Kim Stanley Robinson’s outer-space novels allow us to picture what would happen when real humans, governed by real physical laws, colonize our solar system. Implementation takes decades or even centuries. Ships and living spaces are designed for material and budgetary constraints, not efficiency or safety. There are bugs, mistakes, disasters. Sometimes people just have to suck it up and patch it up as they go, working with what they have. Robinson’s books are completely grounded in hard science and imperfect reality.
And yet he describes the facts with art and imagination to create settings that are not only completely believable, but also surreal and unbelievably beautiful.
And maybe that’s his point: our universe is
amazing. No enhancements needed to make it so.
So, in celebration of my appreciation for our universe, and, in particular, our solar system, on this Valentine's Day, here are some
of my favorite scenes from Robinson's most recent novel, 2312. (Warning: there are
some spoilers in here.)
Scene: Surfing Saturn's F Ring
“Soon after that they took a shuttle to Prometheus, the inner shepherd moon of the F ring. The gravitational sweeps of Prometheus and Pandora, F’s outer shepherd moon, changed in relation to each other in ways that ended up braiding the F ring’s billions of ice chunks into complex streamers, very unlike the smooth sheets of the bigger rings. In effect the F ring was being swirled in the tides created by its two shepherd moons, making for some waves. And where there were waves, there were surfers...”
“They jetted closer and closer to the white wall, until Swan could see discrete ice chunks very clearly, ranging in size from sand grains to suitcases, with the occasional chunk of ice furniture—desk, coffin—tumbling in the midst of things. Once she saw a temporary agglomeration about the size of a small house, but it was coming apart even as she spotted it.”
“Swan tested her jets as she flew toward the wave, pressing with fingertips like a clarinet player, jinking forward in a little sashay of her own device…she focused on the approaching wave, which was lifting up and over her like Hiroshige’s wave; this one was ten kilometers high, and rising fast. She needed to turn and accelerate in the direction it was going, but not so quickly that she stayed ahead of it. This was the tricky part—”
“Then she was in the white stuff and being struck by the bits. She jetted a bit to keep her head out of stuff, as if bodysurfing out of a spume of broken salt water, but it was chunky stuff and she felt herself being thrust forward by little hits from little bits, rather than a mass of water. Then she was at speed with the wave, her head emerging from it so she could look around—very like bodysurfing, and she had to laugh, she had to shout; she was flying in a wave of ice ten kilometers high. She hooted at the sight, she couldn’t help it. The common band was raucous with the other surfers’ yelling.”
Scene: Floating in Space, Waiting for Rescue, after Ejecting from Doomed Ship
“They floated there in the starry night… The Milky Way was like a skein of white glowing milk, with the Coal Sack and other black patches in it even more black than usual. Everywhere else the stars salted the blackness so finely that the black itself was compromised—as if behind the black, pressing intensely on it, was a whiteness greater than the eye would be able to take in. The pure black in the Milky Way must indicate a great deal of coal in the Coal Sack. Was all the black in the sky made by dust? she wondered. If all the stars in the universe were visible, would the night sky be pure white?”
“The big stars seemed to lie at different distances from them. Space popped as she saw that, became an extension outward rather than a backdrop hanging a few kilometers away. They were not in a black bag, but an infinite extension. A little reckoning in a great room.”
Scene: The Re-Animation
of Earth
“They all came down together, first in big landers protected by heat shields, then in smaller landers popping parachutes, then in exfoliating balloon bags. At that point they were drifting down through the airspace the Inuit nation had given them permission to cross. When they got within a few hundred meters of the ground, every lander disintegrated into thousands of aerogel bubbles drifting down, each transparent bubble a smart balloon holding in side it an animal or animal family. What the animals thought of it was anyone’s guess: some were struggling in their aerogel, others looked around placid as clouds. The west wind had its effect, and the bubbles drifted east like seed pods. Swan looked around, trying to see everywhere at once: sky all strewn with clear seeds, which from any distance were visible only as their contents, so that she drifted eastward and down with thousands of flying wolves, bears, reindeer, mountain lions. There she saw a fox pair; a clutch of rabbits; a bobcat or lynx; a bundle of lemmings; a heron, flying hard inside its bubble. It looked like a dream, but she knew it was real, and the same right now all over Earth: into the seas splashed dolphins and whales, tuna and sharks. Mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians: all the lost creatures were in the sky at once, in every country, in every watershed. Many of the creatures descending had been absent from Earth for two or three centuries. Now all back, all at once.”
Scene: Viewing the Sunset on Titan
The sunset on Titan is eighteen hours long.
“Titan is larger than Pluto, larger than Mercury. It has a nitrogen atmosphere, like Earth’s but ten times more dense…on the surface all the water is frozen very hard and forms the material of the landscape—glacial to every horizon, with rock ejecta scattered here and there like warts and carbuncles. Here methane and ethane play the role of water on Earth, changing from a vapor in the nitrogen atmosphere to clouds that rain down into streams and lakes running over the water ice.”“No impact craters; as they are formed in ice, the ice then deforms and resurfaces as the centuries pass. There is only a convoluted, swirling chaos of broken ice features and rock outcroppings, cut by liquid methane into shapes like watersheds. Dips in the land are filled with liquid methane: Titan’s Lake Ontario is three hundred kilometers across, and shaped like the one on Earth....”“The three of them donned suits and left the spaceport city, called Shangri-La, by way of a gate at the northern end of the city tent. They walked a few kilometers north on a broad track, ramping gradually up a tilted glaciated plain to an overlook. Here a broad flagstoned area made a kind of open plaza, overlooking an ethane lake. The metallic sheen of the lake reflected the clouds and sky like a mirror, so it was a stunning plate of mixed rich color, gold and pink, cherry and bronze, all in discrete Fauvist masses; really nature had no fear when it came to spinning the color wheel…Gibbous Saturn flew through the clouds above, its edge-on rings like a white flaw cracking that part of the sky.”
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