Friday, February 7, 2014

Book Review: 2312

Kim Stanley Robinson
2012
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Kim Stanley Robinson writes long books. While there are, from time to time, exciting sections, you cannot count on them for constant page-turning action. They are not taut, fast-paced thrillers. And his central characters tend to be opinionated, idiosyncratic, aloof people who have difficulty getting along with others.

But what Robinson lacks in breathless plot pacing and likeable characters he makes up for—in spades—with his imaginative, vivid, and realistic descriptions of other moons and planets, the colonies we humans build in those places, and the remarkable but completely conceivable technology it takes to create and maintain those colonies. No one does a better job at this than him.

2312 is true to Robinson form in all of these ways. It is a good story—not fast moving, generally, but it keeps you interested enough, and there are several parts that are actually quite exhilarating. There are loads of excellent, realistic off-Earth locations and ingenious, not-so-out-of-reach machinery. And the love story is surprisingly touching.

~

The year 2312 comes almost two hundred years after our successful colonization and terraformation of Mars. During that time, human exploration has spread; there are colonies and, in some cases, the beginnings of terraformation on Mercury, Venus, and several of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. We have also hollowed out the insides of thousands of asteroids and turned them into mobile, steerable, life-supporting terrariums, which we use simultaneously as space transport vehicles and as biomes for preserving extinct and endangered Earth flora and fauna.

For, sadly, in spite of our success in greening and animating much of the rest of the solar system, we have just about destroyed our home planet. By 2312, global warming, in combination with massive overpopulation, has had catastrophic effects, which Robinson depicts with depressing realism. Earth’s ice caps have completely melted except for two small, carefully tended glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. Sea levels have risen more than thirty feet, so that Florida and all of the South Pacific islands and the bottom several floors of all of Manhattan’s skyscrapers are under water. Forests have turned to grasslands, grasslands to deserts. Earth is full of poverty, disease, and sharply divided classes of haves and have-nots.

Ironically, the geoengineering that we are doing everywhere else in the solar system won’t work on Earth—the ecosystem is too complex. The bombardments, sunshields, and gas emissions that we’re using in other places would upset the delicate balance of life that is left.

And the incredible political bickering on Earth leads only to indecision. Earth needs an ecological revolution, but the people of Earth variously can’t see it, can’t accept it, and can’t agree on what is needed. So nothing gets done, and the situation gets worse.

~

The first person we meet in 2312 is Swan Er Hong, currently residing in Terminator, a domed colony city on Mercury. At a spry 137 years old, Swan has been a designer of asteroid terrariums, an architect of cities and landscapes, a terraformer, and a visual artist.

Swan is also kind of a mess as a person. She is brash, whiny, cranky, and impatient. She has a tendency towards depression, self-mortification, and self-punishment. She berates herself about early biome designs that seem misguided to her now. She has a cantankerous personal Artificial Intelligence computer (or “qube”) implanted in her head; she once injected herself with alien microbes from Europa for a high without knowing what the consequences might be; she had treatments to implant animal genes into herself so she can sing like a lark and purr like a cat.

But what prevents her from being completely unappealing is that, at the heart of it all, she loves life. She appreciates everything: the croaking of frogs, the wind, the sun, the soil. She can be happy living for days out in the wild of a terrarium, following a pack of wolves. She likes risky sports and other activities that drive her to the limits of her endurance, because they make her feel fully human and alive.

At the beginning of the book, Swan’s beloved grandmother Alex has just died. While Swan is trying to grieve, her grandmother’s associates come to Terminator from across the solar system to pull her into the project that her grandmother had been working on.
                       
Which, Swan learns, wasn’t just ordinary terraformation research. It turns out that Swan’s grandmother had an all-encompassing, Seldon-esque theory of power in the solar system, which predicted that the instability on Earth would eventually lead to a crash, which would in turn mean disaster for the entire Earth-dependent solar system. And her grandmother had enlisted others across the space colonies to help her with an ultra-secret project to save Earth—“to help Earth cope with its problems by ecological means.”

Swan isn’t actually all that thrilled about being sucked into this project until catastrophe hits her personally. The city of Terminator, which Swan helped to design, is built on rails that circle the entire circumference of Mercury at a single latitude. As the planet rotates through its extremely slow day, the tracks in the daylight behind the city heat up and expand, pushing the entire city down the rails towards the night side, where the tracks are cooling and narrowing. In this way, the city is constantly moving, constantly staying slightly ahead of the deadly radiation of the Mercurial sunrise.

One night Swan and Fitz Wahram, a big lumbering co-worker/co-conspirator of her grandmother’s from Titan, go outside the city, farther ahead into the night side, to a concert. As they are returning, a meteor hits the tracks in front of the city, destroying the rails and forcing the city to stop. Terminator’s human residents are all able to evacuate in emergency shuttles, but when the sunrise finally hits the stalled city, everything else—buildings, gardens, forests, animals—burns to the ground.

Swan & Wahram are able to get to an underground conduit and walk for over a month to the nearest shelter where they can be rescued. During the time they are in the conduit, the Interplanetary Police discover that it was not a meteor at all, but a very cleverly disguised missile attack by someone who wants to subvert their project.

The rest of the book is a combination of intense cross-solar-system geoengineering and crime-solving challenges for Swan. She and Wahram and the rest of her grandmother’s allies struggle to get past sabotage, terrorism, and interplanetary politics to reverse the damage to Earth’s ecosystem, while at the same time trying to track down the forces against them and prevent them from doing even more harm. It starts getting particularly sinister when it appears that the relatively new AI “qubes” may be involved in the sabotage—because, of course, Swan has one of them implanted in her brain.

Eventually Swan and her cohorts decide that the time has come to force her grandmother’s revolution on Earth, whether it wants it or not.

I won’t describe what that revolution is here, but I will say that it is a beautiful thing. And that, in contrast to the ideal Hollywood narrative, but in keeping with both Robinson’s style and the way things really work, it is hard to definitively call it either a complete success or a complete failure.

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