Marooned! On Mars With Matt And Hilary

We're back! This season we're tackling Green Earth, KSR's revised, single-volume edition of the Science in the Capital trilogy. The trilogy was originally published from 2004 to 2007. Green Earth was put out in 2015. In this first episode we discuss the (un)likability of the novel's main characters, and the way the book seems to set the table for KSR's agenda for his following novels, particularly Shaman, 2312, New York 2140, and The Ministry for the Future. We talk about how Green Earth feels very much a Bush-era book, when it was still possible to believe that the main impediment to addressing climate change was anti-science attitudes that had infested an entire party in American politics, before the Obama era revealed that the real problem was far deeper, including obviously capitalism itself, but also something far more intractable, an approach to reality that was impervious to "just the facts" or "trust science" platitudes. One thing Green Earth does that feels very of its moment as we read it from 2022