The final installment in Robinson’s Science in the Capital story is to my mind the weakest of the three books. An American friend once called The West Wing “Liberal wishful thinking on screen”. This book is somewhat like that as well. There are intertwined plots about an NSF-turned presidential bureacrat (adviser to the President’s science adviser) who struggles with a brain injury leading to an inability to make decisions (and the need to make a decision whether or not to have the surgery to try and correct it) while simultaneously the same man is having an affair with a spy (linked to a friendwith links to the intelligence community as well); a presidential aide (think Sam Seaborn from the West Wing) struggling with raising a young family; Tibetan buddhists re-initialising Shambala near Washington, DC; the battles against global warming both scientific and political.

The subplots more or less work individually but I think there’s too many of them and they tie up too neatly. While there’s an acknowledgement that averting everything bad about global warming by the end of the book isn’t feasible I find this way too optimistic about whether US politics will ever be able to face up to the reality of climate change, even with the serious weather consequences in the first two books. There’s also a distinct lack of timing about the book in the tech. Unlike in Antarctica (which I’m now re-reading, more on that later) where he at least makes an effort to project the tech slightly, in this it could easily be 2012 from the tech available. Perhaps it’s meant to be a parallel world in which global warming has progressed slightly faster and this is 2012 (well, 2007 when the book was written, anyway).

The whole trilogy is interesting but not spectacular. Certainly far from my favourite Robinson and lacking the deep sparks that made the Three Californias books so brilliant.