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by uxamanda 1048 days ago
For anyone interested in a near-future sci-fi look at how sulfur as a form of geoengineering might play out, check out out Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson[0]. The title[1] refers to what happens when you suddenly stop an effort like that...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering#Maintenan...

2 comments

I'm still kinda surprised that no novel from Neal have become films or TV shows yet.
There’s been talk of a Seveneves movie or mini series for years….
The final 1/3 of the book would be an amazing role-playing scenario. When you think about it, it's almost designed that way. The underground area, the floaters, the various "classes" of people we meet, their interesting combinations...
I think the final 1/3rd of that book is actually a horrible situation to actually be in. "Someone else's dream" for sure.
Have you played Dungeons and Dragons? It's not supposed to be fun as a place to really live, living in a land harassed by monsters, demons, no security, etc. It's an interesting scenario to explore creativity and conflict in difficult situations.
Sure, but imagine if a D&D setting was an actual world that somehow survived long enough to start implementing countermeasures (remember the last 1/3rd of this book is set thousands of years in the future, so reasonably analogous). If the Player Characters decide they don't want to bother with a problem, it would have to be solved with other methods, like massive use of defoliants (think agent orange) and pesticides, bunker buster bombs (think MOP, if deliverable with enough precision), and as a last resort, dropping massive thermobaric weapons to destroy entire cities, possibly repeatedly, and then setting up miles wide demilitarized zones in a circle around the incident zone with kill-on-sight orders and automated turrets and tracking systems, if feasible with the tech available. Obviously a few Player Characters can't handle everything, so it would be reasonable common as an ordinary person to find out the next city over no longer exists and they have just been drafted to man the "human side" of the newly created DMZ.
Snow Crash has passed hands a few times as well.
Read counts:

  Snow Crash (3) 
  The Diamond Age (1) 
  Anathem (2) 
  Cryptonomicon (3/4) 
  Baroque cycle (2/3) 
  Seveneves (2) 
  Reamde (2) 
  The rise and fall of D.O.D.O (9/10) 
  Fall or Dodge in hell (1/2) 
  Termination shock (1/3)
Are the fractions ongoing efforts or did you drop it?

re-reads for me:

Diamond Age (4) (I'm an educator), Cryptonomicon (2), Baroc cycle (2)

However i plan to re-read Anathem in paralell with my second re-read of Russels A History of Western Philosophy. Really looking forward to this one.

Unfortunately I can't get as into the later ones, so those are me giving up