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A review by mburnamfink
Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling
5.0
Heavy Weather looks like an adaptation of the movie Twister on the surface: giant tornadoes, obsessed scientists, even that one scene with the flying cow, but it's actually a smart dark mirror that seriously asks and answers the question "What would it be like to live through the worst of anthropocentric climate change?"
In the year 2031, Alex Unger is dying in a private Mexican hospital when his sister Janey breaks him out and takes him for one last fling chasing tornadoes in blasted West Texas, where civilization simply dried up and blew away in a megadrought. It's bad everywhere: governments have collapsed into emergency management posses; pandemics strike with regularity; and the best that people can do is scrape out a shallow grave of a life before something kills them. The goal for the characters is the F-6 Super-Tornado, a storm a whole order of magnitude bigger than anything on this Earth. There's some amazing lyrical descriptions of storms across the Texas wastes, and the thrill of chasing tornadoes.
But where this book shines is its nihilistic shadow government. The Very Serious People who have decided that for civilization to survive, the population must fall. Nothing so crass as a Holocaust, just little tweaks here and there to ensure the birth rate falls and the death rate rises. All the chaos and suffering is careful planned by a distributed cadre of secret survivalists... Life boat cannibals who are willing to do anything to see that some of us get through, rather than none.
Heavy Weather is supremely creepy, and has only become more so in the past twenty years. Sure, an honest reviewer would note that some of the dialog is clunky, and that Janey might not be the best character, but it's got a solid dozen or so moments that make my hair stand on end, even after years of rereading.
I'll ask you, like Sterling asks in one of my favorite scenes in all of literature, "When did mankind lose control of its destiny?"
In the year 2031, Alex Unger is dying in a private Mexican hospital when his sister Janey breaks him out and takes him for one last fling chasing tornadoes in blasted West Texas, where civilization simply dried up and blew away in a megadrought. It's bad everywhere: governments have collapsed into emergency management posses; pandemics strike with regularity; and the best that people can do is scrape out a shallow grave of a life before something kills them. The goal for the characters is the F-6 Super-Tornado, a storm a whole order of magnitude bigger than anything on this Earth. There's some amazing lyrical descriptions of storms across the Texas wastes, and the thrill of chasing tornadoes.
But where this book shines is its nihilistic shadow government. The Very Serious People who have decided that for civilization to survive, the population must fall. Nothing so crass as a Holocaust, just little tweaks here and there to ensure the birth rate falls and the death rate rises. All the chaos and suffering is careful planned by a distributed cadre of secret survivalists... Life boat cannibals who are willing to do anything to see that some of us get through, rather than none.
Heavy Weather is supremely creepy, and has only become more so in the past twenty years. Sure, an honest reviewer would note that some of the dialog is clunky, and that Janey might not be the best character, but it's got a solid dozen or so moments that make my hair stand on end, even after years of rereading.
I'll ask you, like Sterling asks in one of my favorite scenes in all of literature, "When did mankind lose control of its destiny?"