2312

Watch this video, and you'll get a sense of what I like about this novel. (Or just watch it anyway, because it's a good way to spend 3 minutes of your life if you're even remotely interested in space travel.)

That video is where this novel lives: 300 years from now, mankind has.spread throughout the solar system, terraforming Mars, living in domes on other planets and moons, shuttling back-and-forth between them in hollowed-out asteroids converted to tiny little custom-made worlds. We haven't quite escaped the increasingly decrepit Earth, which continues to struggle with political divide and a collapsing environment that's flooded just about every major city, but now we have something that starts to look like options.

Exactly how realistic this is isn't the point; Robinson makes it seem plausible, and it gives him a playground where he can speculate at length exactly what it's like to live on Mercury, or on Titan, or be one of the millions of workers trying to terraform Venus; but also, and this is the really nifty part, what it does to society. Because not only has mankind mastered interplanetary travel here, but they've almost conquered aging - there are people who, while considered old, are still active members of society at 200, and our heroine is 130. A far more interesting question than "How long can we live in zero G" is "How bored would we get by age 150?" Just look at all the 40-going-on-21-year-olds around you and extrapolate that. Robinson shows humanity balkanazing - occupation-wise, appearance-wise, gender-wise, sexuality-wise, ethnicity-wise, even size-wise; "speciating before our eyes". And yet they're still all very human, with the same issues and existential (and class) struggles as today. That's a brilliant, endlessly detailed setting for a novel, and Robinson is just enough of a poet to want to show it from a lot of different angles, mixing the narrative up with excerpts from works written within this world, free-form ruminations on it, etc.

And then there's the plot. Which, unfortunately, is a mess; imagine a James Ellroy novel (you know, it's all about water rights!) IN SPACE, except without all the clever conflicts of interest and convoluted plots and character studies. Or sex. Or violence. Or rather, it's there, but so perfunctory you'll be excused for missing it. Above all, the whole thing suffers from a ridiculous case of everything being centered around our main three or four characters, whether they want it to or not. And it's hard enough to imagine a jaded cop accidentally overhearing the mayor of LA plotting something, but when we're talking about a whole solar system of scores of billions of people spread out from Mercury (or technically, from the Vulcanoids - how neat is that?) to Pluto, and everything is still done by THREE FLIPPIN' PEOPLE, let's just say you'll be excused for thinking it'll all turn out to be a dream. (Though that would explain the 100 pages in the middle where even Robinson seems to get bored with the plot and just has the characters go off on a completely different adventure for a while.)

2312 never ceases to fascinate me, but it's all in the details. It comes across much like one of those little asteroid-worlds that our heroine spent her youth designing and now regards with mild contempt; you want to explore it on foot (or by rocketship, I guess), endlessly, while avoiding the people in it.