GREENHOUSE SUMMER

Global-meltdown yarn, part satire, part political comedy, part sober admonition, from the Paris-resident author of Russian Spring (1991), etc. Thanks to global warming, deserts are spreading, coasts are flooded, and icecaps are melting—but Siberia has blossomed into the most prosperous region on the planet. Scientists predict the onset of a runaway-greenhouse Condition Venus that will render Earth uninhabitable. The ineffectual annual UN climate conference moves to tropical Paris. But this year, the sponsors (the Big Blue Machine, the unreconstructed capitalists who run the planet) have hired Bread & Circuses to handle spin and gloss, and are providing lavish funding. Monique Calhoun of Bread & Circuses is told by Big Blue bosses to hire a party riverboat owned by the Bad Boys, a benevolent outgrowth of mafias, triads, and drug barons, fronted by Eric Esterhazy. The boat’s crawling with surveillance devices. The Bad Boys agree to a joint party with Bread & Circuses, each hoping to spy on the other’s clients, while Monique and Eric attempt to seduce one another in a complicated game of bluff and counterbluff. Clearly, the Big Blue Machine is desperate to grab Siberian money for their climate control schemes—but to save their own financial hides, or to save the planet? For all his eccentricities—this time he’s too obviously infatuated with Paris—Spinrad has a social conscience and isn—t afraid to exercise it in public. The upshot’s often shapeless, but funny, caustic, and dead on target.