Somewhere around the end of the 21st century, Monique Calhoun works as a spin doctor for a public relations 'syndic' known as Bread & Circuses. She is chosen to promote a mysteriously-funded UN conference on climate change in Paris. There she meets Eric Esterhazy, captain of a steamboat-cum-nightspot and low-rung operative in a barely-legitimate mafia-style organisation called Bad Boys. Monique's client is the Big Blue Machine, a corporate collective selling "climatech" remedies for global warming, while Eric is a catspaw of the Green faction, the rich who get richer by exploiting the new opportunities that a changing climate provides. Monique utilises the luxurious and heavily-bugged facilities of Eric's pleasure-boat to spy on conference delegates, and finds herself in an uneasy dance with Eric and his opposing interests as they both try to figure out whether the Earth is doomed, and what to do about it.Spinrad paints this post-warming future in meticulous detail: the southward-crawling Sahara has become unsurvivably hot; Manhattan, protected by a high wall, is five metres below sea level; and in Paris, crocodiles bask by the Seine, vines creep up the Eiffel Tower and parakeets wheel above the Tuileries (whatever they are). The machinations of the Blue and Green movements are equally intricate, and the book has something of the intrigue (if not the grace) of John le Carré. Admirable as this density of detail is, it made for a slow read. I regretted too that having constructed this world, Spinrad exhibited so little of it: after opening scenes in Libya and New York, the bulk of the book is confined to Paris, though both the setting and the plot could surely have provided a little more globe-trotting action.Typically, Spinrad supplies sex, sensationalism and savvy cynicism. Here Monique surveys the climatech 'solutions' on offer at the conference's trade show:Suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by reforesting every available meter with Qwik-grow trees. Or with a new gene-tweaked hemp supposedly able to thrive in desert extremes. Or by enriching oceanic nutrient upwellings with iron to increase photosynthetic plankton.Would you buy a used planet from these people?Welcome colour is provided by a pair of hard-drinking super-rich shamans from Siberia "the Golden", the world's new breadbasket, and by a zombiefied mathematician whose lunatic ramblings could save or damn humanity; and there's plenty of humour along the way too. It is a book with a point though, conveyed through a clever climax that, whilst more than a tad contrived, bleakly reflects a symmetry of moral and commercial interests in suppressing knowledge of the effects of our own hubris. Douglas Adams would have nodded sadly.
