Book Review: Greensword, A Tale of Extreme Global Warming

By Donald J. Bingle, Amazon page here.

I found this book when researching for my list of global warming fiction books I recently started here.

This belongs in the category of “books that propose a solution” in that list.

Let’s list things I liked about this book first.

Bingle makes the three activists nuking Seattle look very much like real persons, with a lot of inner conflict. In the first half of the book, the reader doesn’t know yet of their large-scale crime. Bingle manages to create sympathy for the group.

That’s in strong contrast to Crichton’s “State of Fear”, the most harmful book in history. That book also has environmental terrorists, but those are just caricatures.

In real life, the motives of people fighting global warming are complicated. I think Bingle did an excellent job with character development.

It was also quite a lot of fun to read this. The humor worked for me.

Too bad the solution proposed would not really work.

There are also a couple of minor plot holes. Of course it would be impossible for these three clowns to get a real nuclear warhead. Of course Milo would not have activated any voice recording software in the first place, and he would have checked if the computer was actually shut down. He did seem to be moderately smart in the rest of the novel. And I also rather doubt that someone would just give a million dollars to GREENSWORD, no strings attached, after their less than stellar performance until that point.

Anyway, I liked this book. I have added it to the list of global warming fiction books here, and to the Goodreads “climate change fiction” list.