More political fiction than science fiction, but I take that as its point. The technology to stop climate change is all there, so the only thing one has left to imagine are the politics that might make humanity get off the same thumbs that have already done so much damage to our environment.

While the correspondingly relentless sunny optimism about societal change is a little cloying, what makes the book a slog is that Robinson writes in the style of a gifted sixth grader, something that would only be acceptable if he were my sixth grader.

I started skimming past large chains of blocky prose halfway through the book, hopeless that any improvement would come from practice. Luckily I caught the joke buried at page 368 where he describes the literary tradition in which he's operating: "They used English like a hammer to get their meaning across, they banged in nails of meaning." The merely adequate cliche sufficing for everything else one might hope to find in a book.