Specimen FL-01.0009
A heat wave settles over Uttar Pradesh and does not lift. Heat and humidity together pass the point at which a body can cool itself, and twenty million people die. Frank May, an American aid worker, survives it. In Zurich, a new United Nations body has just been chartered to speak for people not yet born and for everything alive that cannot speak for itself. Its head is Mary Murphy, an Irish former foreign minister. One night Frank breaks into her apartment to tell her that her methods are not working and she knows it. The novel follows them for thirty years across 106 chapters that are only sometimes scenes: unnamed witnesses, meeting minutes, a chapter narrated by a carbon atom. Glaciologists slow the Antarctic ice by pumping out the meltwater beneath it, India puts sulfur into the stratosphere without permission, central banks issue a currency for carbon left in the ground, and the curve bends. Meanwhile an organization called the Children of Kali is killing people, and Mary's own ministry keeps a wing she chooses not to ask about. The world is more or less saved. The book will not say which half of the effort saved it.
The Fiction Laboratory pairs science fiction novels with structured reading packets for science and English classes. This is the companion page for this title: where to find the book, every source behind its packet with live links, and any correction made since the packet was printed.
Your public library. Search the catalog or ask at the desk. This one is widely held and still moves, so a hold may take a week or two. Interlibrary loan is free if your branch does not carry it.
Libby. libbyapp.com. Library ebooks and audiobooks on a phone or tablet, free with a library card. The audiobook runs about twenty hours and is read by a full cast, which suits a book made of a hundred different voices better than a single narrator would.
Open Library. openlibrary.org. Free borrowing accounts, one copy out at a time, no library card needed.
Your school library. Less likely than the older titles here, since it is recent, but worth asking. It gets requested.
Not available. The novel was published in 2020 and is in copyright. Anything offering a free download is pirating it. The library is the free route, and it is a good one.
Bookshop.org. bookshop.org/9780316300148. Orders send the money to independent bookstores rather than to a warehouse. That is the Orbit paperback, 576 pages.
Your local bookshop. Any independent store can order it within a few days.
It is long, and it keeps interrupting itself. There are 106 chapters and most are not scenes at all: an unnamed survivor, minutes from a meeting, a riddle, a lecture on economics, a chapter narrated by a carbon atom. The first time the book hands a chapter to nobody in particular it reads like a mistake. It is not, and the difficulty is worth knowing about in advance. Almost everyone who gives up gives up early.
Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (2017). The same argument in one flooded city, with a plot that behaves more like a novel. A good next step for a reader who liked the ideas and wanted more story.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The High Sierra: A Love Story (2022). Nonfiction, on the mountains he has been walking into since 1973. It explains the sensibility behind the fiction better than any interview does.
Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics (2017). Not fiction. The economics the novel keeps stopping to explain, argued directly by someone who appears alongside Robinson in the Pricing Nature conversation listed in our sources.
Everything in the packet is built on real research, and most of it is free. If a claim sparks a question, go to the source and check it yourself. That is the whole idea.
Sherwood, Steven C., and Matthew Huber. "An Adaptability Limit to Climate Change Due to Heat Stress." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 107, no. 21, 2010, pp. 9552-9555.
Four pages, and the paper underneath the first chapter. Wet-bulb temperature never exceeds about 31 degrees anywhere on Earth today, and past 35 a body cannot shed its own heat. The opening becomes measurement rather than horror.
Paris Agreement. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2015. unfccc.int.
Free, and shorter than you expect. Article 14 is the stocktake, Article 8 loss and damage, and Articles 16 and 18 are what the delegates use to charter the agency. Article 16.4(a) really does authorize subsidiary bodies. Read Article 18 and decide whether it says what the novel needs.
Chen, Delton B., Joël van der Beek, and Jonathan Cloud. "Climate Mitigation Policy as a System Solution: Addressing the Risk Cost of Carbon." Journal of Sustainable Finance and Investment, vol. 7, no. 3, 2017, pp. 1-42.
The carbon coin, three years before the novel, by someone thanked in its acknowledgments. Note the date. The idea came first, and the book carried it to a large readership.
Corbett, Charles R., and Edward A. Parson. "Radical Climate Adaptation in Antarctica." Ecology Law Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 1, 2022. ecologylawquarterly.org.
Peer reviewed and free. It asks of the glacier plan the two questions the Antarctic chapters never do: is it lawful, and would it work.
Self, Stephen, et al. "The Atmospheric Impact of the 1991 Mount Pinatubo Eruption." Fire and Mud: Eruptions and Lahars of Mount Pinatubo, Philippines, edited by Christopher G. Newhall and Raymundo S. Punongbayan, University of Washington Press, 1996. pubs.usgs.gov.
Free, from the United States Geological Survey. The real Pinatubo cooled the planet about half a degree, peaking eighteen months out. Hold that against the novel's double Pinatubo.
Markley, Robert. Kim Stanley Robinson. University of Illinois Press, 2019.
A scholarly biography, partly built on interviews with Robinson, and the source for the family, the Sierra Nevada, Clarion and the doctorate. It says nothing about this novel; in 2019 there was none to discuss.
Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. legislation.gov.uk.
Wales has a real Future Generations Commissioner, created by a law that passed in April 2015, five years before the novel. Check that date before crediting the book.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future. Orbit, 2020.
The novel itself. Read the acknowledgments; that page is why this list is short and specific.
Prickett, Casey, host. "Episode 14: Kim Stanley Robinson, Kate Raworth, and Delton Chen Discuss Carbon Currency." Pricing Nature, Yale Center for Business and the Environment, 2021. pricingnature.substack.com
The best single source on this book, and free, with a full transcript. The novelist, the economist whose ideas the novel argues with, and the man who actually invented the carbon coin, in one ninety-minute conversation. If you want to know which way the influence ran between the proposal and the novel, listen to the three of them settle it in their own words.
Global Carbon Reward. globalcarbonreward.org
Delton Chen's own project site, where the carbon reward proposal is maintained and updated. Useful for one thing above all: the dates. Compare them against the novel's publication in October 2020.
Robinson, Kim Stanley, and Helena Feder. "The Realism of Our Time." Radical Philosophy, no. 201, February 2018. radicalphilosophy.com
Free, and Robinson two years before the book, arguing that science fiction is the realism of the present moment rather than a genre about the future. The clearest short statement of the position this novel argues from.
Raymond, Colin, Tom Matthews, and Radley M. Horton. "The Emergence of Heat and Humidity Too Severe for Human Tolerance." Science Advances, vol. 6, no. 19, 2020, eaaw1838.
The follow-up to the paper on the printed list, published the same year as the novel. Where Sherwood and Huber modelled when the wet-bulb limit would arrive, this one went to the weather station records and found that it already had, briefly, in places, decades ahead of the projections. Free.
Tulaczyk, Slawek, W. Barclay Kamb, and Hermann F. Engelhardt. "Basal Mechanics of Ice Stream B, West Antarctica: 2. Undrained Plastic Bed Model." Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, vol. 105, no. B1, 2000, pp. 483-494.
The glaciologist the novel names inside its own fiction, twenty years before the novel. This is the model the Antarctic plan is built on: four coupled equations linking how fast the ice slides to how much water is stored in the till beneath it. It finds that an ice stream has two stable modes, fast and slow, and that small changes in the basal energy balance can grow until they eliminate the conditions that let the ice stream at all. Note what it does not say. It is about one West Antarctic ice stream, not Pine Island, and it models nature doing this on its own, not anyone doing it on purpose.
Gates, Bill. "5 Ideas for Summer Reading." gatesnotes.com, 2021.
A reader with the power to move money, saying the novel "does a better job than any other book I've read of playing out, in a dramatic but realistic way, how high temperatures can literally kill people." This is what the book's influence actually looks like from the outside.
Obama, Barack. "Here Are My Favorite Books, Movies, TV Shows and Music of 2020." barackobama.medium.com, December 2020.
The other documented reader worth naming. Both of these are evidence about a conversation changing, not about a technology existing, and the packet is careful to claim only the first.
Corbett, Charles R., and Edward A. Parson. "Radical Climate Adaptation in Antarctica." Ecology Law Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 1, 2022. ecologylawquarterly.org
Also on the printed list, repeated here because the full PDF is free and the printed page cannot give you a link. The serious treatment of whether the glacier intervention would be lawful and whether it would work.
Paris Agreement. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2015. unfccc.int
The treaty itself, free. Articles 8, 14, 16 and 18 are the ones the novel builds on. Article 16, paragraph 4(a) is where the real authority sits.
Nothing yet. When a link here dies or a finding is superseded, the correction is posted here rather than left wrong in print.
Eight documents as PDFs, in two archives: the complete packet, and a student set holding only the four documents a class should see. Yours to use with every class you teach, this year and every year after. No subscription and no account.
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Last reviewed 2026-08-26 · Specimen FL-01.0009