The Good: Robinson doesn’t shirk from the horror at the beginning, and ends on a hopeful note. I enjoy a dystopian future that we can recover from, and he’s delivered that here. Lots of neat geoengineering stuff too.
The Bad: You’ll really have to be on the far left economically to enjoy many of his tirades. If your utopian vision of the future relies on everyone having a quasi-religious or explicitly-religious conversion experience to join your side, you’re writing a fairy tale. If he spends any more time on dubious political speeches and then showing how it’s all great if you just follow his advice, he’ll be the exact political mirror image to Ayn Rand. He doesn’t even consider the idea that environmentalist terrorism would cause blowback. People who get attacked that way in his novel just roll over and show their bellies, like no powerful person ever. He’s about as thoroughly wrong about the response to terrorism as Osama bin Laden, who seemed to think that terrorism would make Americans be *less* in the Middle East.
The best bit intellectually is when he discusses the concept of ideology. If you ask me, though, he’s read too many Hegelians who think they’re prophets and not enough pragmatists. If ideology is like a religion, he has not adequately appreciated the agnostic option. He needs a healthy dose of humility with his ideology if he wants to speak to audiences that aren’t already far-left.