There's death and destruction of incomprehensible magnitude. Nations and coastlines crumble. Despite all this, a certain cheerful cynicism that pervades the book keeps it entertaining and amusing. That cheerful cynicism is also what makes Barnes' near-future society of 2028 so plausible. TV and newspapers have been largely supplanted by XV, which lets the public experience the full range of sensory experience being transmitted by a character.
Cars drive themselves.
There's a wonderful digression about a group of self-replicating robots on the moon who start to model some of the more unpleasant behaviors of societies. Unlike Barnes' previous books, Mother of Storms has a fairly large cast of viewpoint characters. This usually irritates me, but I didn't mind it here, and their interactions are pwell-handled and informative, although occasionally in moving them about the author's manipulations are a bit blatant. They're not all necessarily good guys, either, although with the hurricanes wreaking wholesale destruction upon the world's coastal areas, ethical categories tend to become irrelevant. But even the Evil American Corporate Magnate is a pretty likable guy.