{"product_id":"fifty-degrees-below-isbn-9780553585810","title":"Fifty Degrees Below","description":"\u003cb\u003eSet in our nation’s capital, here is a chillingly realistic tale of people caught in the collision of science, technology, and the consequences of global warming.\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eWhen the storm got bad, Frank Vanderwal was in his office at the National Science Foundation. When it was over, large chunks of San Diego had eroded into the sea, and D.C. was underwater. Everything Frank and his colleagues feared had culminated in this disaster. And now the world was looking to them to fix it. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut even as D.C. bails itself out, a more extreme climate change looms. The melting polar ice caps are shutting down the warm Gulf Stream waters—meaning Ice Age conditions could return. And the last time that happened, eleven thousand years ago, it took just three years to start.…\"Fifty Degrees Below should be required reading for anyone concerned about our world's future.... it provides perhaps the most realistic portrayal ever created of the environmental changes that are already occurring on our planet.\"—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Fast-paced and exciting.... First-rate ecological speculation.\"—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Could give Michael Crichton a run for his money.... should be required reading for government officials and voters.\"—\u003ci\u003eSt. Louis Post-Dispatch\u003c\/i\u003eKIM STANLEY ROBINSON is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. He is the author of ten previous books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed \u003cb\u003eForty Signs of Rain\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003eThe Years of Rice and Salt\u003c\/b\u003e, and \u003cb\u003eAntarctica\u003c\/b\u003e–for which he was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program.  He lives in Davis, California.I  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePRIMATE  in  FOREST\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Nobody likes Washington D.C. Even the people who love it don’t like it.  Climate atrocious, traffic worse: an ordinary midsized gridlocked American  city, in which the plump white federal buildings make no real difference.  Or rather they bring all the politicians and tourists, the lobbyists and  diplomats and refugees and all the others who come from somewhere else,  often for suspect reasons, and thereafter spend their time clogging the  streets and hogging the show, talking endlessly about their nonexistent  city on a hill while ignoring the actual city they are in. The bad taste  of all that hypocrisy can’t be washed away even by the food and drink of a  million very fine restaurants. No—bastion of the world government, locked  vault of the World Bank, fortress headquarters of the world police; Rome,  in the age of bread and circuses—no one can like that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So naturally when the great flood washed over the city, wreaking havoc and  leaving the capital spluttering in the livid heat of a wet and bedraggled  May, the stated reactions were varied, but the underlying subtext often  went something like this: HA HA HA. For there were many people around the  world who felt that justice had somehow been served. Capital of the world,  thoroughly trashed: who wouldn’t love it?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Of course the usual things were said by the usual parties. Disaster area,  emergency relief, danger of epidemic, immediate restoration, pride of the  nation, etc. Indeed, as capital of the world, the president was firm in  his insistence that it was everyone’s patriotic duty to support  rebuilding, demonstrating a brave and stalwart response to what he called  “this act of climactic terrorism.” “From now on,” the president continued,  “we are at a state of war with nature. We will work until we have made  this city even more like it was than before.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But truth to tell, ever since the Reagan era the conservative (or  dominant) wing of the Republican party had been coming to Washington  explicitly to destroy the federal government. They had talked about  “starving the beast,” but flooding would be fine if it came to that; they  were flexible, it was results that counted. And how could the federal  government continue to burden ordinary Americans when its center of  operations was devastated? Why, it would have to struggle just to get back  to normal! Obviously the flood was a punishment for daring to tax income  and pretending to be a secular nation. One couldn’t help thinking of Sodom  and Gomorrah, the prophecies specified in the Book of Revelation, and   so on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Meanwhile, those on the opposite end of the political spectrum likewise  did not shed very many tears over the disaster. As a blow to the heart of  the galactic imperium it was a hard thing to regret. It might impede the  ruling caste for a while, might make them acknowledge, perhaps, that their  economic system had changed the climate, and that this was only the first  of many catastrophic consequences. If Washington was denied now that it  was begging for help, that was only what it had always done to its  environmental victims in the past. Nature bats last—poetic justice—level  playing field—reap what you sow—rich arrogant bastards—and so on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Thus the flood brought pleasure to both sides of the aisle. And in the  days that followed Congress made it clear in their votes, if not in their  words, that they were not going to appropriate anything like the amount of  money it would take to clean up the mess. They said it had to be done;  they ordered it done; but they did not fund it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The city therefore had to pin its hopes on either the beggared District of  Columbia, which already knew all there was to know about unfunded mandates  from Congress, to the extent that for years their license plates had  proclaimed “Taxation Without Representation”; or on the federal agencies  specifically charged with disaster relief, like FEMA and the Army Corps of  Engineers and others that could be expected to help in their ordinary  course of their missions (and budgets).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Experts from these agencies tried to explain that the flood did not have a  moral meaning, that it was merely a practical problem in city management,  which had to be solved as a simple matter of public health, safety, and  convenience. The Potomac had ballooned into a temporary lake of about a  thousand square miles; it had lasted no more than a week, but in that time  inflicted great damage to the infrastructure. Much of the public part of  the city was trashed. Rock Creek had torn out its banks, and the Mall was  covered by mud; the Tidal Basin was now part of the river again, with the  Jefferson Memorial standing in the shallows of the current. Many streets  were blocked with debris; worse, in transport terms, many Metro tunnels  had flooded, and would take months to repair. Alexandria was wrecked. Most  of the region’s bridges were knocked out or suspect. The power grid   was uncertain, the sewage system likewise; epidemic disease was a distinct  possibility.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Given all this, certain repairs simply had to be made, and many were the  calls for full restoration. But whether these calls were greeted with  genuine agreement, Tartuffian assent, stony indifference, or gloating  opposition, the result was the same: not enough money was appropriated to  complete the job.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Only the essentials were dealt with. Necessary infrastructure, sure,  almost; and of course the nationally famous buildings were cleaned up, the  Mall replanted with grass and new cherry trees; the Vietnam Memorial  excavated, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials recaptured from their  island state. Congress debated a proposal to leave the highwater mark of  greenish mud on the sides of the Washington Monument, as a flood-height  record and a reminder of what could happen. But few wanted such a  reminder, and in the end they rejected the idea. The stone of the great  plinth was steam-cleaned, and around it the Mall began to look as if the  flood had never happened. Elsewhere in the city, however. . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was not a good time to have to look for a place to live.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And yet this was just what Frank Vanderwal had to do. He had leased his  apartment for a year, covering the time he had planned to work for the  National Science Foundation; then he had agreed to stay on. Now, only a  month after the flood, his apartment had to be turned over to its owner, a  State Department foreign-service person he had never met, returning from a  stint in Brazil. So he had to find someplace else.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No doubt the decision to stay had been a really bad idea.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This thought had weighed on him as he searched for a new apartment, and as  a result he had not persevered as diligently as he ought to have. Very  little was available in any case, and everything on offer was  prohibitively expensive. Thousands of people had been drawn to D.C. by a  flood that had also destroyed thousands of residences, and damaged  thousands more beyond immediate repair and reoccupation. It was a real  seller’s market, and rents shot up accordingly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Many of the places Frank had looked at were also physically repulsive in  the extreme, including some that had been flooded and not entirely cleaned  up: the bottom of the barrel, still coated with sludge. The low point in  this regard came in one semibasement hole in Alexandria, a tiny dark place  barred for safety at the door and the single high window, so that it  looked like a prison for troglodytes; and two thousand a month. After that  Frank’s will to hunt was gone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Now the day of reckoning had come. He had cleared out and cleaned up, the  owner was due home that night, and Frank had nowhere to go.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was a strange sensation. He sat at the kitchen counter in the dusk,  strewn with the various sections of the Post. The “Apartments for Rent”  section was less than a column long, and Frank had learned enough of its  code by now to know that it held nothing for him. More interesting had  been an article in the day’s Metro section about Rock Creek Park.  Officially closed due to severe flood damage, it was apparently too large  for the overextended National Park Service to be able to enforce the  edict. As a result the park had become something of a no-man’s land, “a  return to wilderness,” as the article had put it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Frank surveyed the apartment. It held no more memories for him than a  hotel room, as he had done nothing but sleep there. That was all he had  needed out of a home, his life proper having been put on hold until his  return to San Diego. Now, well . . . it was like some kind of premature  resuscitation, on a voyage between the stars. Time to wake up, time to  leave the deep freeze and find out where he was.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He got up and went down to his car.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Out to the Beltway to circle north and then east, past the elongated  Mormon temple and the great overpass graffiti referencing it: go home  dorothy! Get off on Wisconsin, drive in toward the city. There was no  particular reason for him to visit this part of town. Of course the  Quiblers lived over here, but that couldn’t be it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He kept thinking: Homeless person, homeless person. You are a homeless  person. A song from Paul Simon’s Graceland came to him, the one where one  of the South African groups kept singing, Homeless; homeless, Da da da, da  da da da da da . . . something like, Midnight come, and then you wanna go  home. Or maybe it was a Zulu phrase. Or maybe, as he seemed to hear now:  Homeless; homeless; he go down to find another home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Something like that. He came to the intersection at the Bethesda Metro  stop, and suddenly it occurred to him why he might be there. Of  course—this was where he had met the woman in the elevator. They had  gotten stuck together coming up from the Metro: alone together  underground, minute after minute, until after a long talk they had started  kissing, much to Frank’s surprise. And then when the repair team had  arrived and they were let out, the woman had disappeared without Frank  learning anything about her, even her name. It made his heart pound just  to remember it. Up there on the sidewalk to the right, beyond the red  light—there stood the very elevator box they had emerged from. And then  she had appeared to him again, on a boat in the Potomac during the height  of the great flood. He had called her boat on his cell phone, and she had  answered, had said, “I’ll call. I don’t know when.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The red light turned green. She had not called and yet here he was,  driving back to where they had met as if he might catch sight of her.  Maybe he had even been thinking that if he found her, he would have a  place to stay.","brand":"Spectra","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302679564517,"sku":"NP9780553585810","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780553585810.jpg?v=1767726849","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/fifty-degrees-below-isbn-9780553585810","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}