Sixty Days and Counting

In many ways this is the opposite of conventional science fiction dominated by technology, even if scientists are the heroes. On his computer, Frank subscribes to “Emerson for the Day,” and both Emerson and Thoreau are guiding spirits. So is Buddhism — in fact, the Dalai Lama appears as a character.

Even President Phil Chase is a philosophical blogger (one who gets five million responses to his first post). By the end he’s musing about reclaiming imagination as the human tool to create a dynamic culture that can be permanently sustained, a culture “in which no one is without a job, or shelter, or health care, or education, or the rights to their own life. Taking care of the Earth and its miraculous biological splendor will then become the long-term work of our species. We’ll share the world with all the other creatures. It will be an ongoing project that will never end.”

This is a very smart novel — on politics, economics, science and those underlying matters of soul. Things happen, that it wouldn’t be fair to reveal. But perhaps most surprisingly, it feels like a kind of pastoral, valuing the real Earth and real life that makes keeping humankind from destroying the planet worthwhile. In a technical Shakespearian sense it’s even a comedy, because it ends like As You Like It: good people restoring the state, gathered in nature, for weddings.

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