I am in Washington on a fiercely hot summer day, soon after the opening of the World War II Monument. It would have done Mussolini proud. Like all the other tourists, I feel dwarfed by the sheer scale of it: its arches stand forty- three feet high. If the inspiration is European, the materials are all American: the monument is made from stone quarried in Georgia and South Carolina. I think of Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent science fiction novel, Forty Signs of Rain, in which climate change results in the flooding of Washington. Only the tops of its taller monuments can be seen; little islands scattered across a massive lake.