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bradypunch's review against another edition
4.0
Brilliant. Nearly every page had some breathtaking description, turn, image, or phrase. My favorite Robinson so far.
rocksandroles's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
A letdown :/ I was expecting a vast space opera with a reality shaking conclusion. All throughout the book there are bits and pieces that hint toward this paradigm shift that happens in the titular 2312, but blink and you'll miss it. At the very end there's sort of a shrug and admission that okay maybe not EVERYTHING changed in 2312.
The gender politics of this book also read like they're from the mid 80s. 'Bisexuals have tits and cocks'? Okay buddy. You ever read a book and know with extreme certainty that the author has some very particular fetish?
The gender politics of this book also read like they're from the mid 80s. 'Bisexuals have tits and cocks'? Okay buddy. You ever read a book and know with extreme certainty that the author has some very particular fetish?
zeusandhera's review against another edition
3.0
I liked the sci-fi elements, but the plot points were few and far between. Can't say I like the characters very much either.
christopherc's review against another edition
1.0
It is hard to see Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 2312 as anything but a second go at his Mars trilogy (beginning with Red Mars), maintaining the epic scope of future expansion in space and terraforming of other planets, but reflecting the advances in science and culture in the two decades since he wrote that magnum opus.
For example, though the Mars trilogy takes place from the 21st to the 24th centuries, personal computing is missing and the issue of merging of man and machine, "transhumanism", never comes up. In 2312, however, wearable and implantable computing, and the rise of Artificial Intelligence are major themes.
The Mars trilogy also had invariably heterosexual love affairs, but as gay relationships and gender norm-defying artists have become more visible and more accepted in society, it is clear that love/sex/romance/identity in the future will be far more diverse than we used to imagine. 2312 depicts a society where gender is a spectrum explored in every detail. Nearly all of the characters here have undergone harmone therapies or surgical alterations, and some even change the pronoun used to refer to them over the course of the book ("he" one chapter, "she" the next). There’s a fairly graphic sex scene between two hermaphroditic characters.
Finally, the third new concern here is global warming and biosphere collapse. Earth in the future has seen its coastlines innundated due to melting polar ice, and most animal species are extinct. The inability of lawmakers to preserve the environment, even as science offers new, sustainable solutions, has made Earth the sick man of the solar system while the space colonies are flourishing.
So those are the ideas that Robinson explores in this new book, and they are thoughtprovoking. The plot itself, however, is disappointing and really half-baked. Some attacks happen on Mercury, and the characters have to figure out who is responsible. This plot is so barebones it’s almost like in outline form, and at one point, unforeshadowed and without any setup, he leaves it aside to suddenly go in a totally different direction (really, a character just ups and says “Hey, guys, let’s go to X and do Y”, and they do), before then returning to the main story. If the plot is meagre, the descriptive passages are grotesquely huge in comparison. We get pages and pages describing how a character whistles his favourite classical pieces, pages of descriptions of the landscapes of other planets (it was OK in the Mars trilogy, but here it’s getting old), pages of descriptions of animal migrations across a biosphere.
Plus I had a hard time suspending disbelief. These characters have lived with powerful quantum computing for over a century, but they still have long conversations about issues that would have been very familiar to them, like “How do you know if a computer is really conscious?” The protagonist is 130 years old and a venerable, respected figure, but at one point KSR has her threaten to scream to get what she wants in a meeting.
I really wanted to like 2312 because the ideas are so powerful. Like in the Mars trilogy, alternative economic models play a big role in the book, and I found that KSR was already thinking like me about the possibility that modern capitalism may preclude a Singularity, because entrenched interests would be unwilling to undergo the adaptation to a post-scarcity economy. However, the storytelling is just so godawful, even for a fan of this author, and I really wish I could find some non-fiction treatment of these issues. If you haven’t read KSR yet, definitely start with the Mars trilogy.
For example, though the Mars trilogy takes place from the 21st to the 24th centuries, personal computing is missing and the issue of merging of man and machine, "transhumanism", never comes up. In 2312, however, wearable and implantable computing, and the rise of Artificial Intelligence are major themes.
The Mars trilogy also had invariably heterosexual love affairs, but as gay relationships and gender norm-defying artists have become more visible and more accepted in society, it is clear that love/sex/romance/identity in the future will be far more diverse than we used to imagine. 2312 depicts a society where gender is a spectrum explored in every detail. Nearly all of the characters here have undergone harmone therapies or surgical alterations, and some even change the pronoun used to refer to them over the course of the book ("he" one chapter, "she" the next). There’s a fairly graphic sex scene between two hermaphroditic characters.
Finally, the third new concern here is global warming and biosphere collapse. Earth in the future has seen its coastlines innundated due to melting polar ice, and most animal species are extinct. The inability of lawmakers to preserve the environment, even as science offers new, sustainable solutions, has made Earth the sick man of the solar system while the space colonies are flourishing.
So those are the ideas that Robinson explores in this new book, and they are thoughtprovoking. The plot itself, however, is disappointing and really half-baked. Some attacks happen on Mercury, and the characters have to figure out who is responsible. This plot is so barebones it’s almost like in outline form, and at one point, unforeshadowed and without any setup, he leaves it aside to suddenly go in a totally different direction (really, a character just ups and says “Hey, guys, let’s go to X and do Y”, and they do), before then returning to the main story. If the plot is meagre, the descriptive passages are grotesquely huge in comparison. We get pages and pages describing how a character whistles his favourite classical pieces, pages of descriptions of the landscapes of other planets (it was OK in the Mars trilogy, but here it’s getting old), pages of descriptions of animal migrations across a biosphere.
Plus I had a hard time suspending disbelief. These characters have lived with powerful quantum computing for over a century, but they still have long conversations about issues that would have been very familiar to them, like “How do you know if a computer is really conscious?” The protagonist is 130 years old and a venerable, respected figure, but at one point KSR has her threaten to scream to get what she wants in a meeting.
I really wanted to like 2312 because the ideas are so powerful. Like in the Mars trilogy, alternative economic models play a big role in the book, and I found that KSR was already thinking like me about the possibility that modern capitalism may preclude a Singularity, because entrenched interests would be unwilling to undergo the adaptation to a post-scarcity economy. However, the storytelling is just so godawful, even for a fan of this author, and I really wish I could find some non-fiction treatment of these issues. If you haven’t read KSR yet, definitely start with the Mars trilogy.
merrieberrie's review against another edition
3.0
It took me awhile to get into this book... I wasn't really hooked until about 20% through (reading on kindle) and even then I could have done without the lists between every chapter. I would have liked the book a lot more if it was about ~200 pages less. The author seemed to spend WAY too much time on things I didn't really care about and WAY too little time on things that seemed vastly more important such as the aftermath of Swan's kidnapping, or how/when/what/why the qube people existed... who/what really made them?
rickwren's review against another edition
5.0
I am so glad Kim Stanley Robinson got over his infatuation with cause novels and got back to writing about science, the solar system, and people that matter to each other. Whew! I'd almost given up on him.
This harkens back to the the Mars Trilogy.
Let me start on Mercury. It's so cool that there's a city on a Mercury that circles the planet on giant railroad tracks to keep it on the night side. I mean that's a great idea. And the asteroids - let me tell you that hollowing out asteroids in order to make crafted biomes created by artists in which communities live and thrive. Why else would you read science fiction if not for the fantastic ideas. People are different as well. They have longevity treatments and they have AI-like implanted networks of quantum computers.
It's a mystery adventure story as well, with side stories and wild twists. It's great. Read it.
This harkens back to the the Mars Trilogy.
Let me start on Mercury. It's so cool that there's a city on a Mercury that circles the planet on giant railroad tracks to keep it on the night side. I mean that's a great idea. And the asteroids - let me tell you that hollowing out asteroids in order to make crafted biomes created by artists in which communities live and thrive. Why else would you read science fiction if not for the fantastic ideas. People are different as well. They have longevity treatments and they have AI-like implanted networks of quantum computers.
It's a mystery adventure story as well, with side stories and wild twists. It's great. Read it.
lmack097's review against another edition
Very slow, narration didn’t make sense to me
primmiiee's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
zmorris1923's review against another edition
3.0
I want to start out by saying that Kim Stanley Robinson is a genius. The scientific research done even just to write this book and every other I've read by him is immense and fascinating. It's honestly the best part of this book. The science he talks about in this and the Mars trilogy is fascinating and kept me reading. Generally, if you enjoy hard science fiction, you'll enjoy everything by KSR.
I did enjoy this one, but I must say it was nowhere near as great as the Mars Trilogy. But I think that's okay.
Here we saw glimpses into a world beyond Mars, where humanity has colonized Mercury, Venus, Saturn's and Jupiter's Moons, and the Asteroid Belt. There's a vastness to the human empire here that seemed real and made sense. Similar to his other work, in the context of things, the timing of scientific discovery generally is fast, but not so fast that it's unbelievable. One critique here, is that while the Mars trilogy is thoughtful and caring about colonization and using these spaces for humanity, when there are problems still on Earth that need to be solved, here we only see full support for continued colonization of the solar system and terraforming efforts. There's no ethical side-story like those of his previous work. Humanity is using climate and worlds for their own purposes, which seems antithetical to what KSR stands for. Even if space exploration is a hope for humanity, it didn't seem like there was much talk about the ethics of it. (And I recognize the plot of this book is to make Earth better again with climate action and movements for revolution, but it comes from "spacers" and the actions seem out-of-touch with the people of the world. There is only one character I can remember who is from Earth, and she has such a small part to play in the book that it's almost unnecessary.)
But while the book moves away from some of this ethics from his original trilogy, the influence from his Mars trilogy is still there and obvious--with references to Peter (Clayborne?) and the longevity treatments, this read like a sequel. A lesser sequel, incomparable to the first (tone, style, everything has changed). But a sequel nonetheless. I wonder if he missed his original series.
Beyond the critiques on ethics, I also found that the main characters are not loveable whatsoever, and Swan, the person who we follow for most of the book, is insufferable. She's mean to her robot companion, she beats up a random person/ai that she suspects is lying to her (in a playful, and not meaningful way), and generally just dislikes people. The other characters are seemingly blind to this, or are willfully ignorant. Wahram, who I liked at times, says he needs to get away from her at one point, else he would learn to dislike her. And then he goes about and falls in love??? The characters were so weak here and their influence on the whole solar system was unbelievable and unrealistic. They could make a decision and the next day governments are kneeling and their own cohort all agrees and goes about doing things. There was so much that happened in this book that of course it couldn't all happen within a year. So why did KSR try to make it happen in one?
I also found that the use of gender in this book was unnecessary and took away from my read. I love a book that highlights queer and gender-variant lifestyles, but the way KSR went about it here could have been better. There was no recognition of the history of intersex and trans people, nor queer people. Everything seemed to be so spontaneous, that people were all the same before 2100 or whatever, and suddenly with emerging technology, we saw people evolving to suddenly become this way, as if it's not a natural state. He created new rules for lives that already exist now and have our own ideas and theories on gender and sexuality that go far beyond what he may have thought of himself as what I presume to be a cis-het man. It felt as though he were erasing history and rewriting it. I understood he may have been trying to be vocal in support of queerness and what not, but truly... ugh. I mean, the scene that we realize as readers that Swan is intersex is through seeing her genitals. In real life, intersex people's privacy has historically always been stolen, having their genitals shown and reviewed by people to discuss how they should be treated by the law, etc. And KSR uses a moment of sickness and vulnerability to show the reader this character's genitalia, to give the reader a sense of who she is, when truly we don't need anything of the like. "Before We Were Trans" by Kit Heyam does better at going through the history of intersex and trans people, so you should read that, and perhaps one day there will be a great science-fiction book that shows queer and transness as inherently natural and good.
I did enjoy this one, but I must say it was nowhere near as great as the Mars Trilogy. But I think that's okay.
Here we saw glimpses into a world beyond Mars, where humanity has colonized Mercury, Venus, Saturn's and Jupiter's Moons, and the Asteroid Belt. There's a vastness to the human empire here that seemed real and made sense. Similar to his other work, in the context of things, the timing of scientific discovery generally is fast, but not so fast that it's unbelievable. One critique here, is that while the Mars trilogy is thoughtful and caring about colonization and using these spaces for humanity, when there are problems still on Earth that need to be solved, here we only see full support for continued colonization of the solar system and terraforming efforts. There's no ethical side-story like those of his previous work. Humanity is using climate and worlds for their own purposes, which seems antithetical to what KSR stands for. Even if space exploration is a hope for humanity, it didn't seem like there was much talk about the ethics of it. (And I recognize the plot of this book is to make Earth better again with climate action and movements for revolution, but it comes from "spacers" and the actions seem out-of-touch with the people of the world. There is only one character I can remember who is from Earth, and she has such a small part to play in the book that it's almost unnecessary.)
But while the book moves away from some of this ethics from his original trilogy, the influence from his Mars trilogy is still there and obvious--with references to Peter (Clayborne?) and the longevity treatments, this read like a sequel. A lesser sequel, incomparable to the first (tone, style, everything has changed). But a sequel nonetheless. I wonder if he missed his original series.
Beyond the critiques on ethics, I also found that the main characters are not loveable whatsoever, and Swan, the person who we follow for most of the book, is insufferable. She's mean to her robot companion, she beats up a random person/ai that she suspects is lying to her (in a playful, and not meaningful way), and generally just dislikes people. The other characters are seemingly blind to this, or are willfully ignorant. Wahram, who I liked at times, says he needs to get away from her at one point, else he would learn to dislike her. And then he goes about and falls in love??? The characters were so weak here and their influence on the whole solar system was unbelievable and unrealistic. They could make a decision and the next day governments are kneeling and their own cohort all agrees and goes about doing things. There was so much that happened in this book that of course it couldn't all happen within a year. So why did KSR try to make it happen in one?
I also found that the use of gender in this book was unnecessary and took away from my read. I love a book that highlights queer and gender-variant lifestyles, but the way KSR went about it here could have been better. There was no recognition of the history of intersex and trans people, nor queer people. Everything seemed to be so spontaneous, that people were all the same before 2100 or whatever, and suddenly with emerging technology, we saw people evolving to suddenly become this way, as if it's not a natural state. He created new rules for lives that already exist now and have our own ideas and theories on gender and sexuality that go far beyond what he may have thought of himself as what I presume to be a cis-het man. It felt as though he were erasing history and rewriting it. I understood he may have been trying to be vocal in support of queerness and what not, but truly... ugh. I mean, the scene that we realize as readers that Swan is intersex is through seeing her genitals. In real life, intersex people's privacy has historically always been stolen, having their genitals shown and reviewed by people to discuss how they should be treated by the law, etc. And KSR uses a moment of sickness and vulnerability to show the reader this character's genitalia, to give the reader a sense of who she is, when truly we don't need anything of the like. "Before We Were Trans" by Kit Heyam does better at going through the history of intersex and trans people, so you should read that, and perhaps one day there will be a great science-fiction book that shows queer and transness as inherently natural and good.