I’m in Seoul…

Or actually, I’m out of it, wherever this hotel is. Tomorrow I’ll see the city proper.

I suspect the city will be branded Samsung. Everything else here seems to be. 🙂 In the immigration line at the airport, the screens telling you the rules were not only flat-screen Samsung TVs, they also were interrupted by ads for Samsung phones.

Had dinner with Jason Della Rocca. I surely didn’t need to travel quite so far to do that…!

Finished off that Warshawski novel (it was Hard Time, if you’re curious, but I don’t have much to say about it). But I also finished off Fifty Degrees Below, which is Kim Stanley Robinson’s sequel to his earlier book Forty Signs of Rain. I enjoyed it, but as usual with his stuff, it can feel kind of slow in places. You could call it the brainy version of The Day After Tomorrow — it also deals with a thermohaline shift, as well as with other dramatic forms of climate change, but it’s DC-insider setting (the halls of the NSF) gives a very differentperspective on events. Most of the book is told from the point of view of a scientist who has some problems interacting with the rest of humanity — someone who spends a lot of time thinking about evolutionary biology. The real story, however, is happening slightly offstage — the battle for the hearts and minds of the public as regards climate change.

It’s full of sharply observed details about how life would adapt if there were things going on like cold snaps to 50 below in DC. I was particularly amused when the reinsurance companies showed up willing to pay billions of dollars to dump thousands of tons of salt in the North Atlantic; it was the cheapest way out for them. If anything, the weakness of the book is that it demonstrates all too clearly just how adaptable humans are — by never crossing over into the sensationalism of Day After Tomorrow, it also makes the catastrophes cozier. A whole bunch of DC homeless manage to survive that cold snap, for example.

This is a spiritual take on the issue as well, what with the presence of Tibetan monks and a possible reincarnated lama, the protagonists’ delving into Ralph Waldo Emerson, and so on.

OK, I’m drifting off (my biological clock still thinks it’s 5am) and I can’t seem to wrap up my thoughts on the book into something coherent. So I’ll stop there. 🙂