So we have to nurse the world back to health. We’re not good at it. But we have to do it…
I know my program is only a small part of the process. I now it’s only a silly cloud show. I know that. I even know that my own producers keep stringing me out in these little pseudo-emergencies because they think it adds to our ratings, and I go along with that because I think it might help, even though sometimes it scares me to death, and it’s embarrassing, too. But to the extent that it gets people thinking about these projects, it’s helping the cause. It’s part of the larger thing that we have to do. That’s how I think of it, and I would do anything to make it succeed. I would hang naked upside-down above a bay of hungry sharks if that would help the cause, and you know I would because that was one of my most popular episodes.(259)

Kim Stanley Robinson’s most recent novel follows up on the themes and subjects of Aurora. If earth is, for the foreseeable future, the only place we can live, how will we deal with a world altered significantly by global warming and other potentially disastrous trends? In the New York of the next century, several characters deal with the consequences of raised sea levels, as their lives converge into one story.

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