The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut Universe, #1)

by Mary Robinette Kowal

Later, when I saw where he had been standing, I was amazed that he was able to speak at all. “But of Washington itself, nothing remains.”

BAM! I'm hooked! Such a compelling paragraph. Written in a way that is both tightly written and also humanizing to the characters and the situation. I like that we're following people who have a military background (and thus were able to get most of their shit together in a crisis), but that even they were not able to conceive of the damage done until later. It reads so much like real life. When these huge events happen nobody is ever able to fathom the scope of it at first. Even those prepared (as much as possible) for the idea of something on that scale happening.

“No, but I think this could be an extinction event.”

Well shit, maybe this isn't the right time to be reading this.

President Brannan said, “That’s more than enough to severely affect crops. Growing seasons will shorten by ten to thirty days, so we’ll have to convince farmers to plant different crops and at different times of year. That’s not going to be easy.” As the former secretary of agriculture, it wasn’t surprising that he intuitively understood the trouble with a change in climate. But he was still focused on the wrong thing. Yes, we had a mini–Ice Age to get through, but none of them were considering the eventual rise in temperature.

I knew that him being the former secretary of agriculture was going to be useful!