2312

Kim Stanley Robinson

Completed 5/26/2019, Reviewed 5/26/2019

3 stars

I’m not really a big fan of Kim Stanley Robinson, but I do recognize that his books are really well written.  The prose is usually outstanding and the amount of research and thought that goes into his books is extraordinary.  2312 is no exception.  I was continuously amazed at what he was writing about and how he was writing it.  However, I thought this book was short on plot and character development.  It took a long time to get around to advancing the plot, and I didn’t think it was all that interesting.  The characters were sort of interesting, but not very likeable.  I thought the real point of this book was a love letter to the solar system and positive thoughts on its colonization if we put our minds to it. 

The very basic plot concerns Swan Er Hong, the granddaughter of Alex, the Lion of Mercury.  When Alex dies, Swan is more or less thrust into some of Alex’s roles as a thinker and coordinator of efforts to advance living in the solar system.  However, Alex hardly kept any notes and left little for Swan to research.  Still, Swan becomes embroiled in trying to figure out who is sabotaging cities and operations on the planets.  Wahrum, an ambassador from Saturn and Inspector Jean Genette work with Swan to get to the bottom of this mystery. 

Swan is the main character.  She’s 135 years old.  She’s a hermaphrodite, but uses the she/her pronouns.  Many people are hermaphrodites in the future, and many people live to be well over one hundred years old.  Despite her age, Swan acts very childish in many respects.  I found it rather annoying, particularly in the beginning of the book.  One would almost have guessed she was a teenager by how she reacts to situations.  I found it difficult to like her, let alone identify with her because of her immaturity.  Yet, she’s been a mother and a father, but certainly doesn’t act like she’s ever been a parent. 

Wahrum is also a hermaphrodite and has fathered and mothered children.  He’s a spritely 115-ish.  He’s much more mature than Swan, but the two eventually end up romantically entwined.  But like the plot, this is slow in developing through the novel.

The real relationship in the novel is the romance Robinson has for the solar system.  Most of the book describes the inhabited planets and moons and how they were terraformed and settled.  It’s really good reading.  I found it much more interesting than the plot or the characters.  Robinson also spends time talking about how the Earth has changed with the effects of climate change and the animosity the eleven billion people still living on earth feel toward the spacers, who they consider deserters of the bad situation. 

The book felt very long.  I think this was due to the fact that very few chapters for the first two thirds of the book feel like they advance the plot.  There are a lot of scenes with Swan and Wahrum, but they don’t always have to do with the sabotage story line or their relationship.  Yet, they are very readable.  The form of the book is very interesting, with strange stream of consciousness lists, extracts that seem to come from papers and research adding color to the world building, and “quantum walks” which are also stream of consciousness, but much stranger.  I think those had to do with the AI implanted in Swan’s head.  The form reminded me of Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner.  In fact, a lot of reviewers claim there are many references to older science fiction authors, particularly Heinlein, though I missed most of those. 

I was going to give this book four stars out of five when I got the end, but I spent most of time reading it thinking it was only a three-star book.  I recognized that I really liked reading the prose and was almost always fascinated by the astronomical and ecological passages.  However, I just couldn’t forgive it for not having such a basic plot and so little character development.  So I settled on three stars.