Amazon.com: Customer reviews: 2312

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Fascinating, but long, future history, taking place in the year 2312

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2013

This is the 4th novel I've read by Kim Stanley Robinson, the first three being part of his Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars). I was a voracious science fiction reader as a kid, but gave it up when actual science fiction seemed to be replaced by dragons and fantasy. Then a rave review in the Washington Post and a free e-book offer convinced me to read Red Mars a couple of years ago, and I was hooked.

This is "hard" science fiction, that is, it is SF based on the best of actual, known science. It's not "Buck Rogers," though there is conflict, economic and political, including terrorism and some cold-war type standoffs between the settled planets, moons and asteroids of the solar system.

There is also a lot of slow, but fascinating descriptions of how these planetary bodies might be terraformed, or made habitable for humans; about the effect of global warming on our own planet (think New York turned into a 24th Century Venice, with skyscrapers rising from its flooded streets); and political and economic critiques of a capitalist economy.

There is also a hint of romance between two of the main characters, and settings that are charming. That may sound strange, but underneath their domed cities, space dwellers have created attractive parks, plazas and terraced, tile-roofed towns. There are a number of expository excerpts that break up the actual storyline. Some are greater scientific details and others are excerpts by historians in a future some decades or more after the events of 2312, analyzing that year. These can be both fascinating and annoying.

I'm not the fastest of readers, and reading on a Kindle, I kept pausing to consult my pop-up dictionary for unfamiliar words. So it took me a month to finish reading 2312. But having read the author's earlier novels, I expected a long, thoughtful and ultimately satisfying read, and I got what I expected.

15 people found this helpful

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Melanie D. Typaldos

It's technology, stupid! Who needs characters?

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2017

I am reading the nebula award winning novels in chronological order. This is the winner for 2013.

Initially I didn't realize that I had already read this book. When I remembered, I thought it would be worth a second read. Now I'm not so sure. I did finish reading it the second time, but I kind of wish I hadn't.

The story takes place in the year 2312 when humanity is busily populating the solar system while Earth itself sinks ever further into the swamp of pollution and overpopulation that we are experiencing today. There are three or four main characters, depending on how you look at it. Actually, you could say there are 0 main characters because the author seems to feel character development is overrated.

What's good.
The book is heavy on science and technologies that can be used in various ways to allow humans to freely and expediently travel the solar system. Some of these are quite innovative, or seemed so to me. Okay, that's pretty much it on the good side, but that is actually quite a lot. Enough to make it worth reading once, but not twice.

The rest.
As I already mentioned, character development is not the author's strong point. The dialog is especially terrible. There is no way any of it sounds like real people. And all of the characters sound identical. And the narrator, too, not surprisingly. One really annoying aspect of this--and it could just be me--is the use of the word "so." It starts many, many sentences and sometimes weasels itself in mid-sentence as if discontent at being always in the lead. Of course, the narrator's voice would not want to miss out on this delightful little word.

Why do humans have to spend one in every seven years back on Earth itself? No simulation will do, it's got to be Earth. The author says that no one knows why this is, but that falls flat to me.

A big deal is made of how oppressive 1 G is to "spacers." They have to wear a body brace to deal with it during their Earth sabbaticals. But their interplanetary travel takes place on terraria that are maintained at 1 G and this doesn't seem to bother anyone.

In this future, human sexuality has broadened to the point of ridiculousness. It seems that heterosexuality doesn't even exist anymore. Most people seem to have both sets of functional reproductive organs. That's a bit hard to believe. Can human anatomy be redesigned to accommodate this physiology. I think the author is trying to present a more sexually open world but he should probably look into his biological facts as closely as he does his physical ones.

There's also a really major flaw concerning ecology that I don't want to discuss due to spoilers.

I would recommend this book if you're interested in technology but not if you're interested in characters or social issues.

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From the United States

Melanie D. Typaldos

It's technology, stupid! Who needs characters?

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2017

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76 people found this helpful

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S. Smith

I Just Don't Get It

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2017

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Many of the reviews here are pretty spot on:

1) Gorgeous world building....

The description of the world's, their cultures, their creation are all gorgeous and a real spark for the imagination. I can see these places in my mind's eye, and would love to travel to them.

2)...but terrible characters

I'm 150+ pages in, and I could give a rip about any of the characters. Swan comes across as psychotic, fickle, and aimless. Her companions are uninteresting; bland and without internal motivation. I honestly am hoping someone falls in a volcano on Io at this point just to spice things up.

3) Needed: Editing

I love a good existential thought piece moment in sci-fi (God Emperor of Dune, anyone?) But this is just painful. Why do we have to take a half dozen pages to describe a concert? A chapter on lawn bowling? The 'lists' sections are hit or miss: some fill in context for the world building, but most are just headache inducing lists of mental illnesses, biomes, existential...stuff.

I appreciate the trick of not describing a character in detail, but it wasn't until 100+ pages in was the main character described, which was jarring to what I'd constructed in my mind. Swan came across as a petulant 20 year old, so I was shocked when I learned she was 134..

And the vocabulary. Dear God, it's almost purple prose. I consider myself a smart reader, but I had to give up on Googling some of the words. And if I read "goldsworthies" or "balkanization" one more time...

4) Plot? Conflict? *Jingles keys*

The plot is completely lost, if there even is one. It's completely unclear if there's any conflict or dilemma to solve, and if it is, the characters seem wholly unconcerned with solving it. Swan seems content to have feral mental episodes each time her companions say the equivalent of "if I told you, I'd have to kill you." We take a time out to smuggle out a street rat/would-be-kidnapper, apparently on a lark before resuming an aimless trip around the Solar System...and the whole time I'm wondering if I accidentally picked up the second book in a trilogy because I'm lost and starting to hate the characters and at this point just reading it for the space descriptions.

*Sigh* I think this is a 'leave this in the airport terminal and see if someone else likes it' read...

56 people found this helpful

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Technophile

Disjointed and Random

Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2019

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I'm a big fan of Kim Stanley Robinson. I loved his Mars trilogy. I'm really not sure what to make of this book. I read the Kindle edition. Did someone screw up and accidentally post a first draft with just notes? Roughly every third chapter seems like it was intended to have been done with bullet points (no formatting, no punctuation, incomplete sentences). Is it supposed to show the influence of our texting culture? I don't know, but it doesn't work for me.
I found the beginning a chore to read, but it had some interesting plot, thoughts about post-CRISPR human evolution, and some interesting possibilities for human terraforming and expansion into the solar system.

By the middle it felt like each succeeding sentence had been chosen by a random number generator -- dissonant, disjointed, random, no flow, no plot, no action, no character development. Likewise, the future history of tech development seemed oddly uninformed as if it were written in the late 90s.

Time is my most precious resource. At the halfway point I couldn't justify wasting any more of it on this book. If you do read this, try a printed or audible version -- I can't imagine the Kindle version I read even being nominated for a Nebula award, much less winning. I'd like to believe I just got a bad e-copy because I know Kim Stanley Robinson can do much better.

22 people found this helpful

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gordon f.

A distinctive book!!

Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2019

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This book has the distinction of being the first book that I have ever tossed into the recycling bin. It was that bad. I am especially disappointed because I somewhat enjoyed "Aurora" by the same author; but it was a difficulty reading past page 100 in "2312".

If you like books where the main character is a whiney little brat who reminds you of the art students at college who believed that the government should pay them to make art while everyone else works a "real" job to pay the taxes to support their wonderful art, then this book is for you. Maybe the main character will eventually show some redemptive characteristics, but I am too old to waste time hoping for such in a book where getting past p. 100 was more of a chore than getting out of bed in the morning.

17 people found this helpful

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Pegasoi

Story Wanting, Concepts Cool

Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2017

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Only the weakest thread of tension pulls the reader through the story. The characters are bland. Entire chapters are devoted to lists. So many pages are wasted on boring, non-essential fluff, like page after page of running after wolves, it kills what little story there is. And then while the first 90% of the story has too much extraneous material, the last chapter seems rushed, as if the author just wanted to get the story over with. The only redeeming quality of the book are some fun concepts, like surfing Saturn's rings, what it means to be human, and the authors ideas on terraforming. I'll give him a star for that.

16 people found this helpful

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Jonathan D. Bradley

Meh, had to force myself to finish.

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2020

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I got the distinct impression that the plot only existed so that the author could describe the solar system he had imagined. The plot was really secondary and somewhat pointless. There was some interesting take on human life out in the solar system. Although I found the time frame life expanding into the solar system to be quicker than I would imagine, he did rationalize it well. His description of Earth's future seems plausible, but I just didn't see the colonization and terraforming of so many places happening in such a short time. The main character never became someone I appreciate it or rooted for, nor even cared about. The secondary characters were rather one-dimensional. I will credit the author and say it is clear he studied greatly for his version of a future solar system. There is an impressive amount of planetary and moon geography as well as science. That part was utterly fascinating. Additionally his creation of asteroid ships was brilliant. One last quibble is there was an unnecessary amount of sexuality. I am no prude, rather perverted if I'm being honest, but the sexuality seemed more like musings than having any actual purpose.

I can't recommend this book.

3 people found this helpful

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COMICS TIGER

A Tough Slog, A Sweet if Uneventful Ending

Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2018

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2312

Kim Stanley Robinson’s style is unusual . And his style of breaking up paragraphs with droning technobabble and lists and excerpts make this book a tough read. So tough that it’s hard to read. Because it does not flow as I expect a book to read and of coruse every writer wants to be “unique”, its uniqueness is its error.

Despite it’s occasional convolution and use of highly technical words in biology, chemistry, physics, etc. that only a biologist, chemist or physicist would really understand, despite all this babble and convolution, it’s the story of a woman. Or who’s mostly a woman. Even she is unsure of who and what she is.

Her name is Swan. And as her namesake she flies across the solar system looking for creativity, people and places that are both unusual and stimulating. Over her 100+ year lifetime, she’s become a woman with some male body parts thrown in. Apparently in this society sub-genders are many and it’s often a task to use the proper pronouns he or she.

She lives on Mercury and in her travels she finds her hometown there destroyed by a pebble storm .

Her mentor recently died under unusual circumstances and so did her city. In all this she travels to an Earth that has no animals (she helps reintroduce them) and still struggles with factions and politics, as the oceans rise and many coastal cities are flooded or underwater such as the state of Florida.

She travels to hollowed asteroids which are worlds in themselves, each one specializing in some society no matter how bizarre. She has a “qube” in her head – artificial intelligence – that she constantly tells to be quiet yet this AI, Pauline, reflects Swan’s persona.

Mars has its independence, the moons of Saturn and Luna have theirs, and a newly terraformed Mercury and Venus. Her adventures are many and varied and sometimes hard to read through as it is trying to figure out her personality and lack of predictability.

Then there’s Wahram. He’s Swan’s opposite in many respects. And there’s Inspector Genette, a small but important character in figuring out the murder of a city and the potential murder of an entire planet. Who is planning it, and who is instigating it?

I won’t spoil it, but it was anticlimatic ending.

Final Thoughts:

Kim is a hard author to get through. But when you have run the marathon of getting to the end, and slog through the nomenclature of several subjects, you somehow have faith that Swan and Wahram will make something of their long and crazy lives.

Not bad, Kim. Not bad . Unfortunately the book is so intent in explaining Man's societies that the plot lines grow thin to nearly forgetting what the story is about!

5 people found this helpful

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Greg T

Just OK.

Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2017

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Yeah. Well. Hmmm.

There were a number of pearls scattered throughout this novel: terraforming ~ orbital mechanics ~post-humanism ~ quantum computing. The list is actually quite long. And each topic would be a great discussion topic in a futurist forum. Or a 21st century ethics seminar.

But, that's about all I found worthwhile. Robinson has a tendency to splatter concepts yet he never really delves into the subject....a George Lucas architecture. The compulsion never becomes the obsession, sotospeak. Character development was weak and what did develop wasn't all that palatable. I didn't find one character that I related to all that well, and that's unusual for me in a sci-fi novel.

This novel won the 2012 Nebula Award. I can't imagine why.

14 people found this helpful

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mjnigrey

A detailed technical manual in novel format.

Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2021

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This is a book of ideas and descriptions, not characters and plot. It’s primarily about literal world-building, with the author providing excruciating detail on how the human civilization will colonize the vastness of space. If that’s what you’re looking for, this is the book for you.

It’s also a very, very long book that feels even longer as a mashup of lengthy descriptions and digressions. I’ve spent countless hours trying to get through the bulk of this book, and I can barely describe the “story” as anything more than the main character traveling around, visiting places. She runs into other characters, who converse only to provide some context for the next place on this seemingly limitless tour around the known universe.

Reading this whale of a book is exhausting, frequently frustrating as the author falls down another multi-page rabbit hole of verbose descriptions, and worse still, pretty boring.

During my glacially slow progress through this tome, I had the following thoughts:

At 30%… holy sh!t there’s a suggestion of a plot. Turns out, the story is a pretty standard mystery about the destruction of a large human settlement.

At 50%, I muscled through. Keep wishing the author would just stay on target, and not get distracted with more pages of technical jargon about another biome or tech or belief.

At around 65%, I lost my positive outlook on actually getting through to the end. The writing style is just too convoluted, where every line feels like it’s missing lengthy footnotes just to explain what it’s trying to convey. Even without them, your stuck with descriptions like these:

“This terrarium she was in now, with Genette, whose presence would definitely keep her oriented to her task, was an old flame, the Bantian Kongzhong Yizou Men, meaning “The Door in the Middle of Half the Empty Sky,” which was one of the many Chinese euphemisms for the vulva.”

I finally got to 100%, using sheer willpower to keep turning the pages. It feels like a real achievement, in the sense that collecting all the collectibles in a video game should be: Not fun, but feeling well earned.

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Paul Wedel

A brave attempt brought down by trying to do too much

Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2019

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Robinson provides a thoroughly imagined future world in which mankind has occupied most of the solar system. Set 300 years in the future man has also extended life and gender, turned asteroids into space ships and begun terreforming Mercury, Venus, Mars and the moons of Saturn to make them livable. For the most part, his speculations are reasonable, convincing and well explained. This feat of scientific imagination is the strongest part of the book.

The novel, however, is also a love-story, a mystery and a stylistic experiment. The love between between Swan and Wahram develops in fits and starts through much of the book, ultimately providing the obvious climax to the book. It was a little strange to empathize with this couple whose sexual equipment has been modified and whose life span has been extended into a second century. The mystery of the role of quantum artificial intelligences in deadly attacks on humans was intriguing, but the resolution fell flat. The stylistic experiments in ungrammatical and enigmatic sections labeled "extracts" and "lists" are ambitious, but, for me at least, unneeded distractions from the story.

I think the problems with the novel arise from the author's attempts to do too much. Despite this, Robinson provides an interesting view of the future with some original characters.

2 people found this helpful

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