In a near future of devastating climate change, “The Great Transition” is a save-the-world project inspired by the collapse of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Larch, one of three protagonists in Maine resident Nick Fuller Googin’s debut novel, will never forget the moment. He was in a Bangor arena that had been repurposed as a homeless shelter, and there it was, up on the Jumbotron. Watching glaciers crumble and ice pour into the sea for days, people finally, viscerally, understood that the world they’d been living in was finished.

We know from the beginning of the story that the Great Transition has succeeded. As the novel begins, Larch is living in a new city on the shores of Greenland with a wife, Kristina, and their 15-year-old daughter Emi. He is team nutritionist for the world champion WNBA Tundra. Kristina is a serial volunteer for a Transition project in New Jersey. And Emi is a struggling adolescent, smart beyond her years and naïve in spite of them. It is not a happy family.

It’s been 16 years since Day Zero, when the world achieved carbon neutral. The People’s Party has taken over the government, the workers have taken over the corporations, and Larch and Emi are taking the maglev train down to the Esplanade to watch the parade celebrating the Z-Day anniversary. Emi was supposed to be on a ski trip, but at the last minute she’d begged off. Larch had promised Kristina he’d stay at home during the celebration. But Kristina’s gone off to Gowanus Station and now Larch is taking Emi to watch the parade with a bunch of other Transition vets.

Kristina’s been ignoring his texts for two days, but when he sends her a clip of Emi happily dancing and singing, she answers in two minutes. Seething. You promised, Larch. Leave. Right now. Then, just as Larch tries to drag Emi away, gunfire erupts.

“A board member collapses on the Finance float. Another from the Leadership Council loses his head in a red mist.” A group calling themselves “The Furies,” it transpires, had decided some climate criminals needed killing.

Emi and Larch escape the chaos, but by the time they get home Kristina has ghosted them again. So Larch takes Emi off to the rebuilt New York to find her, and not so incidentally to resolve the tensions that have infected their family.

The first requirement of good science fiction is a good story, and filled with action, suspense, reversals, and recoveries. “The Great Transition” is by any measure a fine story. But successful near-future fiction also demands good world-building, and here the novel falls short. It offers no plausible path from what the author depicts as a failing world of corporate greed and social injustice to, a mere two decades later, a successful collectivist future of a recovering environment, Workers’ Councils and six-hour workdays.

Instead, we get hand-waving. The Transition, we’re told in alternating chapters in the voices of Larch and Emi, was carried out by heroic volunteers for groups like Forest Corps and Carbon Capture, who overcame environmental collapse through collective labor. It’s like a Neo-American version of China’s Great Leap Forward or, deeper in the bleak history of collectivist enterprise, the Stalinist construction of the Dnieper River dams.

Unfortunately, that sort of action is what the author seems to think will solve the world’s problems. Kristina, who Googins appears to use to voice his philosophies, tells her daughter, “We learned so much, from the Bolivians, the Chavistas, the Zapatistas. Working alongside one another. Building solidarity.” There are Soviet-style murals of heroic Wind Corps workers building turbines. “Corps Power,” a Transition era reality show that Larch starred in, is still being recast. It’s propaganda, the director told him when she started filming, but “the good kind.”

When Larch and Kristina finally reconnect, the political is clearly personal:

“Listen to yourself, she says. You promised we would never stop fighting.

“We won, Kristina. It’s over. It’s been over for years.

“She shakes her head. Ask my parents if we won. My sister. Your parents. Everyone who lost their families and fled their homes so a few wealthy people could get wealthier. We did not win. We prevented total collapse. That’s not victory.”

Kristina never comes right out and praises struggle sessions and re-education camps, but her truth, chillingly, is “It’s justice, not murder,” and “We didn’t finish the job.”

If this sort of ends-justify-the-means is what the world needs to reach a Zero-carbon future, forget it. I’ll stick with higher oceans and warmer winters.

John Alden, a long-time fan of dystopian and apocalyptic near-future novels, has been reviewing science fiction for over 30 years.

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