Sixty Days and Counting

In the third installment of the Science in the Capital trilogy, author Kim Stanley Robinson follows the riveting events in a world trying to recover from devastating climate change

By the time Phil Chase is elected president, the world’s climate is far on its way to irreversible change. Food scarcity, housing shortages, diminishing medical care, and vanishing species are just some of the consequences. The erratic winter in Washington, D.C., is another grim reminder of a global weather pattern gone haywire: bone-chilling cold one day, balmy weather the next.

But the president-elect remains optimistic and doesn’t intend to give up without a fight. A maverick in every sense of the word, Chase starts organizing the most ambitious plan to save the world from disaster since FDR and assembling a team of top scientists and advisers to implement it.

In a world where time is running out as quickly as natural resources, and where surveillance is almost total and freedom nearly nonexistent, the forecast for the Chase administration looks darker each passing day. For as the last—and most terrible—of natural disasters looms on the horizon, it will take a miracle to stop the clock.