A thought-provoking novel on the scariest response to climate change

Geoengineering, or hacking the planet to cool it down, is either a maniacal plan dreamt up by foolhardy scientists or a useful tool for staving off climate catastrophe—maybe both. It raises hard questions about what sorts of sacrifices humanity may have to make for the greater good and who gets to decide; questions that beg for nuanced conversations about the social, environmental, and political risks and rewards.

Yet in science fiction, geoengineering tends to get treated with all the nuance of Thor’s hammer striking a rock monster. Which is why Eliot Peper’s recent novel Veil, set on a near future Earth beset by climate crises, is such a refreshing read. This book gets geoengineering right by showing that there are no obvious right answers.

A fast-paced novel that unfolds like a political thriller, Veil tells the story of Zia León, a humanitarian aid worker who bounces around the world helping people suffering from climate-fueled droughts, storms, and sea level rise. When Zia learns of a secret effort to commandeer the climate, she faces a dilemma: How to let the rest of the world know about it without causing an international crisis. Zia must do so while navigating a web of dangerous corporate oligarchies desperate to keep the geoengineering plot secret and while working through her own, very personal, form of climate grief.

Veil joins a very small collection of stories whose plots revolve around geoengineering. Most other examples treat the hypothetical technology as unequivocally dangerous and bad—think Snowpiercer, where the last surviving humans live out their lives on a globe-trotting train after a climate hacking effort gone awry plunges Earth into an Ice Age, or Geostorm, an astonishingly boring disaster movie about a planetary weather control system that starts glitching out and dropping mega-tornadoes on Mumbai.