Nor the guilt, nor the anger, which become plot points of sorts in this sprawling novel. People murmured what should have been screams of grief.įrank survives, barely, with a lifelong case of PTSD: “Any time he broke a sweat his heart would start racing, and soon enough he would be in the throes of a full-on panic attack.” Even a job he gets in the UK in a meat-processing plant with refrigerated rooms is not enough to keep the terror at bay. All the children were dead, all the old people were dead. Hot water in one’s stomach meant there was no refuge anywhere…. It doesn’t-the lake water, too, is above body temperature, and as thirsty people drink it, As night falls, Frank goes with some of the survivors to the shallow lake in the center of the city and they submerge themselves in the water, hopeful it will help them survive. People start to die, and their bodies are taken up to the roof and left there. The temperature inside and out approaches 108 degrees Fahrenheit the humidity is 60 percent. But then local thugs take both the generator and the AC unit at gunpoint. Actually, conditions inside are approaching the same level, because the power has gone out.įrank manages to get a generator going and opens the doors of the NGO’s offices to seven or eight extended families, who cram themselves into the few rooms where creaking air conditioners knock the fatal edge off the heat. Somewhere in a small city on the Gangetic Plain in Uttar Pradesh during the summer of 2025, Frank, a young American working for an NGO, wakes up in his room above a clinic to find that an unusually severe pre-monsoon heat wave has grown hotter still and more humid-that the conditions outside are rapidly approaching the limit of human survival.

The prolific science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who is at heart an optimist, opens his newest novel, The Ministry for the Future, with a long set piece as bleak as it is plausible.

New yorker kim stanley robinson