Forty Signs of Rain

The best-selling author of the classic Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt returns with a fascinating new trilogy of cutting-edge science, international politics, and the real-life ramifications of global warming as they play out in our nation's capital and in the daily lives of those at the center of the action. This realistic near-future novel draws on scientific facts that are already making headlines.

When the Arctic ice pack was first measured in the 1950s, it averaged 30 feet thick in midwinter. By the end of the century, it had shrunk to 15. In August, the ice broke up. The following year, it began breaking up in July. The third year, it began breaking up in May. That was last year.

It's an increasingly scorching summer in the nation's capital as Senate environmental staffer Charlie Quibler cares for his young son and deals with the frustrating politics of global warming. Charlie must find a way to get a skeptical administration to act before it's too late—and his offspring find themselves living in the swamp world. But the political climate poses a challenge almost as great as the environmental crisis when it comes to putting the public good before private gain.

While Charlie struggles to play politics, his wife, Anna, takes a more rational approach to the impending crisis in her job at the National Science Foundation. There's a proposal for a revolutionary process that could solve the problem of global warming—if it can be recognized in time. But when a race to control the budding technology begins, the stakes only get higher. As these everyday heroes battle to align the awesome forces of nature with the extraordinary march of modern science, they have no idea that fate is about to put an unusual twist on their work—one that will place them at the center of an inevitable storm.

With style, wit, and a rare insight into our past, present, and possible future, this captivating novel propels us into a world on the brink of unprecedented change, in a time very much like our own. This is Kim Stanley Robinson at his visionary best, offering a captivating cautionary tale about progress—and its price—as only he can tell it.