Tool of War is the latest in a series of connected novels by Paolo Bacigalupi that started with Ship Breaker and continued in The Drowned Cities. I call them a series of connected novels as each book is quite capable of standing on its own but they are connected by recurring characters and evolving situations in Bacigalupi's vividly laid-out dystopic near-future world.-- Ahead, Seascape Boston's seawalls loomed: piles of bricks, slabs of asphalt from old roads and overpasses, massive concrete columns bristling with rusting iron rebar, all of it covered now with barnacles and draped in seaweed spackled with anemones.-- "What do you think of Kanodia's legacy?"-- Mahlia startled. Tool slumped hard against the rail, breathing heavily, having managed the short walk from the mast.--"He planned," she said. "He saw everything coming, and he planned."-- "A very good general," Tool agreed.-- "He wasn't no general," Van objected. "He was, like, some kind of school guy."-- "A professor of biology," Tool said.-- "A _professor_," Van mimicked.-- Mahlia shot him a warning look. According to Seascape legend, Anurag Kanodia had been more interested in scientific research at one of the Seascape's ancient universities than in the practical activities of the world. His family had a tradition in trading and finance, but he had always been driven by learning, rather than profit.-- But then one day, the marine biologist had abruptly quit his academic life. He abandoned a treatise on the adaptation of corals to acidifying oceans, shut down his research, and then, as legend told it, he had walked out into the city, carrying a piece of chalk.-- A piece of chalk in one hand, and an altimeter in the other.-- According to the stories the Seascapers told, he'd circled through the city, marking a contour line with his chalk -- a line many meters higher than most estimates of sea level rise.-- The seas are coming, he said when anyone asked him why he was marking chalk on buildings.-- People took it as self-aggrandizing performance art, and laughed. Then the scrubbed the silly man's scribblings off their homes and offices. But when people washed off the chalk, he returned with paint, graffiti-spraying sea level promises in fuchsia and chartreuse, blaze orange and neon blue -- gaudy colors, too rude to ignore. Colors that refused to wash away.-- He was soon arrested for vandalism. Bailed out by a wealthy sister, he returned to his midnight graffiti raids. Marking and re-marking his city with the stubborn line. He was arrested again, and fined.-- Then arrested again.-- And again.-- Defiantly unapologetic each time, he was finally jailed for a year. At his sentencing, he laughed at the judge. "People don't mind that the sea will swallow their homes, but woe to the man who paints their future for them," he said.-- When he was eventually released from jail, his vandalism took a new form. If people only understood business, then business it would be. Kanodia had the blood of merchants in his veins and so now, with the help of his sister's connections, he went about gathering investors, buying as much as he could of the city that stood above his old painted lines.-- Eventually, he and a few major corporate partners purchased nearly all the real estate above the line. They collected rents, made steady money, and waited patiently for the inevitable Category Six hurricane that research told him must eventually arrive.-- In the aftermath of Hurricane Upsilon, which destroyed much of lower Boston, Kanodia turned his investments to the devastation below the line, buying up the wreckage, and harvesting from it. He was an old man by then, but daughters and sons continued the project. The seawalls were the result. Rising high across the mouth of an anticipated bay, they were comprised of every bit of wrecked architecture that had lain below the storm surge line.-- "He didn't pretend things would get better," Mahlia said. "He made things better, because he saw how things were."-- "Indeed. A rare talent," Tool said. "Very few choose to have it."Highly, highly recommended.