Veil

Veil is Eliot Peper’s  10th novel, and I read them all, so you know I’m a fan. His first three books have earned cult status in Silicon Valley since they deal with information that is familiar to that place. In this book, as he has in several, Peper writes about a near-future society which has evolved due to our current leaders’ inability or unwillingness to deal effectively with global warming. However, he does not leave us in a hopeless dystopian world, but suggests ways to deal with the science and political matters that should lead to a better world.

Peper writes about the Leon family’s involvement in all of this. Miranda Leon is the wonderful wife of Santiago, a brilliant but maniacal scientist, and they’ve given birth to Zia. Miranda dies due to a heat wave that killed 20 million, and Zia is sent to a special school for the wealthy and highly gifted students in Switzerland. This is where Zia finds a new group of friends  who become her family of creation rather than one based on her biology. Zia has become a master of saving people who have been trapped by the effects of climate change. The Maldives are underwater and there are almost no natural beaches left anywhere in the world due to the rising ocean levels. The earth’s population is being progressively driven to occupy smaller and smaller pieces of land. The massive storms that are occurring his damaging what’s left of our world.

Zia’s friend Galang has become a reporter of all that has gone wrong in the last 20-30 years, and he says to Zia, “After responding to natural disaster after natural disaster, you eventually start to realize that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster. There are only human disasters revealed by nature… The real disasters are poverty and shortsightedness.”

This is a quick read with both believable, full-bodied characters, and a convincing plot, leaving the reader with some hope that there’s a way out of our current climate mess.