Chilling sci-fi novel about 'global heating' good summer read

by Dan Bloom

I have seen the future and it's dank, dark and dystopic. At least in one Oklahoma author's eyes, it is.
When veteran sci-fi writer Jim Laughter sat down last summer to start in on a new novel about mankind'sshaky future on this third rock from the sun, he wasn't sure where the book was actually going, hesaid. Seven months later, after typing out each chapter of"Polar City Red" on his computer keyboard, Laughter, 59, was finished and ready toface critics on the right and on the left. Climate denialists are going to say it's not science,and die-hard climate activists are going to say it's just fiction.
Rick Perry's not going to read, that's for sure. Neither will Rick Santorum or other national politicianswith their heads in the sand. But Laughter's book could make a cool movie in the future dystopia department,following up on such Hollywood films as "City of Ember" and "The Road."
Laughter's pulp "polar western" is set in the Last Frontier and it poses a veryimportant and headline-mirroring question: will mankindsurvive the coming climapocalypse coming our wayas the Earth heats up over the next few centuries?As sea levels rise and millions of "climate refugees" make their way north to Alaska, Canada,Russia and Norway, think scavenger camps, Mad Max villages, andU.N.-administered ''polar cities'' -- cities of domes, as Laughter (his real name)calls them.
"Polar City Red" is more than mere sci fi: a retired USAFtechnical writer who has lived all over the world on military assignments, the retired grandfather of four comes across as a probing moralist and a modernJeremiah. His worldview befits a Christian pastor who has built two churches and findsin religion both an anchor and a place for hope.
His book is not just about climate change or northern dytopias. It's also about the moral questions that must guide humanity asit tries to keep a lid on global warming's worst-case scenarios whilealso looking for solutions to mankind's worst nightmare -- thepossible final extinction of the human species due to man's own follyand extravagant ways. Can a small 200-page book do all that? No, it's justentertainment, a good book to put on your summer reading list.
Writing the novel took Laughter seven months of non-stop researchand keyboarding, he told me, but I have a feeling that what he wrote will last 100 years.It's more than a cli-fi thriller. It also exposesthe underbelly of humankind's most terrifying nightmare: thepossible end of the human species and God's deep displeasure at what His peoplehave done to His Earth. Even if you're an atheist, as I am, Laughter touches a nerve.
The book is prophetic, futuristic and moralistic. Youas reader will get through this one alive, but will our descendants, 100 or 1000years from now, survive the Long Emergency we find ourselves in now? That's thequestion that Laughter poses.
Fortunately, the book ends on a note of hope and redemption, so it's not adowner at all. You and your loved ones need to read it. As Laughterhimself says in the introduction, quoting ChristopherMorley:  ''When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelveounces of paper and ink and glue -- you sell him a whole new life."
"Polar City Red," which I just read in a preview copy, won't giveyou a whole new life, and it'll probably just give you a headache and heartburn.I would not advise Rick Perry to read it.