Ratings49
Average rating3.4
I enjoyed many of the concepts but it feels like it could have been shorter.
This was an extremely well done book. I admit KSR usually writes books that are a bit to slow, methodical, dense or obtuse for me. It took me a year to slog through Red Mars. So I am weary of most of his books but this one sounded too interesting to pass up and I was not disappointed.
Man did I try to enjoy this. The world building was exquisite but what's a world without a story or worthwhile characters?
KSR can write, but I just don't agree with with this concept of weighing detail over characters or plot.
Overall interesting story, but it wraps way too quickly while some chapters drag on way too long. The inclusion of lists every few chapters gets very tired.
This is my first time reading Robinson, and I was instantly floored by this man's skills as a writer. I have told my peers that if he didn't write genre fiction, he'd probably have a prestigious literary award to his name. His descriptions of the settings this story travel to alone are worth the read. At points, it felt like I was taking a guided tour of the solar system: riding the rings of Saturn, jogging along Mercury to stay ahead of the coming dawn, and my favourite part, public transit by way of hollowed out asteroids with man-made climates built inside. Just imagine the next time you travel being asked “on your way, would you like to experience the environment of an ice age expidition, safari, rain forest or rural France?”
The characters, philosophies and basically everything about this book is brilliant. In short, (cliche warning) it's a tour de force.
This book is about 15% plot, and the rest is concept, setting, and character, and that's the way I like it. But I hold back on 5 stars only because the lack of plot combined with the size of the book, and the long bouts of descriptive writing meant I had a hard time keeping momentum. When a side character's story came back to the fold, I would realize I'd forgotten what that character's part of the story was, and would get kind of lost. Maybe this is a 2020 problem as much as any (I was reading this when the second wave of COVID hit and the American election happened, and my attention was obviously strained) so maybe this is an unfair criticism. But such was my reading experience.
I recommend highly to any reader not afraid of a little detail, but not really for people who need a “page turner”.
Best known for his work with the Mars trilogy, and The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson is a visionary author whose works have challenged readers' views about nearly every aspect of society, from government, to business, to global warming and religion itself. His latest novel, 2312 takes place three hundred years in the future, and provides a glimpse at a very believable humanity that's spread to the other planets.
Synopsis for 2312:
The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity's only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.
The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them.
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I wanted to love this book, as Robinson is a genius, and at times I found it brilliant. The characters are interesting and unfold in a truly intriguing manner. The historical sweep of the universe is really shown off in this book too and a love the bits of future science explaining terraforming and the like. I could have done without the lists personally although I see their poetic function. They just weren't my thing personally. But overall the story just never grabbed me. I wanted it to and I want to say it did because intellectually I admire this story greatly. But for some unfathomably reason likely due to a defect in my own situation or makeup I never found myself wanting to keep reading. I didn't dread it, mind you, I just didn't get that pull of excitement I get from other books. That said if you want good scifi with compelling characters this is an excellent place to find them.
I'm doing a vlog post on this book later, but to put a long story short, I feel that the travelogue part of the narrative and the conspiracy part of the narrative just didn't mesh, and ultimately made reading the book an unpleasant slog. Thus, I'm lemming this book.
In traditional KSR style, this book is full of grand sci-fi visions, experienced through the senses of a variety of characters with starkly contrasting personalities and modes of thinking. The world building is gorgeous and, just as Red Mars did, left me feeling like I had traveled to these remarkable places.
Neither really good nor really bad. It had its moments and it had its passages of utter dullness. The story itself is really good and the idea behind too, but the execution is sadly lacking.
I honestly do not know if I would recommend this unless you are a hardcore KS Robinson fan or a hardcore sci-fi fan. There are better books, you can skip this one.