Neal Stephenson is the darling author of tech geeks.

His breakthrough came in 1992 with Snow Crash, a cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk novel.

Termination Shock, published in November 2021, is a climate fiction novel about solar geoengineering.

A Texas oil-industry billionaire builds a launcher on the Texas-Mexico border to fire sulfur into the air, a form of stratospheric aerosol injection intended to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight into space.

This technique replicates the effects of volcanic eruptions that inject sulfates into the atmosphere and produce global cooling, such as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption.

Schmidt’s plan has uneven effects, helping low-lying areas such as the Netherlands, Venice, and the Maldives, but threatening the Punjab with drought. …

Eventually India sends a hit team with drones to take out the project.

The book did keep me interested. Some of the characters entertaining: the Queen of the Netherlands, and granddaughter of Queen Beatrix; Rufus Grant, a part-Comanche exterminator of feral hogs. And others.

In the end, I was wondering if this technology MIGHT be part of the solution in future.