2312
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Summary
Three centuries from now the solar system is settled and humanity is doing well everywhere except the place it came from. Mercury has a city called Terminator that rides rails around the planet, staying just ahead of a sunrise that would destroy it. Asteroids have been hollowed into terraria, each a private biome carrying species that no longer exist on Earth. People live two centuries, change sex more than once, and are described by categories the twenty first century has no words for.
Swan Er Hong is an artist who designs terraria has a quantum computer implanted in her skull, and is grieving her grandmother Alex, who turns out to have been running something political and secret. Then Terminator is destroyed by an object nobody detected, and Swan, a diplomat from Titan called Wahram and an inspector from Mars begin working out who did it and why.
Earth, meanwhile, is a flooded, crowded, badly governed mess that the rest of the system regards as an embarrassment and a moral obligation, and the novel's best sequence is an attempt to rewild it by dropping animals from the terraria out of the sky.
Around five hundred and sixty pages, digressive by design, with lists and extracts breaking up the narrative.
Wahram is the surprise. He is slow, heavy, fond of routine and Beethoven, and entirely unlike the restless Swan, and a long sequence in which the two of them are trapped together walking a maintenance tunnel under Mercury for weeks is the best thing in the book.
Best for readers who want a tour of a completely imagined solar system, and a genuinely odd late life romance between two people with nothing in common and two hundred years to spare.
Historical Context & Significance
2312 won the 2012 Nebula Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, the BSFA and the Arthur C. Clarke awards, and was named to the Tiptree honor list.
Kim Stanley Robinson had won the Hugo twice for Green Mars and Blue Mars two decades earlier, and this book returns to the same preoccupations at a wider angle: what a settled solar system does about the planet it started on, and whether an economy can be planned well enough to be worth living in.
Its treatment of gender was singled out at the time. Most characters are some combination the reader has no template for, described without explanation or fuss, and the Tiptree nomination followed. The moving city on Mercury has since become one of the most borrowed images in the genre.