I finished Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock a year ago, and I still can’t get it out of my head. As an aspiring writer I was searching it for some pattern of plot or character development that I could steal for my own writing. But it was so masterfully written, nearly every paragraph had some meaningful turn of phrase or new word or idea I haven’t thought about since college. That the words of that book refuse to let go of my brain, a year later tells you how captivating it is. I only just now understood how the title applies to the story of nearly every character in the book. All of the leading characters, and there are many, have suffered one or more traumas of termination in their lives that connected them in their struggle against the termination of the planet. And these termination shocks shaped them and their view of the hazards of a global climate engineering project being terminated.

I won’t spoil it for you by even hinting at these traumas suffered by the main characters, but I will end the post with a simple mood-setting quote that Stephenson used to drag the reader into a car-camping scene along side a creek in the heart of Texas:

“a nimbus of insects orbiting a flickering light bulb”.