(Drivebycuriosity) - How will the future look? It seems everything is possible when you go far enough, a rich field for writers of Science Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson moves his readers to the year 2312, the title of his novel, published in 2012 ( amazon).
Humans have settled our solar system and live on Mars, Mercury, Venus, many moons and even inside of asteroids. Rising sea level changed the shore lines and Manhattan turned into "a skyscraper Venice, a super Venice - which was a very beautiful thing to be". The novel is spiced with a lot science, a real piece of hard science fiction. But I didn´t like it much.
Spoiler Alarm: Because I don´t recommend the book there are some unusual spoilers below.
2312 reads like a collection of short stories, there is no real ongoing plot. Some episodes are exciting, some are funny, but many others are tedious and don´t make much sense. Robinson has a lot of interesting & unique ideas, but they are drowning in a flood of filling material. Some parts are very poetic:"Gravity, mysterious gravity, immutably following its own laws, interacts with matter, and somehow the result is complex motion." But too many other parts read like an advanced school book and are unrelated to the rest of the book.
I enjoyed Robinson descriptions of the reconstructed (terraformed) planets, moons & asteroids. Some of them reminded me a bit of Christopher Priest`s "Inverted World" and Asimov`s "Rama" and I want to visit them. I also loved the description of the spaceship "Eidgenössische Technische Hochshule Mobile" (ETH), made by Swiss universities and engineering. "ETH Mobile was outfitted with characteristic Swiss elegance, undemonstrative and superb, evoking the ocean liners of the classic era but entering whole new realms of human comfort..." There also are interesting political & phylosophical observations: "People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always seduced to power into insanity"
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