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A review by zmorris1923
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
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.