James Nicoll Reviews

Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2012 2312 is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

KRS fans may want to consider the significance of this being reviewed under What’s the Worst That Could Happen.

Three centuries from now, humans have spread across the Solar System. Every wonder from Disco-Era Co-Evolution Quarterly space articles has been realized and while not every space community is a paradise, those of the Mondragon Accord are marvelous indeed.

Too bad the entire arrangement is more fragile than it appears.

Swan, a terrarium (space habitat) architect now questioning the wisdom of her chosen field, is distressed to learn that her grandmother Alex, the Lion of Mercury, has died. While Alex’s death was unexpected, and therefore suspicious, nothing concrete points to murder.

Many people are distressed by Alex’s death. Alex was a senior figure in the Mondragon Accord, the nicest of the great powers of the 2300s. She had many sterling qualities, but leaving comprehensive, cross-referenced, impeccably indexed notes as to what she was up to does not appear to have been one of them.

Alex had reasons for secrecy and was canny enough to have set in place a contingency plan in the event of her untimely death. Swan receives post-mortem instructions from Alex, ordering Swan to hand-deliver a letter to Alex’s colleague Wang on distant Io.

Wang explains that Alex was convinced something was up, that the quantum computers (qubes) are acting up, that the Solar System is less stable than it appears to be, and Earth is somehow to blame. Although she has no obvious qualifications aside from being related to Alex (and suffering from the obvious drawback that she has a qube implant), Swan is recruited to help deal with the nebulous crisis.

In fact, Alex was right to be concerned. Someone is orchestrating infrastructure attacks across the Solar System. The great Mercurian city of Terminator is rendered uninhabitable. Various facilities are subjected to swarm attacks. Someone has to do something and destiny has selected Swan and her colleagues.

The something that must be done turns out to be racing from one location in the Solar System to another, sometimes in time to help mitigate disasters. What would be more helpful would be to determine who and the why behind the how, but that will require some detective work.

~oOo~

Now, some of you may be astonished to find that I have filed this award-winning novel by a widely beloved author in my category What’s The Worst That Could Happen. It’s included on a technicality: 2312 is a dreadful book and anyone who nominated it for awards should be ashamed.

2312 has more characters than I found room for in this synopsis and much less plot than you may expect. Mostly the book is a travelogue that allows Robinson to show off his shiny new Solar System. The actual mystery isn’t that mysterious, although it does have the virtue of underlining how annoying griefers would be in space, where all life depends on delicate, complex infrastructure, which is ​“very.”

I don’t actually mind that 2312 is a travelogue. My shelves have many well-read SFF novels whose plots are gossamer thin, entirely in service of forcing the characters to wander to-and-fro, pointing at the scenery while ooh-and-ahing.

My issues with the book include but are not limited to¹:

• Swan affects me like tinfoil on a filling. The role that nepotism seems to play in her recruitment does not suggest that the good guys are as good as they think they are.

• Robinson borrowed Dos Passos’ stylistic approach of inserting supplementary sections, much as John Brunner did in Stand on Zanzibar. The effect is much like running a hose from Wikipedia to the manuscript. Robinson clearly knows what Dos Passos and Brunner did, but not how or why.
• The shiny future with which reviewers were so impressed is composed primarily of retreads of proposals from the 1970s.
• Robinson’s science is so terrible as to be painful to read.

Example: habitats are created by hollowing out asteroids, filling them with a biosphere and spinning them up. Most asteroids have almost no tensile strength and will fly apart if you do that. See Haumea for what happens to fast-spinning asteroids. Robinson is lifting an idea from Cole and Cox, but Cole and Cox foresaw the issue of tensile strength and focused on metallic asteroids. Not that their approach would have worked, but at least they saw some of the obvious pitfalls.

Example: Robinson has no idea of the practicalities of rocket travel, which is why some of ships zipping around the Solar System are habitat-sized.

• Mind you, his geography is just as wretched:

So he rode the trains back and forth from Canada to Florida. The land was huge, and mostly flat. 

• The rewilding subplot

Swan and company decide to rewild Earth by bombarding selected sites with once-endemic animals to the great distress of Earth’s governments. Swan is outraged when the Canadians arrest her. She’s a do-gooder! How dare the natives object to projects inflicted on them by their betters!

• Irrefragable Africa. To quote: 
  

As for Africa, people say it’s a development sink. Outside aid
disappears into it and nothing ever changes. Ruined long ago by slavers, they say. Full of diseases, torched by the temperature rise. Nothing to be done. The thing is, now those are the conditions everywhere. The industrial rustbelts are just as bad. So you could say Earth itself is now a development sink.

One of the many things that drive me up the wall with Robinson is that he is a darling of the left, yet one would often be hard pressed to distinguish passages drawn from Robinson from passages drawn from Jerry Pournelle. Or Cecil Rhodes. This reminds me that this novel could have been written in the 1970s. Independent African nations have enjoyed considerable progress, but you’d never know it from authors like Robinson

I set down 2312 astonished that 2312 was not intended as parody or rather, I would have, were I not (reluctantly) familiar with Robinson’s work. Shame, because with a little rewriting (and some heavy editing), this could have been a black comedy worthy of Sladek or Heller.

My Romantic Times review of 2312 read in part ​“No doubt destined for yet more incomprehensible critical praise, 2312 stands amongst the least of the new Interplanetary SF.” Bang on.

What grinds my gears in particular with Robinson is that his terrible books are held up as exemplars of hard science fiction, when in fact it’s pretty clear that there are vast swaths of science (on which his plots depend)² about which Robinson knows very little and does not seem particularly interested in learning. If you were to design from first principles a novel that would annoy me, it would be this book and if you wanted to ensure maximum vexation, you would add glowing accolades from critics and fans who should know better but for some reason do not.

Nevertheless, even the worst book may offer something of value. In this case, it’s a drinking game:

Take a sip every time someone races from one world to another. Empty the glass when they could have accomplished at home whatever they do at the end of the trip. Empty the bottle whenever KSR introduces a plot point with racist implications.

You may want to book your liver transplant now.

2312 is available here (Publisher), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: The novel has egregious scale issues. It’s not just that terraforming of Mars and Venus is portrayed as being a lot faster than it would be, but that the novel mentions that half the atmosphere of Titan was moved to Mars. Grossly understating the difficulty of terraforming Mars is nearly as traditional as faster-than-light drives, but moving half the atmosphere of a body that would be counted as a planet if it weren’t orbiting Saturn seems a bit much.

2: I should clarify that the all the evidence supports the position that global warming is real and will have transformative, disastrous effects on the planet (although nothing it won’t shake off in a hundred million years). Probably it would have been better to avoid it and it would be better to mitigate it than whatever humans will actually do. However, it’s counterproductive to write a novel (that is in large part about the dire consequences of climate change) that is rife with basic science errors to which climate change skeptics can point and ask ​“if he got that wrong or tweaked it to make the plot work, why should we assume he got climate change right?”

See also The Windup Girl, which is slated for its own spittle-filled review. Good news for everyone who ever wanted a review filled with ranting about shipping costs.