2312

[sawyl]

Into the tail end of my thoughts on the Hugos with Kim Stanley Robinson's tour of the solar system novel 2312. The core of the book is the growing relationship between the Mercurial Swan Er Hong, whose personality is impulsive, unpredictable and immediate, and the Saturnine Fitz Wahram, who is quiet, ordered and contemplative.

The novel opens in the constantly moving city of Terminator with a gathering to mark the death of Alex, the Lion of Mercury. As Swan struggles to come to terms with her grandmother's death, some of the others present — Fitz Wahram and Inspector Jean Genette — repeated ask her whether Alex has left her some sort of bequest. When Swan eventually stumbles across a message from Alex, she finds herself directed to deliver a message to a scientist on Io.

After returning to Mercury, Swan agrees to attend a Beethoven concert with Wahram. On their way back to Terminator following the concert, they witness the destruction of the city's tracks and are forced to take shelter in a tunnel beneath the surface. With no rescue forthcoming they decide to walk through the tunnels to the darkside of the planet and safety, keeping their spirits up by whistling their way through some of the great Romantic symphonies. With their relationship altered by their ordeal, the pair separate: Wahram to pursue Saturn's diplomatic agenda; Swan to help Inspector Genette investigate the attach on Terminator.

The rest of the plot, involving the possible self-awareness of quantum computers, the re-wilding of Earth, and the terraforming of the solar system, plays out against the background of Swan and Wahram's changing attitudes to each other. The characters dwell on some of Robinson's perennial interests: our moral obligations to those, both animal and human, we seek to help and the problems of maintaining their autonomy as we do so; the importance of art and music to individual existence; existentialism and how people might go about creating their own meaning in a post-scarcity society; the importance of the work ethic, and obsessions with pattern and order and iteration.

The setting is, as might be expected, extremely beautifully realised. Travel through the solar system is achieved many by hitching a ride on one of the many peripatetic terraria — hollowed out asteroids furnished with a unique internal landscape, some modelled on classic Earth environments, some catering to skiers or sailors, some, like sexliners or the completely unlit blackliners, intended to provide a unique experience for their passengers. There are other moments of great beauty, such as when the spacers decide to reintroduce animals back to Earth by dropping them back through the atmosphere in a series of aerogel bubbles that burst on impact like something from a dream.

Although the universe of 2312 draws on some of the elements of Robinson's classic Mars trilogy — from the constantly moving city of Terminator and the title of Lion of Mercury, to Swan's embedded quantum computer sharing a name with John Boone's AI — it seems unlikely that the novels share a setting, if only because Earth and Mars seem very different from those of the trilogy.

Despite enjoying the novel and admiring its ambition, I didn't feel that it was entirely successful in its attempts to integrate the conspiracy theory subplot with the story of the central relationship. Ultimately the crime plot relied too heavily on coincidence and resolved itself too neatly and easily to provide a satisfactory conclusion but I'm willing to overlook this in favour of the bits of the novel that are more successful — especially the final uplifting epilogue.