Kim Stanley Robinson's 17th novel is complex and sometimes bewildering, 500 pages crammed full of strange but decent characters whose actions play out against a vastly constructed utopian background.
It is the year 2312: much of humanity has left an overheating Earth and is busy geo-engineering the inner planets along with the moons of the outer ones to a marginal habitability. Transformed by new sciences and new ways to live, most "spacers" find the mother planet an embarrassment; 92% of its mammal species are endangered or live in "off-planet terraria". Its population remains "decisively under the thumb of late capitalism". It's a rubbish heap, flooded and still warming uncontrollably. Not a parent to be proud of: but Earth's political influence is carried to the very edge of the solar system, where the children have grown so wilful they're planning to turn Neptune into a second sun.
They would leave the system altogether, but physics forbids. At human speeds, the author warns us, the stars are too far away: they "exist beyond human time, beyond human reach". Despite that, his characters have a fully space-operatic sense of entitlement. They say such things as "reality made a mistake, and now you're fixing it!" Biologically modified, computer-augmented, successfully "multi-sexed" and on their way to sub-speciation, they can live for 200 years. It isn't enough for them. They look forward to the regrowth of limbs. They whisper about full immortality. What redeems them, to some extent, is Robinson's insistence on the work ethic.
Into this utopian mix of sandbox and civic responsibility are brought Warham and Swan. He's large, froglike and a Titan, she's thin and from Mercury; neither of them is really a he or a she, of course. Warham is mature and steady, Swan a little flighty and self-centred. They grow to love and treasure their differences. They live to work. Brought together by the death of Alex, one of the system's upper management team, they witness a terror attack on Mercury's rolling capital city and crisscross the system in search of answers. What's happening? Who's responsible? There are so many factions: the Chinese, running the terraforming of Venus from their strongholds of capital on the ruined Earth, have motives of their own; Mars broods silently, but has motives of its own; even the quantum computers that do the system's mathematical heavy-lifting have motives of their own. In the end Swan and Warham, too, have motives of their own.
The tale of terrorism and interplanetary romance is so uncomfortable with itself that it's written in more awkward language than the rest of the book. Its ending is so contrived that you wonder if Robinson isn't undermining his vision in preparation for some as-yet-unwritten sequel. This is a shame, because the structure of 2312 is much more interesting than its plot: an assemblage of documentary data reminiscent of Dos Passos's USA trilogy or John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar that builds into a meditation not so much on what we might become as on what we already are.
SF depends on its special effects. There's plently of scope for them in 2312. Space travel is accomplished in hollowed-out asteroids. Sunlight is exported to the dark outer reaches of the system by the Vulcanoids, who live inside the orbit of Mercury on an "almost perfectly circular necklace of burnt but stable" natural satellites so close to the sun that their tidally locked day-sides are at 1,000 kelvin. But curiously the great set-pieces of the novel are its descriptions of classical music and the urban landscapes of a polluted yet lively Earth. Like his characters, the author is still tied to his humanity. It's a neccessary anchor, because if Robinson has a weakness, it's the immemorial weakness of the hard SF writer, which is to assume that the reader is as excited by extreme technological speculation as he is. Mind you, the issues covered in 2312, whether of pure science or of science and politics, are exciting in themselves.
But it's one thing to read "pausing to look in cracks they earlier inoculated with bioleaching metallophytes" and quite another to imagine, or visualise, such an act, even after you've excavated the concept from the bare words.
M John Harrison's Empty Space will be published by Gollancz in July.
