Climate queen saves the Netherlands: is writer Neal Stephenson prophetic again?
Keep an eye out for science fiction author Neal Stephenson’s latest book, writes Constanteyn Roelofs. Termination Shock:in which a headstrong Orange goes out to red the climate, important issues about the future of the Netherlands.
Call me a frumpy provincial, but I always have a bit of a huphollandhup feeling when we the Dutch in America are in the spotlight. Still a little orange fever when Carice van Houten entered Game of Thrones issued from when Rik Smits was the big star of the Indiana Pacers.
Constanteyn Roelofs
Weekly explores historian Constanteyn Roelofs (1989) the tragicomic achievements in economics and society.
So I was delighted to learn that one of my favorite authors, science fiction author Neal Stephenson, had chosen our homeland as the theme of his latest book. Without wanting to reveal too much, the latest book is going Termination Shock: more than a sustainable Dutch queen in a not-too-distant future who, impatient with the fact that the Netherlands’ own cautious and center-right democracy does not take any measures to take climate change, starts an ambitious climate plan on its own.
The book asks important questions
Together with like-minded people with a lot of money and formed power all over the world (think Venetian aristocrats, Texan oil billionaires) she is going to battle with an extensive project of geoengineering. The book asks important questions about the climate: how far can you go when tinkering with the climate on a planetary scale? Can you give priority to the climatic interests of low-lying deltas such as the Netherlands over other interests of regions with completely different weather?
Of course, social media and the emerging digital tribes of angry citizens also play a role; the wappies and the climate crazies don’t want to know anything about geo-engineering. The wappies think it’s just left-wing nonsense and the GroenLinks longing for a non-existent paradise instead of engineering solutions.
All very current
But, as Stephen Grootson writes, isn’t the Netherlands one complete geo-engineering project where a new country has been wrested from the sea since the Middle Ages? And aren’t we expanding to continue that geo-engineering to get the ‘complicated machine that keeps millions of people alive’ – as he describes the Netherlands – to keep it up in the air? And is democracy prepared for that?
Also funny: the queen and her companions are not least driven by a sense of guilt about the fact that their position is due to the activities that have brought us into the climate crisis. In the case of the Oranges, this is of course the extensive interest of the family in Shell and mining in the former Dutch East Indies. All very current.
Stephenson’s Prophetic Gifts
The book may not be Stephenson’s best. The pace is set and the meandering expositions of anything and everything (from integrated chemistry to the fortunes of the Indo community in East and West in the wake of the Japanese occupation) are mainly for the lovers of meandering expositions. Still, given Stephenson’s prophetic gifts, it might be a good idea to keep an eye on the book.
his book cryptonomicon from 1995 is the intellectual bible of the current cryptocurrency movement (Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are obligated to their employees at PayPal to read the book) and his book snow crash from 1992 already delicately laid out the theory and dynamics of the Metaverse, thirty years before Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg transferred his company to the Metaverse. Perhaps the book will end up on certain bedside tables in Huis ten Bosch. Self-fulfilling prophecies are also prophecies.