If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...
Dete Meserve structures her novel around four characters, each getting their own chapter in rotation until storylines start to cross. This is a difficult approach to engage with, as after the first four chapters it's hard to have any connection to a character, but in the context of the storyline it makes sense, and after a while everything does start to fit into place. Each of our four is making a journey back in time using new technology developed by Californian startup Aeon Expeditions (founded by ex-husband of one of the four, Elizabeth). This is not time travel as science fiction usually portrays it. It is reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier's striking time travel novel The House on the Strand . In that book, the protagonist is able to mentally travel back to the fourteenth century, while his body remains in the present (putting him in danger, as his physical body moves across the landscape following the mental one in the past). in Meserve's book, the characters do travel...