Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Forty Signs of Rain | 2004 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Buy |
| 2 | Green Earth | 2015 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Buy |
| 3 | Fifty Degrees Below | 2005 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Buy |
| 4 | Sixty Days and Counting | 2007 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Buy |
The Science in the Capital series began with Forty Signs of Rain in 2004, drawing on Robinson’s experience living in Washington DC. The novels follow Frank Vanderwal, a scientist working at the National Science Foundation, alongside colleagues, policy staffers, and a fictional US president as climate change begins producing visible and dramatic effects. A Tibetan Buddhist community that has relocated to Washington after losing their homeland to rising seas provides a recurring presence throughout the series.
Robinson set out to write fiction about how science actually works in relationship to politics, which means much of the drama comes from grant applications, congressional testimony, interagency disputes, and the slow grind of institutional decision-making rather than from spectacular disasters alone. There are spectacular disasters too, including a Washington DC winter that drops temperatures to dangerous extremes, but Robinson is more interested in the question of how people try to respond within existing systems.
The series holds up as one of the more prescient works of climate fiction from its era. Robinson wrote it when climate action was already a political issue but before it had become the central anxiety it is today, and the institutional obstacles his characters face feel recognizable to anyone following real-world climate policy. Green Earth, the 2015 single-volume revision, tightened the narrative and updated some of the science, and is a good starting point for new readers.