Well, this guy has written a lot of books I have never read. I doubted I’d get through this one, because it’s a doorstop at 657 pages. But I fell for his protagonist, Swan, the feral bitch with a micropenis to go with her standard vagina, more fond of running with wolves than hanging with people, apt to violate terrarium rules by killing and eating some of the tastier fauna. “Eccentric bitch” would well describe Swan as Robinson first reveals her to us. I came to really enjoy her eccentric viewpoint, and found her character well-developed and deeply engaging.
The Premise: Real Estate in the Year 2312
The premise of *2312* is simple. Cue up a video recording of humanity starting with today, fast forward for three hundred years, set a widescreen view for the entire solar system, and explore what humanity has been doing like a horde of curious monkeys with AI in their back pocket.
Terraforming asteroids is a well-established practice, that begins with AI-powered diggers hollowing out a potato-shaped rock, continues with a rotary kick from rockets attached to the exterior, thus creating pseudo-gravity against the interior walls of the asteroid, so you can hang dirt and water all over the inside, set up a lighting schedule, and in a score of years or so, you can move in.
It gives the lie to the old adage about real estate – “They’re not making any more of it.” According to Kim Stanley Robinson, in 300 years, making new real estate is a well-established human ability.
Mercury and the Sun-Worshippers
Swan’s home is on Mercury – a habitat that suits her desire to live permanently on the edge. Along with everyone else on Mercury, she falls into hypnotic trances while watching the sun engulf the tiny horizon of the planet closest to Sol, the god of the Solar System, breaking back into self-awareness at the last moment to sprint toward the mobile city called Terminator that orbits Mercury on twin rails that power the entire city forward due to the heat expansion that accompanies the relentless dawn.
The sun-worshippers have their curious professions. Jewelers create molds in the rocks of Mercury, pile precious metal into it, and let the sunrise melt it into a brilliant puddle that they collect a day later. Others, like the Dead Heads of twentieth-century lore, spend their lives pursuing another glimpse of the enormous radiant disc that threatens at every moment to consume them, running from the deadly rays far enough to pause again and glimpse the glory.
Hard Science & Interspersed Format
Robinson leans into the hard science with a light touch, alternating standard chapters narrating the lives of the characters with eighteen “Extracts” and fifteen “Lists” that impart scientific and factual information that sets the scene for interplanetary drama by giving human societies new real estate thanks to ingenious terraforming tricks of various types.
- The first Extract relates the process of creating a terrarium from an asteroid, that begins by taking “an asteroid at least thirty kilometers on its long axis,” takes you through all the stages of hollowing out the rock, setting it to spinning, seeding it with life, and tending the biological process to create an environment according to your liking. The Extract concludes with “there are still many unclaimed asteroids out there.”
- The first List in the book recites the chaos of names given to Mercury’s numerous craters and geological features by drunken astronomers hurling darts at a map of the planet, while calling out the names of great persons and mythic figures, and tossing off flippant comments. Wherefore Ovid’s crater is much larger than Pushkin’s, and an escarpment is named Porquois Pas – “why not?” Robinson’s scientists are not averse to a little.
Fans of *The Expanse* will find Robinson’s work echoes, or perhaps provided inspiring source material for the Amazon production.
First, the detailed attention to how people stay alive in the void of space, and the way human relationships are affected by the scarcity of air, and the availability of the void of space as a means of simultaneous murder and body-disposal. In *The Expanse*, people get spaced left and right, in huge blowouts like the mass murder at Anderson Station, and in abrupt, brutal ceremonies that separate the quick from the dead with an airlock.
In *The Expanse*, Marco Inaros lines up huge rocks – in a row – right in the earth’s orbital track where they collide with earth, causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, and plunging the world into instant winter. And in Robinson’s solar system, the bad guys throw rocks, blowing out an asteroid by cracking a seam of ice unnoticed by the terrarium makers, and destroying the mobile city of Terminator on Mercury. This second catastrophe strands our protagonist, Swan, without surface shelter on Mercury, so she and her new acquaintance, Wahram, take a very long way all the way around Mercury, through its underground tunnels.
Plot Progression & The Return to Earth
The plot spins along like this – when the story starts Swan is mourning the death of her partner Alex, an important political actor in the Mondragon Accord, a network of space-dwellers from various terraformed habitats who operate on a collaborative basis. Immediately upon Alex’s death, her former associates, like Wahram, start contacting her to ask if Alex left any messages for them.
- But when Swan asks what it’s all about, she gets stiffed by Alex’s friends because – wild gal that she’s been – she has a “qube” implanted in her brain – a quantum computing powered AI named Pauline, with whom she often argues aloud in tones we’d only use with a despised roommate we couldn’t escape or kill.
- That’s because rogue AIs engineered to simulate humans -- simulacra – are believed to be fomenting mischief in the solar system, and AI was unquestionably used to throw the rocks that destroyed the terrarium and Terminator city. So they don’t trust her and of course that pisses her off.
Within this frame, our characters bounce about the solar system, to the various moons of Saturn, terraformed hives on Mars, and high-G Earth, where they can enjoy breathing an atmosphere miles deep with the infinite sky above. A pleasure available nowhere else in the solar system.
Ah, the exquisite joy of simply being outdoors! Many spacers love earth, and Swan and her spacer associates still have enough sympathy for the home planet and its populace, and enough technology and energy to try and terraform the earth out of the ecological sink into which it sank due to centuries of industrial exploitation. As part of the plan, the spacers bomb earth with reconstituted species of extinct animals, with a good mix of prey and predators to get that ecological balance wheel spinning again. Yes, some humans do fall prey to wild predators on occasion, but you can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs, and if some humans have to die to get the Earth’s ecosystem for the remainder, well then that’ll happen.
Conclusion
By the end of the book, Swan’s gained the trust of Alex’s former associates, Pauline has proved her value and loyalty to humans, the architects of the terrarium blowout and the destruction of Terminator city have been captured and banished, along with the simulacra AIs that really did exist, and had infiltrated Mars government. Genette turns out to be not only a good detective, but also able to deploy a highly trained group of paramilitary “smalls” like himself, to conduct a lightning raid on the enemy facility that would do Seal Team Six proud.
The book ends with a cinematic close, a mass wedding on Olympus Mons, the highest mountain on Mars, that has been terraformed into a vast network of terraces where hundreds of couples are each assigned their own terrace, and simultaneously take their vows of matrimony in hundreds of individual ceremonies, all happening under a very, very large tent that almost simulates a sky.
From beginning to end, this book was a pleasant surprise. It's easily among the most engaging world-builder books out there, and Robinson's vision of human societies ever-progressing technologically at a much higher rate than our social evolution will accommodate, certainly squares with what I see all around me today. As a result, the future, much like the present, will be shaped by human conflicts, times of economic growth and trade, times of war and chaos, political resolutions, and sometimes, for some people -- golden ages of peace that affords enjoyment of life. I think Robinson would agree with the French adage, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
> Footnote:
*The Expanse* wasn’t funded beyond Season 6, and therefore left us a few stops short of our destination in Laconia, the protomolecule-designed military dictatorship set up by the mad military man on one of the innumerable planets accessible to humans by using the Ring.