Review:
2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson
| Publisher: |
Orbit |
| Copyright: |
2012 |
| ISBN: |
0-316-19280-5 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
563 |
Swan Er Hong is a native of Mercury, granddaughter of one of the most
influential women in the solar system. Alex, known as the Lion of
Mercury, has just died as the story opens, and Swan is mourning. But
she's also discovering that something else has been going on, something
that Alex had not confided in her. Something that involves an inspector
from the asteroids, a scientist from Titan, and a message Alex left in the
event of her death, asking Swan to convey something personally to another
scientist on Io. And then Mercury is attacked and the situation becomes
much more complicated.
2312 is, like most Robinson novels, built on top of monumental
world-building. The date is given away by the title; the setting is a
solar system full of terraforming, habitats, and explosive human
colonization. There are human settlements on every world that could
possibly sustain them, including a terraformed Mars and a vast in-progress
terraforming project on Venus. Mercury, Song's home, supports the city
known as Terminator, a shielded habitat that travels around the planet on
rails, pushed forward by the thermal expansion of metal at sunrise.
Humans have scattered across the solar system and changed everything
they've touched, even the asteroids. Many of those have been repurposed
as long-haul shuttles: self-contained habitats on carefully-designed
routes on which people live for months or years until they get to their
destinations.
Parts of this book are gorgeous. One of Robinson's strengths is creating
images of the vastness of space, science, and human endeavor that feel
plausible and inspiring at the same time. The setting of
2312
frees him to go wild with mega construction projects, and he takes full
advantage. Parts of the book inspire the same sense of awe as the Hoover
Dam or the Great Wall of China, transplanted into space and backed with
neat scientific ideas to ponder. (Even if the more skeptical will note
certain human habitation hazards, such as prolonged weightlessness and
radiation, are mostly hand-waved away.)
Unusually for a Robinson novel,
2312 also features an interesting
and vibrant protagonist. Usually I can barely remember Robinson's
protagonists five minutes after I finish the book, but Swan is so
impulsive, erratic, and emotionally intense that I doubt I'll forget her.
Her past is stuffed with outrageous risks and intense creativity: having
songbird neurons transplanted into her brain, ingesting extraterrestrial
bacteria, designing habitats in the asteroid belt, and creating art on the
plains of Mercury. As the story gets underway, she meets the oversized
and mellow Wahram; at first, she finds him boring, but then they're thrown
together by one of the best set pieces of the book, and both they and the
reader discover they work well together. Wahram serves as a straight man
and as a stand-in for the reader's opinion, showing Swan all the more
clearly in contrast.
All this sounds quite promising. Unfortunately, what makes
2312 an
ambitious failure rather than an excellent story is the story part.
Robinson has built an amazing world, but he doesn't seem to know what to
do with it. His economy, at least outside of Earth (and more on
that in a moment), is essentially post-scarcity. Few of the characters we
meet seem to have any concept of fiscal or practical limitation. They
head across the solar system on a moment's notice, take vacations in
habitats, or head to favorite spots for the view. It felt like Robinson
was trying to write a
Culture story. Unlike
Banks, however, he struggles with generating a plot.
2312 is, in structure, a murder mystery. The characters witness a
crime, survive it, and then intend to investigate it, and the crime
appears to grow and link to fault lines in their society. This could have
worked, but it has two problems: their society is only barely coherent
enough for the reader to perceive the potential fault lines, and Robinson
seems to have no idea how to construct a mystery plot. There is no sense
of coherence to Swan and Wahram's approach, no sense of a gathering of
clues, and very little sense of drama. All of the plot revelations are
either dropped in Swan's lap by another character at a convenient moment
or generated by Swan refusing to take the plot of the book seriously. The
characters do essentially no meaningful investigation on-camera and show
almost no investment in the outcome of the plot. When the climax comes,
it's all weirdly forgettable.
There are also large sections of the book that appear to have nothing to
do with the rest of the plot, and that's where the unfortunate interval on
Earth comes in. Robinson takes advantage of the scenes on Earth to do a
bit of alienation and shows how foreign and strange and stifling Earth
feels to someone who grew up outside of its atmosphere. Parts of this
work, but he puts the plot on hold to do it. And parts of it do not work
at all. The most glaring example is Swan and Wahram's bizarre bit of
attempted charity in Africa, which comes across as stunningly high-handed
and arrogant. This could be in character, particularly for Swan (who is
not long on empathy), but, if so, the book doesn't signal to the reader
that it should be read that way. Instead, there are some side (or snide)
comments that seem to indicate Robinson knows nothing about the economic
arc of Africa from the past twenty years. And when their absurd, botched,
condescending charity plan fails for all the obvious reasons, the
characters, and apparently the novel, throw up their hands and write Earth
off as a stagnant lost cause that can't accept the imposition of a good
idea and go back to the plot, never apparently caring about Earth again.
Almost as frustrating is the way that these interludes are tied back into
the story, which is usually through Swan getting ridiculously lucky on her
random encounter rolls. It felt like whenever Robinson needed to make
progress in the plot, Swan would just accidentally run into exactly the
right person or situation to bring up the next plot point or to have some
investigation make sense. (Not that Swan usually figured this out.
Normally, the inspector explains it to her.) The author's finger was
planted so firmly on the scales that it destroyed my suspension of
disbelief and made a mockery of the idea that the characters were actually
investigating anything.
2312 is built around a skeleton of a plot, but the lack of
engagement with it, the lack of tension and emotion, the way the next
developments are generally narrated to the protagonists and the reader,
and the repeated use of random encounters to steer it left me without much
reason to care. Robinson tries a few twists, but since the story never
felt committed to its plot anyway, those twists feel less like planned
complications and more like another random veer in the road. It didn't
help that the final outcome was more prosaic and forgettable than the book
had been implying it would be.
There is a lot to like here. I'm very pleased to see Robinson finally
write a memorable protagonist, and he's very good at both world-building
and set pieces. But it needed a plot, and it needed a more coherent and
complete cultural backdrop for its characters. Without both, it fell back
into the typical Robinson trap: gorgeous moments separated by a whole lot
of boring, and an overall impression of a construction tour rather than a
story. There are bits of it I loved and still remember, particularly Song
and Wahram in the tunnels of Mercury (which is possibly the best extended
characterization Robinson has ever written). But the book as a whole is a
mess, and I can't recommend wading through it for the good parts.
Rating: 5 out of 10
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I try to have some guests every now and then to my 
A gorgeous day in Chicago for the 37th annual Chicago Marathon. Today was
the seventh time I ran this race. I had sat out last fall, and ran a smaller local
race (
(With apologies to 
After upgrading my Sid virtual machine hosting my Jenkins, build after git push stopped working. This is because version 1.503 and above require an auth token for triggering the build. Since it took me some time to search the web, I ve decided to blog about it to save time to other Jenkins users.
Under each project configuration screen, in the Build Triggers section, tick the Trigger builds remotely (e.g., from scripts) option. Then enter a random token (I used a password generator for it). Then in your post-receive hook, use what s below:
