I started to draft this review, in my head, while still reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Sixty Days and Countring, the final installment of his very-near-future ‘Science in the Capital’ trilogy. I’ve been wanting to say that the book deserves no lesser praise than this: it makes me understand myself and the world better.

But I’ve almost been afraid to finish it. Robinson’s prose evokes a sensation of omnipresence; a wide vision of the Washington DC he has created and the political world around it, in which, even when some things remain obscured, the connections between them slowly but reliably resolve into focus. This is a wonderful feeling and I simply don’t want it to end!

In Sixty Days and Counting, the action revolves (as it did in Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below) around Frank Vanderwal, errant geneticist from San Diego, seconded to the National Science Foundation’s headquarters in Washington DC. There, Frank’s work centres on directing the use of NSF funds to help with climate engineering and CO₂-reduction projects.

Frank Vanderwal is an interesting character. Like Frank Chalmers, one of the protagonists of the Mars trilogy, Vanderwal is trying to be the man the world needs him to be; he’s less morally flawed, but more out of his depth in the world of espionage and political intrigue in which he finds himself. He succeeds in remaking himself, over the course of the series, reading Emerson and Thoreau and carving out a new, feral life for himself, rejecting the ‘American Dream’ of the 1950s for deeper, older American dream. This is the dream of a nation which accepts that some measure of definition must be derived from its environment, not one that redefines its environment in fearful rejection of the unknown.

I’ll say again that in reading Robinson’s work I come to understand more about myself, and this was the explicit thought that lay in the back of my mind as I read most of Sixty Days and Counting. You might be able to imagine my surprise when, in echo of the serendipity with which Emerson and Thoreau’s words come to Frank, I arrived at a passage that began:

[Frank] read Emerson and Thoreau to learn about himself.

The passage continues to describe Frank’s evangelical approach to emersonfortheday.net, the site through which most of the Emerson and Thoreau that appears in the novel is supposedly filtered. Sadly, emersonfortheday.net does not exist; but since it doesn’t, someone had to create it, at emersonfortheday.com. That site is simpler than what Robinson imagined for his novels, but it’s a start, and I hope to see it flower.

More to the point (and as other reviews have noted), the role that Emerson and Thoreau play in Sixty Days and Counting is to provide a philosophical basis upon which Robinson is trying to build. He is attempting, it seems, to bring American Transcendentalist sensibilities into the 21st century, and renew a vision of America from which the country has diverged ever more.

I have to confess that ‘America’ is a concept I’ve never fully understood. All the things that ‘America’ is claimed to be seem so disparate and divergent that, to an outsider such as myself, it might in truth be anything at all. Nonetheless, even to me there’s a sense that something has been lost from this great ideal, and Robinson connects the preservation of what is left of the global climate to the rediscovery of this thing that people call ‘America’. His bold, unapologetic and convincing vision of this forgotten ideal and its antitheses makes this series some of the best speculative fiction currently being produced.

Sixty Days and Counting, and the ‘Science in the Capital’ series as a whole, ranks for me as Robinson’s best work to date. That is really saying something. To put it plainly, these books are very, very good; an enormous achievement, on any scale.

Rating: 4.5/5