger discipline; his cocked revolver was pointed straight up and his finger was laid alongside the cylinder. He had his face buried in the crook of his other arm. He lifted his head. If it made sense to describe a motion of the eyelids as violent, then he was blinking violently. He was trying to see something.”

“Conor, displaying admirably good knees and leg muscles, stood straight up and looked through the mesh wall of the lift,”

““We are at war,” Rufus said. “Gonna ride to the sound of the guns. Leaving before daybreak, I reckon.”

““The guns aren’t making any sound!” Carmelita objected. Rufus sighed.

““It is a Civil War joke. Not so funny apparently. It means I need to go to where the action is gonna be. Pina2bo.””

““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. T.R. ain’t the perfect man to grab it, but I don’t think his whole plan is just to fuck up the Punjab and starve India.”

“By the time Laks climbed back into his six-rotor flying chariot, it had become a five-rotor flying chariot.”

“Piet was a rucker, meaning a practitioner of a sport that consisted of putting on a backpack loaded with weights and then covering ground on foot in open country.”

““They’re gonna do what’s in their national interest. Always have, always will. You think China didn’t have its eye on that copper mine before I started building a gun there? The gun was a pretext, that’s all. Does that mean I oughta do nothing? When I got the means to do something?””