2012 Nebula Winner: 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Alright, I want to try to catch up a little bit this year, including posting my review of this book that I read...um....two years ago. Don't expect regular posts or anything, but I do want to keep my streaks in the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus SF novel awards going.

So, 2312 is pretty typical work from Kim Stanley Robinson, who is a favorite of mine. There's very strong world-building, as we once again get the Accelerando and its colonized solar system with lots of inventive terraforming (see Galileo's Dream and Blue Mars for other examples). There are some interesting ideas about social and political developments, clearly based on Robinson's clear understanding of history and social science. And your mileage with plot and character and prose may vary.

I found this novel especially uneven on the latter three counts. Robinson is a hard sf writer who really seems to put some energy into his style, and here he tries a little experimentation. It's appreciated but not entirely successful, and it stands out awkwardly next to some rather lengthy passages of technical writing focusing on the aforementioned world-building. Similarly, the characters can feel a little flat. Robinson's usual trick is to give his characters universal traits like love and ambition while also placing them in very specific historical and cultural contexts, and I think he's generally better at the latter than most of his peers. Here, the characters have immense longevity and the ability to change aspects of their appearance and identity fairly freely. At times, this is all realized wonderfully, and the best portion of the novel involves a gender fluid romantic arc with the main character Swan. Often, however, the characters just feel distant and cold - there's a lot of telling but not much showing, for instance, about how much Swan was inspired by a deceased character named Alex, whose death drives much of the plot.

Speaking of the plot, this is where the novel fails to realize its potential. It's basically a mystery, as Swan wanders the solar system investigating a series of dramatic terrorist attacks, but the investigations mostly feel engineered to show off the various exotic settlements, including a massive train city that circles Mercury between its light and dark sides - a device Robinson has used before, but he really goes into depth here. The setting is driving the story, not the characters.

2312 was more ambitious and literary than most of its competitors in 2012 (what I would have called a very off year, looking at the nominees), and I liked it quite a bit, but its flaws are evident enough that I'm not particularly bothered that it got beat by the fairly silly Redshirts for the Hugo and Locus.

Grade: B+

2003 Locus – THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT by Kim Stanley Robinson

Why Europe? By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the area was a backwater compared to China and the Islamic world. The Europeans discovered America, and, by the eighteenth century, they were on the path to world domination. Why this happened is the fundamental question in world history, and one that I think should interest science fiction authors as they often deal with issues of discovery, expansion, and technological and scientific advancement. In this epic novel, Kim Stanley Robinson digs into the science fiction writer’s toolbox to examine this and other questions of world history.

Robinson uses alternate history to get at these big questions, and he does so in a way that I think no other science fiction writer has. Philip K. Dick and writers of historical fantasy or steampunk usually focus on aesthetics, capturing the mood of a era or shocking the reader with a sense of dislocation from a world like and unlike our own. How many times have we seen the old “Nazi flag flapping in a modern city” trick? Harry Turtledove is a bit more focused on the historical questions, but he still spends more time wargaming alternate Americas than historical inquiry. Robinson, however, wants to know what made the modern world, and he does it by subtracting Europe.

This is an ambitious work of massive scope. Robinson starts with the Black Death, which killed as much as half the population of Europe in our own world. Robinson has it explode in virulence and wipe out more than 99% of the population. Then, he follows the rest of the world for the next seven hundred years to see what happens. Who discovers America? The Chinese, but they arrive among the hunter-gatherer societies of California rather than near the wealthy societies of Mesoamerica, and they don’t have as many competitors as the Spanish, so Indians have more time to maneuver. The Iroqouis (Hodenosaunee) form a pan-American movement of resistance. The Enlightenment is centered in Samarkand; the industrial revolution in India (giving us a bit of well thought out steampunk, for once). Rather than a post-Inquisition Jewish diaspora spreading capital and knowledge, there is a Japanese diaspora prompted by a Chinese invasion. The Great War is a six-decade affair that pits industrialized China against industrialized Islam, killing a billion people. San Francisco is a Chinese city called Fangzhang centered north of the “Gold Gate.” In other words, many things follow the same path – the processes of exploration, scientific discovery, technological transformation, and international conflict make certain developments inevitable, but the shape of these changes is different enough to make things interesting. Similarly, the same natural disasters occur (Japan’s Ansei earthquakes and the great California flood, both in our 1850s-1860s, get special attention), but the contexts change.

As a history geek, I’d be happy to read a dry fictional history in this mode for 600+ pages, but Robinson also manages to give us a consistent set of characters through an ingenious device. We begin with Mongol Bold Bardash and African Kyu, who are both enslaved and shipped to China. When they die, they come to the Bardo from the Tibetan book of the dead, and then they are reincarnated into the next age as Bihari and Kokila in India. They, and a small group of other characters, form a jati; they are destined to meet in each life and influence each other, and Robinson helps us keep track by using the same letters in their names. K is brash and rebellious while B is humble and steadfast.

I can’t say that The Years of Rice and Salt always works as a character-centered novel; sometimes time passes too quickly, and it is hard to get attached to storylines when we change scenery every sixty pages or so (on average). I’d almost rather have 10 short novels set in this world than this set of vignettes. But, I did think it worked extremely well, and the last two chapters slow things down a bit and offer a nice capstone to the whole novel, as K and B become scholars who can look back on everything that’s happened before.
It’s probably not for everyone, but I adore this novel; it’s one of my favorites from the past decade. I love that a book can create interesting, centuries-spanning characters, build a really fascinating counterfactual world, and be so unabashedly intellectual. This isn’t just a historical novel, this is a novel about history, and I think science fiction is at its best when it works as social science, and tries to dig into the workings of the world.

Hominids, pshaw.

Grade: A

1997 Hugo and Locus – BLUE MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson

Blue Mars wraps up Robinson’s monumental Mars trilogy, which tries to bring scientific and sociological realism to the colonization and terraforming of Mars. By this volume, we’ve entered the twenty-second century. Multiple revolutions have rocked Mars, and the surviving members of the original colonists, plus the succeeding generations of Martians, focus on forging new economic and political systems for the rapidly growing population and the changing climate of the red planet.

Again, Robinson spends a lot of time on these economic and political questions. Usually, he demonstrates an awareness of socio-economic complexities, but there are a few more straw man moments here and some rather embarrassing moments where characters inspire unanimous awe by espousing Robinson’s utopian views. Yes, his Martian society works a little too perfectly, and there are echoes of Pacific Edge throughout the trilogy. I do like that Robinson will go out on a limb with these issues though – constructing an entire Martian Constitution or imagining the future theoretical frameworks that guide various academic disciplines. For instance, he creates a whole new meta-theory of history here – it’s mostly just a modification of Marxist historiography, and it doesn’t really work for me, but I admire the guts and imagination it took for Robinson to posit it. He does the same thing with physics and neurology as well.

Alongside the academic theorizing, Robinson continues to offer detailed descriptions of Martian landscapes and a focus on character development, usually in tandem. The changes in Mars are dramatic and beautifully evoked by Robinson, as in wonderful passages where characters explore their memories while looking out on an icy Martian sea. I especially like the ways that Robinson draws on the work of Aldo Leopold to examine the aesthetics of “wild” nature and the human place therein.

And the characters have mellowed, a lot. Red Mars is probably a more dramatic and exciting entry in the series, but, boy, are the main characters horrible people. By the end of Blue Mars, I’d come to sympathize with all of the survivors, even the manipulative and melodramatic Maya. At the novel’s beginning, the “red” Ann Clayborne threatens most of Martian society with an obnoxious stubbornness, but the later sections following her were some of my favorite in the entire series. In one chapter, she spends time with new Martian fauna and the geneticist that designs them. In another, she takes a trip to Uranus with a fourth-generation Martian girl. She’s the one who least wants Mars to change, and Robinson’s rendering of her coming to terms with the terraforming can be quite moving.

From skimming a few online reviews, it seems that the consensus is that this is the worst of the trilogy, but I think it was actually my favorite of the three excellent books, mainly due to the characters’ mellowing. Plot-wise, it is perhaps an anti-climax. The most dramatic events take place in the early chapters, and the novel winds down with the musings of the aging First Hundred colonists as they accept their losses, contemplate senescence and death, and relate to the vastly different generations of the Martian-born. Honestly, if you’re a fan of tight plotting and the three act structure, avoid Kim Stanley Robinson like the plague. I love his prose, and I don’t mind the long descriptive passages and the time he spends on various ruminations. Even I’ll admit that this volume could have used a little trimming though.

I’m interested to see how much I see the influence of this widely-read trilogy in coming novels. I know one idea in the particular volume has been picked up by other writers. Robinson describes a period of the rapid settlement of the solar system, and he dubs it the “Accelerando,” which was later picked up by Charles Stross. I also hadn’t realized that the future of Galileo’s Dream may well have been in the same universe as the Mars trilogy (there are a few strong hints, including a fictional mathematician that appears in both). The Mars trilogy may not be for everyone, but I do think every sf fan should give Red Mars a shot. Robinson’s detailed world-building and rich prose are hard to match.

Grade: A

1994 Hugo and Locus - GREEN MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson

Robinson’s sequel to his highly successful novel of Martian colonization is really more of the same. As far as recommendations go: don’t read this without reading Red Mars; if you liked Red Mars, you’ll probably like this; if you didn’t like Red Mars, you’ll probably hate this.

Robinson continues to explore the near future colonization and terraforming of our neighboring planet. The same debates continue: how thoroughly should Mars be terraformed? Does the pre-human, inorganic geology deserve preservation? Should Mars fight for its political independence for Earth? If so, what means should revolutionaries use? What kind of new society should Martians design alongside such a political independence? Robinson usually manages to present the nuances of various sides of these debates in the context of a convincing vision of Earth’s possible near-future history, and there are lots of scientific details/poetic descriptions of the Martian environment in the background.

Not that Robinson’s portrayal of the social situation is always 100% convincing. The consensus of the Martians on the issues of political independence and rejection of capitalism seem to come a bit too easily, for instance. You could argue that Robinson’s vision of capitalism as feudal and universally coercive is a straw man, and few historic revolutions have as broad a base of support as Robinson’s Martian Revolution. And, it takes hundreds of pages for Robinson to admit the obvious limitations of one of his favorite alternatives to capitalism on Mars – the gift economy (based on Native American economic practices). We also get a very convenient “good” corporation with an eccentric CEO called Praxis that doesn’t fit well in Robinson’s simplistic depiction of capitalism but becomes rather necessary to the plot. Still, Robinson’s knowledge of social theory surpasses all of the works I’ve read so far on this blog.

The real center of this novel, as in Red Mars, is the characters. In all three books, each chapter focuses on a single character’s point of view. Due to longevity treatments, many of the original colonists still survive, even though the climax of this novel takes place about a century after their initial landing. They’re still petty, argumentative, and, well, often annoying. Whether you see this as an honest portrayal of emotional complexity or obnoxious hyperbole will go a long way toward deciding whether you like these books or not. I tended to like the characters and see their vices as enriching details, but I can’t really begrudge critics who see things the other way. There are a couple of female characters in particular (especially a third generation Martian-born woman named Jackie) who are extremely unlikable and use sexuality as a weapon to manipulate and control men. At times, Robinson’s obsession with female sexuality gets tiresome, though I should note that we get many smart, talented, and powerful female characters in these books. At the least, Robinson does seem to have an unhealthy obsession with infidelity. Nonetheless, I have complained since the first review on this blog that character is often the element most ignored in sf – love them or hate them, I don’t think you can argue that Robinson doesn’t spend time trying to develop the central characters in this trilogy.

I wouldn’t say this is better than Red Mars, and it’s interesting that Nebula and Hugo flip-flopped on this one. Moving Mars is the next novel on the agenda (in one week), so we’ll see if the SFWA made the right choice…

Grade: A-

1993 Nebula and 1992 BSFA – RED MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson

Many fans and critics hailed Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian trilogy as a modern sf masterpiece in the 1990s. You don’t hear as much about the books these days, it seems, but this novel, at least, does an excellent job at straddling the worlds of hard science and humanities, as I think the best science fiction always should. It was beat in the Hugos by two very good novels - I think 1993 might have been the strongest class of Hugo nominees ever – but it certainly left a mark on the sf of the era.

The novel follows a joint US-Russian effort to colonize Mars in the year 2026. Two decades later, this looks like a bad bit of futurism from the get-go: we probably won’t be getting to Mars in fifteen years, let alone colonizing it, and the Russians would be a lot less likely to be equal participants with the US than, say, the Chinese or the EU. It is important to remember that Robinson was writing in the wake of the Cold War. Beyond those issues, the novel is extremely well-researched and thought out. One of the novel’s greatest strengths is in Robinson’s mastery of details, as he concocts systems and scenarios for crew selection, psychological evaluation, the journey itself, early settlement-building, and terraforming. Robinson has a solid grasp on several fields of science and on human history, and he uses them all to create a convincing world here.

It is this thorough knowledge of history’s workings that has always most impressed me about Robinson. He’s able to weave in interesting multicultural details (we get some brilliant scenarios like whirling dervishes caravanning through Martian deserts), while also depicting the broader sweep of history. Robinson convincingly portrays Mars as a frontier with demonstrable economic and psychological consequences in the context of a Malthusian Earth.

In this volume, Robinson presents the original group of colonists, one-hundred in total, with special focus on a select few – American hero John Boone, and the less-heroic American leader Frank Chalmers; the emotional Russian leader Maya Toitovna, and her more-stable counterpart Nadia Chernyshevski; the mysterious biologist Hiroki Ai; and much of the novel’s politics center around the pro-terraforming “green” Sax Russell, and the “red” Ann Clayborne who wants to preserve the pre-human Martian environment. Through them, Robinson presents a very fascinating question in a balanced and challenging way. I’m still not sure what side I fall on. Robinson also gets to question contemporary politics and economics through the radical Arkady Bogdanov, who pushes for the Martian colonists to found a new type of society, outside the limitations of the capitalist/communist spectrum.

Thousands of immigrants, representing a broad array of Earth cultures, follow the First Hundred. Political tensions and radical ideas lead to a rather spectacular revolution that turns the work into a more sophisticated version of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Much of the drama comes from the characters’ debates about Mars’ destiny, but also from their petty personal clashes, especially a rivalry between Boone and Chalmers that recalls the central love triangle/political debate in Pacific Edge. As in that novel, I can understand how these characters might annoy some readers, but it also feels very real to me, especially among the competitive egos of academia (where I have spent some time). Yes, really smart people are often socially awkward and competitive to the point of pettiness. The violent clashes that eventually result from these rivalries may push the drama too far, but, again, they are certainly not beyond the realm of plausibility.

Robinson does much to recognize science fiction history as well, naming cities and installations after Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Charles Sheffield, and Arthur C. Clarke, among others. If politics and literary allusion bore you, there’s a lot of cutting edge science concerning space travel and colonization, Martian geology, biology, and terraforming. There are Martian blimps and space elevators.

The writing is first rate as well – Robinson is one of those rare authors who can totally engross a reader (or, at least, this reader) with his depictions of landscapes, characters and technologies. I think Robinson is very much the heir to Clarke, though he tends to focus more on character development. That said, Robinson writes a lot of poetry and (sometimes awkwardly) inserts it into his novels - It’s not his strongest suit. He avoids doing this explicitly here, though there are some lyrical prose passages that don’t entirely work, especially in the italicized chapter introductions.

Red Mars is one of the best science fiction novels I’ve read – it’s an epic work that delivers everything I’m looking for in a piece of sf. I read this novel in college, but I never actually got around to reading the two sequels, and I’m anxious to see if they follow the usual trend of diminishing returns in sf series.

Grade: A

1990 Campbell – PACIFIC EDGE by Kim Stanley Robinson

I'm going to have a lot of chances to talk about Robinson as we go forward, but he is one of the reasons that I'm doing this project, and I want to mention his first award-winning novel, especially since it represents that rarest of sf genres: the utopia. Pacific Edge is the third in Robinson’s Three Californias trilogy, in which he presents three possible futures for the LA basin. The Wild Shore depicts a post-apocalyptic subsistence society, The Gold Coast shows us a highway-obsessed cyberpunk world, and Pacific Edge examines an ecologically-oriented society.

In 2065, America has splintered and ecological crisis has fostered new pro-environment attitudes and an emphasis on local control and democracy – basically the precepts of social ecology which guide the Green Party, an important force in the novel. The reason that utopias are fairly rare (and good utopia novels even rarer) is that it’s difficult to set up the conflict necessary to drive a narrative. Pacific Edge, for this reason, does feel a bit relaxed. The narrative turns on a love triangle between the protagonist Kevin Claiborne, his friend Alfredo Blair, and a woman named Ramona Sanchez. Kevin spends his days reshaping the very un-ecofriendly geography of Orange County to fit the values of the new bike-riding, wind-powered utopian society. He eventually gets into a political conflict with Alfredo over real estate development… okay, the stakes aren’t too high here, but it does work as a personal story, and it does add a tinge of drama to a novel that is mostly about describing a better way of living.

I love Robinson because he really focuses on the intersections of history, ecology, and geography – topics that are close to my own heart and at the center of my work. Those concerns do add something to the Three Californias, which would otherwise threaten to be a bit generic. Pacific Edge is the most laid-back and slowest of the three, but it’s also the most original concept. Don’t expect a roller-coaster ride, but it’s a well-written, character-oriented novel that does depict a really admirable world well. Robinson also plays some games with intertextuality in the novels, as they bleed over into each other through storytelling. It’s not Robinson’s best work, but they’re worth checking out if you do like his work and are interested in these genres.

Grade: B

2010 Not-a-Hugo Nominee GALILEO'S DREAM by Kim Stanley Robinson

My third and final not-a-nominee entry. Galileo’s Dream is an ambitious work from one of sf’s most prominent (and, I’d say, best) writers, so I expected to see it on the nomination list. When it didn’t appear, I wondered if it’s late US release date (December 29th!) had hindered it in some way. For all I know, that could be the case, and it may even be eligible again next year. However, while I liked the book, now that I’ve read it, I’m not quite so miffed to see it absent from the nominee list.

Robinson’s main focus is on writing a biographical novel of Galileo Galilei, the seventeenth century scientist who made a host of discoveries that reinforced the idea that the earth revolved around the sun and paved the way for Isaac Newton a few decades later. Galileo emphasized mathematics and empiricism, and thus also influenced the modern practice of science. And, he made some of the first important observations with a telescope, discovering Jupiter’s largest moons among other celestial objects. When Galileo published his observations, he faced persecution by the Catholic Church, which had committed itself to a geocentric view of the universe that put the Earth at the center of everything (ironically, this was the result of a thirteenth century bout of rationalism in the Church that had Thomas Aquinas synchronizing Greek thinkers like Ptolemy and Aristotle with the Bible, and Aquinas was also persecuted and recanted, but that’s a whole tangent that Robinson doesn’t really get into).

So, about 3/5ths of the novel covers Galileo’s life, which is suitably operatic: he has an abusive mother, he suffers bouts of debilitating (mental?) illness, he fathers three illegitimate children with the same woman, his two daughters end up in a convent and suffer from their own illnesses, he’s caught up in court intrigues, he makes the aforementioned scientific discoveries, and he has a dramatic trial that includes forged evidence and startling testimony. There’s lots of material to work with, and though these biographical portions started out slow, I eventually came to prefer them to the science fiction portions.

So, yes, the other 2/5ths of the novel involve Galileo being plucked out of time by 31st century colonists of Jupiter’s moons. He’s pulled forward by competing factions who are involved in scientific disputes and want to alter Galileo’s destiny for their own purposes. Early on, these sections were very intriguing, and it’s fun to watch Galileo learn about Einstein (though he takes things in a little too easily). But it all gets a bit fuzzy as the story goes on, and we begin to get vague, pseudo-sciencey talk about “entanglement.” Robinson is usually known as a hard sf kind of guy, but, paradoxically, a hard sf version of time travel inevitably takes you to some sort of probabilistic, quantum mechanics-heavy view of the universe. The uncertainty principle is good science, but it’s not very satisfying from a narrative point of view: “ah, yes, you’re the Galileo who died young – or not – or both. Oh well, who cares?” This story just gets more bizarre and more pointless as it goes on, and I found some of the future discoveries about Jupiter to be just plain silly.

There are other weird decisions in the book as well. The future debates all involve the relationship between science and religion, and what it means for human history. But, it’s never explained all that well, and that entire narrative thread feels unfinished. There’s also a first-person narrator, but he generally refers to himself in the third person and drops completely out of the novel for hundreds of pages at a time. Again, I was left wondering what the point was.

There’s a lot to like here. Robinson’s writing and ideas are characteristically strong, and the Galileo material is generally compelling. But, the novel never quite comes together. It’s very unclear and uncertain, which may have been the goal…but it makes for a difficult and unrewarding read.

Grade: B-