A Climate of Doubt
Year: 2018
Author: Russell F. Moran
Length: 250 pages
***THIS BOOK WAS RECEIVED FROM THE AUTHOR IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW***
Most people don’t take thrillers seriously. These types of books are meant for silly entertainment and often have a plot similar to campy B-movies. If you’re into that kind of book, A Climate of Doubt is right up your alley. I was actually a little surprised at how well it handled most of its female characters for the genre (despite all of them being married and tied to their husbands at the wrists and ankles). Even though A Climate of Doubt deals with serious scientific subjects, you can turn your brain off and enjoy the mayhem that wild swings in weather will bring upon a planet. Of course, I partly say this because A Climate of Doubt exists in a logical sphere separate from our known universe (i.e., the secondary and tertiary effects of such drastic changes are not addressed or are merely mentioned after the fact).
A Climate of Doubt suffers from a lack of research to create a believable narrative. Subjects like meteorology, weather disasters, solar panels, treason, and how the government actually works (among other topics) should have been researched more thoroughly than they were here. For example, the “weather experts” provide no alternative explanations—like polar vortices—or even attempt to describe what is happening other than calling it “drastic climate change.” Even the chosen method of this extreme weather is completely implausible. If the constellation of satellites had solar panels as large as football fields, they would only be able to adjust 0.000000084% of the light that hits the Earth’s surface. I’m not even going to touch the huge amount of weather effects that were completely ignored in this scenario (or used hand-waving to ignore, like during space launches), as it would make this review much too long.
While this book suffers from many flaws of self-published books (i.e., proofreading, grammatical, and formatting errors), there were fewer than most I’ve seen. Perhaps I didn’t notice these errors as much because so much of this book was redundant or unnecessary. Writers are often told to “kill their darlings,” but this book left every single one of them intact. Many chapters could have been cut completely, their content adding nothing to the story (including a groan-inducing, fourth-wall-breaking self-insert of the novelist husband). Considering half of the pages of this 250-page book were only partially filled, it won’t take you much time to get through it if you want to endure 125 pages of blunt-force exposition through endless “As you know, Bob” dictations.
A redundant and poorly researched thriller, I give A Climate of Doubt 2.0 stars out of 5.
