Reply #11: I've started at least thread on this trilogy, with zero response, I think:

[Gabi Hayes]

http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2007/robinson-sixty_days.htm


The collision of the present and the future, of the already is and the could be, is a difficult moment to capture. Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital trilogy, comprised of 'Forty Signs of Rain', 'Fifty Degrees Below' and his newest novel, 'Sixty Days and Counting', manages to do so in a manner that is in every way unexpected. Funny when you expect it to be grim and powerful at the peripheries as well as the core, 'Sixty Days and Counting' is a thoroughly satisfying finish to a series that successfully captures the now and the next. Robinson's story is not a grim glimpse of the coming apocalypse, but a refreshingly positive and human story of how the mundane details of our everyday lives accrete to create a narrative much larger than those lives.

The three novels tell a single story, and should be read as such. Robinson offers readers science fiction as social realism to tell how science actually works in the United States and the world at large in this moment. In the first two novels of the series, we meet Charlie and Anna Quibler and Frank Vanderwal as well as their friends and families. Anna Quibler is a cog in the National Science Foundation, while Charlie is a science advisor to Phil Chase, a well-placed senator. Frank Vanderwahl is a scientist on leave from UCSD, working with Anna in the capital. ''Forty Signs of Rain'' took readers through events that bring the problems of global climate change into the lives of its characters, and 'Fifty Degrees Below' sees Chase elected President as the US population and government begins to realize that radical action will be required to avert global catastrophe.

'Sixty Days and Counting' follows the first sixty days of Chase's Presidency and beyond, as the Quiblers try to sort out their home life, Frank his love life and the world this little problem concerning a forthcoming species extinction event. Of the human race.