First I want to say that this is not a review, but my personal feelings about some aspects of the novel 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. I’m not going to discuss plot points and language and story arc except where they speak to the points I do want to make. And there are spoilers galore. STOP HERE if you want to read the book first.
So here goes.
I really wanted to like this book. I have loved some of what I’ve read of KSR’s work, and I wanted this to be as wonderful an experience for me as others have reported it was for them. And indeed there are some cool things about this book. Unfortunately my enjoyment of them was ruined by certain aspects of the book that I frankly found appalling. But as far as I know, in the general uncritical adulation, hardly anyone has pointed out some of the things that make this a less than stellar work. So I am sticking my neck out in full anticipation of having it chopped off. Because some things need to be said.
In 2312 we have humanity spread through much of the solar system, having made habitations out of moons and planets through terraforming. Humanity has become, through various genetic and cybernetic enhancements, giddily diverse in terms of body types and sexualities — smalls, talls, rounds, hermaphrodites and so on — and many carry personal quantum computers in or outside their bodies. KSR’s sense of place is, as evident from some of his other works, absolutely and wonderfully evocative — the book has among the most beautiful opening paragraphs I’ve read in the genre. I could rave about the gorgeous inventiveness of placing a moving city-on-rails on the planet Mercury, designed to stay on the night side through the motion provided by the expansion of the rails on the sun-side. I could go on about the spacecraft that are hollowed out asteroids (‘terraria’) complete with an animal-and-plant-rich habitat. I could wax ecstatic about the wonderful intellectualizing, the transformation of infodumps into poetic “Extracts.” But others have done that, so I note these only in passing.
One of the main characters is something of an irritant – a stereotypical American teen at age 137 – a mostly-woman of Chinese descent, who is one of the privileged spacers. There’s nothing wrong with having a protagonist like this, except that for the grand task that she chooses to undertake, she doesn’t seem quite believable. She realizes that in order to decrease the probability of terrorist attacks from (as she suspects) Earth, which is a ‘development sink’ with massive ecological issues (global average temperature rise of 5 C) and resulting sociological chaos — there can be no tolerance for continuing poverty and misery due to want and injustice. She talks with the other major character, a far more mature Saturnian called Wahram, about the need for revolution on Earth. And the chapters set on Earth, where Swan Er Hong and Wahram attempt to make things better, are the weakest in the book.
Swan and Wahram are privileged spacers, and as such, unsurprisingly speak and act thus, although Wahram is more sensitive. Yet by not challenging their view in more than a half-hearted way, the author slips into a colonialist rant that threw me right out of the book. So the two spacers land in North Harare, a new country in Africa, and they have this massive machine called a self-rep that goes through abandoned neighborhoods and demolishes them, leaving pre-fab homes in the local style in its wake. The two off-world innocents are then puzzled at the apparently pointless antagonism that breaks out among communities and in other locations, such as the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, where a self-rep is blown up for no apparent reason. In one scene Swan takes control of a sabotaged self-rep and saves it from destroying the settlement, and is arrested by the local government. “We’re trying to help!” Swan says at one point, in utter frustration. The poor are shown to be ungrateful, irrational, and incomprehensible, and it is pounded into us that things are such a mess on Earth, and so complicated, that no wonder nothing really seems to work. At one point Swan Er Hong “abuses” a Harare woman and Wahram is so upset that he might end up disliking Swan that instead of intervening on behalf of the woman, he leaves — not just the scene, but Africa. You might think the author is simply showing us how incapable the two spacers are of getting out of their privileged world-view. But the fact that the spacers simply abandon the whole housing-for-the-poor scheme, thinking maybe their approach was too blunt after all, and merrily carry on to another project, serves to underline any lack of serious engagement with issues of poverty, let alone revolution. Africa in particular has been made such a mess by European powers (not to mention the American slave trade — and forget about what’s happening in Algeria now) — that any first-world headshaking and sorrowfulness at the lack of gratitude because they were ‘only trying to help’ makes one either retch or seethe with fury. Colonialism is not even mentioned, however, as could have been done in one of the book’s many Extracts. Can you imagine running some kind of massive development project without a knowledge of (or respect for) local history, culture and politics? These privileged spacers don’t even have the excuse of not having access to information, considering that one of them carries a particularly encyclopedic quantum computer in her head. The point is, the poor they are trying to help, to raise to revolution so that they – the spacers — can be safe from terrorism, don’t matter. They aren’t people. They are a monolithic mass of misery, beyond help.
Swan Er Hong and Wahram prefer to run away from problems they don’t understand, abandoning the Africa project to the locals (although Swan wants to return to housing at some future point) and they decide completely arbitrarily that the next step is time to return the animals to Earth. Endangered species thriving in various space terraria are sent to Earth to rain down gently in aerogel capsules without (mysteriously enough) any governments detecting this process (let alone being consulted, another example of arrogance), which involves the return of thousands of animals all over Earth. While the scene of wolf and caribou returning to North America is quite moving, I was left rather puzzled. With the 5C warming and the increasing ecological issues, why is this a good time to bring the animals back? And how is it connected to the protagonists’ original goal of brewing revolution on Earth? It turns out that not all natives appreciate the return of the animals — Swan feels the need to lecture to Earthlings about animals being our ‘horizontal brothers and sisters.’ An admirable sentiment, which I share, but again it speaks to a colonialist ‘let me tell you what’s good for you’ spiel that I find I am unable to stomach. And the animals also seem removed from us, despite Swan’s trek with wolves, which has some genuine poetic moments. It seems that spacers recognize their beauty and value, but despite Swan’s protestations, they are not brethren. The spacers in general seem to have no actual emotional bond or interdependence with other species.
In Canada, incidentally, we get to see some of the locals as people, through scenes in a bar, with Swan and Wahram drinking with Canadians. Apparently this is simply not done when the privileged do-gooders go to Africa. Mix with the locals? Figure out what their thoughts and desires and world-views might be? Nah!
(In an earlier part of the book Swan does go to China, the land of her ancestors, but spends most of the time there kidnapped and drugged).
Overall, the book shows a deep disrespect for the poor and disenfranchised. In India alone there are (as counted by an environmentalist friend of mine) at least a thousand local environmental movements, initiated and maintained by the rural poor. In my own experience of the Chipko movement in the Himalayas as a teen, I saw illiterate women speak up, take the lead, and launch a movement that not only protected the local forests but transformed their societies. Just because newspapers owned by giant conglomerations don’t report on them, it does not mean that these movements don’t exist and don’t have an impact. (Check out, for instance, the site of the National Alliance of People’s Movements for a certainly-not-complete longish list). If you want to hear what poverty is really all about, and how to actually speak truth to power, listen to even a few minutes of ‘rural reporter’ P. Sainath’s impassioned expose, “Globalizing Inequality.” In the book, Swan and Wahram approach various agencies working on development issues but they never even attempt to talk to people, or engage with, or study people’s movements, let alone access information readily available on the internet today.
It is worth mentioning also that despite its apparent imaginativeness on the subject of human sexuality, gender and variations thereof, the book seems to idealize heterosexual mating, although between hermaphroditic beings. (Come on!) The romance between the two main characters, even independent of sexuality, does not come across as believable. There’s no fire between them, I suspect because at least one of them rings hollow as a character.
There is another deep problem with the book. It is a philosophical problem and perhaps all of what I’ve pointed out above are symptoms of a common malaise. This is that despite all of the gee-whiz wonderful inventiveness and expansiveness of the book, it ultimately represents to me a colossal failure of the imagination. The philosophical underpinning, the invisible paradigm, is basically the frontier mentality of Old America. True, the non-Earth worlds that are settled by humanity are (with one exception) empty of other life, so that one might argue that there is nothing wrong with terraforming those worlds for human needs (although it is important to point out in this critique of the book by E. Yanarella that there are other views on the subject of terraforming, which, if even partly represented in the book, would have made it deeper and far more interesting). But let us concede that there are no moral issues with terraforming unoccupied worlds. Here’s my problem with it.
The language and attitude of the people doing the terraforming is still colonialist. The way they speak of resources in the context of terraforming: nitrogen from Titan, this from that, rather reminiscent of the post-industrial-revolution view of the world as a list of resources, silks from China, bauxite from here, oil from there is just one case in point. The baldly stated notion that that humans are “meant to inscribe ourselves into the universe” is not that different from the kind of ideology that justified the British plunder of India, or the French and Dutch mangling of Africa — manifest destiny on a solar system scale. Earth is bound by history and nothing gets done, so humanity escapes to space, builds a variety of little utopias free from want (there’s always nitrogen from Titan if you want to fix your atmosphere) – the ultimate escapism. Since the language and philosophy and attitude of these far-future spacers is still the same old same old, I find it hard to believe that capitalism has been shifted to the margins, and that a more just, less exploitative system is possible in that future. A colleague of mine, an environmental philosopher, argues that a people’s underlying philosophy guides how they act, as much as economics does. And if your underlying philosophy is messed up remnant of an unjust system of thinking, you’re going to do something terrible somewhere, sometime. Consider for instance the rather cavalier and barely contested attitude to the presence of indigenous life on the moon Enceladus in the book, presented as an aside.
Overall there is a peculiarly staccato feel to the book. Everything is chunked up and oddly disconnected. Swan Er Hong has lost her home city to terrorism, and mourns the loss, but we don’t actually experience the loss through her eyes in any real way. She’s disconnected from memories, from a social network, and even her travels across the solar system have a jerky quality to them. Wahram is part of a multi-partner family community called a crèche, but we don’t see him emotionally attached to it, or thinking about it, let alone shaped by it. The main characters in the book zip around the solar system without a thought, in fact quite casually, as though it really doesn’t take much energy to move (and move mass) over such enormous distances. The plot, too, is all over the place. First you get a tour of Mercury, the Saturn system, and Venus — then suddenly Earth is seen by the protagonists as the possible source of terrorism – then the Venusians (Chinese-descended Indian-name-adopting) are discovered to be the actual bad guys, at which point Earth is promptly forgotten about, other than warranting a few mentions in meetings.
Speaking also as someone with a scientific background, I need to say this: that the book does not critique the enterprise of science. It seems to posit the untenable view that science and scientists can solve everything. (If only! But life’s more complicated than that). I love science with a passion myself, which is why I am critical of some of the ways it is done, how it is used and misused, that it is filled with the masculinist baggage of its origins, and the contradictions that allow it to be appropriated by power. I also point out the arrogance of the scientific enterprise — its relationship to colonialism and capitalism are not easily dismissed. The book takes a dewy-eyed view of technological advance that is deeply problematic to me.
By the way there is also the strange non-mention of future India. I found it really odd that a country with a huge technological base, space-faring ambitions and the world’s second-largest population only merits mention by absence. So for instance the Mars settlement is dominated by the Chinese but because they have some kind of adolescent issue with their home country, they take Indian names. There’s the random blowing up of a self-rep in Uttar Pradesh, as mentioned. There are several references to an opera about Gandhi called Satyagraha, but any kind of alternative world-view on politics/development, let alone a Gandhian one, is conspicuously absent. There is an Indian character, a young man named Kiran, who is a particularly two-dimensional character, whose main function appears to be to discover something that leads to the discovery of the bad guys. He seems to have no history, or sense of connection to anything or anyone, or anything else that would render him a person. This is a future in which India might as well have not existed. And I say this not out of some kind of misplaced nationalism but because a country of over a billion people that has a space program and a huge amount of scientific talent is a bit hard to ignore in any extrapolation to a realistic future – even a mention would suffice.
To sum up then: some of KSR’s earlier works show a deep sensitivity to how ordinary people, including ordinary scientists live and act. But this sensitivity seems to be limited to white American or European men and women. Despite his critique of power as demonstrated in many books, when it comes to an international or interplanetary stage, he cannot speak truth to it. His vision appears to be mired and limited by the very world-view that the powerful of today and tomorrow strive to perpetuate. The colonialist view of the world is not a thing of the past. There are consequences to ignoring or being ignorant of the humanity of the poor and disenfranchised. There are consequences to having a scientific-technological viewpoint that sees the world in disconnected little (or big) chunks. Imagine this rather terrifying oh purely imaginary scenario:
Somewhere in a corporate boardroom, oil company executives are feeling the pressure to switch to green energy. There are already R&D programs under way in those areas, but surely there are ways to capitalize on the situation and make even more money. Perhaps a graduate of a top US university comes up with this brilliant plan: disinform the public and pay the lawmakers so that any meaningful legislation on global warming is stalled. Continue to find new sources of oil, including mining the Arctic sea-bed, so that even more CO2 goes into the atmosphere. Delay the possibility of change while developing massive geoengineering/ terraforming projects on the side. Suppress world-wide people’s movements such as the ones going on in India against CO2-spewing coal-fired power plants being built by multinationals. Especially suppress news of such movements so that citizens of powerful countries continue to harbor racist and colonialist prejudices about the global poor. Let things get to a point where catastrophic temperature rise seems inevitable, with perhaps a few dramatic disasters that cause a few million deaths, preferably of people in developing countries. (That’s just collateral damage). Get scientists worked up to a point where their ignorance of other alternatives including social movements leads them to say to the public that geoengineering/ terraforming is the only way to save the planet. Never mind that complex systems like global climate are not entirely predictable in the sense that even certain small changes can have wildly disproportionate results. The point is that this way, governments and taxpayers will pay a ton of money to these people to save the earth. Now this might mean that certain other people, such as the millions in the tropics, will have to die, but they were never important to begin with. (Remember the poor are a monolithic, hopeless mass of suffering, they are beyond help, right? as we’ve just read in 2312). So the corporations and their lackeys, the scientists who’ve bought into their propaganda, get to be heroes and save the world! And make a killing in the process, pun intended.
Books like 2312 contribute to such a scenario becoming reality, because they reinforce comfortable prejudices and belief systems instead of challenging them.
(For the record, I do think that geoengineering could be a last, desperate resource, and deserves some R&D independent of vested interests, and I agree that changing lifestyles, let alone mindsets, paradigms and world-views, is remarkably difficult — but I don’t think we should give up even before we’ve begun. Think of how unthinkable some social movements were before they became successful. Where is the science-fictional imagination when it comes to this sort of change?)
I ended 2312 with a feeling of deep betrayal. Not only because KSR has been one of my favorite writers (Pacific Edge is one of my favorite books) but because it was a reminder, a kick in the posterior of my complacency — of a few hard truths. The fact that the SF community in the US and probably elsewhere, despite the presence of a few individuals with mindsets to the contrary, is deeply uncritical of works by writers who have crossed a certain threshold of popularity — that issues that beset much of the rest of the world today are not even on the radar of people who read and write in the genre — that not only do xenophobic books win awards but even works by otherwise deeply thoughtful writers that contain unexamined colonialist or other problematic attitudes do not get called out for it – these are true enough, sadly. But most of all I am shaken by the reminder to us writers that power can corrupt, subtly or otherwise, even that which should be free — the imagination.
*
Note: My ever-erudite friend Steve points out (as someone innocent of the book who has read my rant above) that the attitudes I describe are more correctly attributed to American Exceptionalism than to old-fashioned colonialism. For instance, he says, “…it does explain why the spacers don’t understand other cultures. They have the US mindset, which is (as Tom Wolfe said) they think an Englishman would talk just like an American, if only you woke him up early enough in the morning. The kinds of people you are talking about are just invisible to them. “Women organized to protect local forests? Interesting. If only they’d had GPS drones and high bandwidth internet think of what they could do. I know, let’s set up some repeater towers across the Himalayas to make that possible. Here’s a good spot. Once we clear the trees we’ll have coverage of the entire region…”
Tags: 2312, Environment, Global warming, writing
Antariksh Yatra 
March 19, 2013 at 12:13 pm |
You remind and educate me of my own underexamined reasons for finding science fiction to often be disturbingly less than fulfilling. And at the same time, you inspire me to remember the powerful opportunity that the mandate of willful imagination provides those with the drive to and awareness of what it means to make full use of that unique freedom. Change the world, Soni. I’m listening.
March 19, 2013 at 8:35 pm |
Ah, wish I could change the world! But speaking out is a first step. thanks!
March 19, 2013 at 2:06 pm |
[…] reservations, as I hope my review makes clear. Today I found some of those reservations writ large by Vandana Singh. I can see exactly where she’s coming from on this, and I think it’s a valid view to […]
March 19, 2013 at 8:35 pm |
Thanks, Cheryl!
March 19, 2013 at 3:47 pm |
KSR seems to me what you might get if an avid fan of the Whole Earth Catalog circa 1978 turned their hand to SF: the technophilia, the annoyance that some people persist in not being right-thinking Californians, the, uh, unfortunate race stuff, from stereotyping to romanticizing to simply ignoring their existence (also, the inability to do simple math and a heartfelt ability to ignore anything that conflicts with their simple little worldview).
If you go back to Red Mars, check out how a murder is arranged by exploiting the the knife-waving excitability of Muslims or how the Asian woman is the mystical one (and isn’t it a black guy from the Caribbean who is a stow-away?) Or there’s Escape From Kathmandu with its struggle to save the people of Nepal from the ravages of modern sewerage. Or how, in the Years of Rice and Salt, the method KSR chooses to avoid Europe’s domination of the world (something that is historically rather atypical for the tag-end of Eurasia) is to wipe out most of the Europeans, as though the only way to keep them from winning from about 1500 to 1950 was to remove them from the board entirely.
March 19, 2013 at 8:40 pm |
Your comments are insightful. I had forgotten about the examples from Red Mars. Escape from Kathmandu, had way too much of the “look at these weird locals” attitude toward the Nepali, but that at least one could attempt to explain as a symptom of a new writer trying to find his feet. And yes, I hadn’t thought about the implicit assumption in the Years of Rice and Salt — thanks for pointing that out.
March 21, 2013 at 5:12 am |
James, the rest of your comment aside, I find your final sentence specious in the extreme, a criticism devoid of content. “[A]s though the only way”? That’s your imputation and nothing but your imputation, it says more about you than about anything else, and it has no bearing on what KSR was or was not doing. It’s wholly your projection to suggest that KSR’s artistic starting-point was a desire to avoid European domination of the world. His starting point may just as well have been, and arguably much more likely was, what the resulting novel simply and starkly and in actual point of fact does do — posit a world without white people, period, commencing at a point before the beginnings of modernity, and then explore the potential consequences of such a world over the long term — which is NOT the same kind of starting point as the one you posit: moreover, the former (avoiding European domination) is not automatically or necessarily the “implicit assumption” behind the latter (exploring a world without white people), and for you (or Vandana Singh) to suggest it is is simply an interpretive conceit on both your parts.
KSR made a perfectly valid artistic choice: “In a world more or less wholly without white people dating from c. 1350, what might then have happened over the next 700 years? Explore.” To be sure, alternate histories developing other starting premises, including ones that explore ways white domination might have been avoided or prevented from happening, with white people still part of the worldwide ethnic mix, would also be perfectly valid, as you suggest. But to criticize KSR for making another, equally valid artistic choice than the one you might prefer is disingenuous at best: let’s go ahead and call that disingenuousness your own brief, entirely human, small-bore imperialist moment in the sun, and Vandana’s too. Goodness knows, we are all capable of it and we are all intermittently guilty of it. We all live deep in our own perceptual and interpretive tunnels, and our views of our divergent surroundings are never wholly obstruction-free. This is certainly as true of me as of anyone else.
The 700 year history that KSR posits shows us a world that is better in some ways than our own, worse in some ways than our own, and roughly the same in some ways as our own. Among many other things, it posits that over the course of that 700 years certain tribes ethnicities races nations corporations became oppressive of and colonialist towards others, and others did not; that some were victims, and some were victimizers; and that some of these power relations sometimes reversed polarity over time. One understanding that the novel arrives at in its own uniquely insightful way, I think, takes the simple fact that we are, every one of us, human, as its foundation: the nature and behavioral range both of individual humans and of humanity as a whole, and the nature and behavior of multiple kinds and sizes of human collectives, are such that immense and horrific forms of oppression and abuse by individuals against other individuals and by one body or grouping of people against another, and so too incredible accomplishments and acts of generosity, have happened and continue to happen in our own history, they happen in the history KSR posits, and they would happen in almost any history of the last thousand years let alone the last ten thousand, *regardless of the specific mix of genetic types or races*. We human beings — of all races and cultures, no exceptions — are nasty, murderously selfish critters. We are also magnificent, magnanimous, great-hearted critters. Those qualities, and many others that speak of nothing so much as the sheer range and variety and starkness of our contradictions, and many more filling out the middle ranges of multiple qualitative spectra, are deeply part of who we are. Our humanity, for good and for ill, transcends the boundaries of our races and cultures, and members of all races and cultures are equally capable, individually and collectively, of both the worst atrocities and the greatest humanitarian achievements of our collective history, regardless of which individuals, which individual race(s) or culture(s), actually committed the actual atrocities or brought about the actual achievements that actually occurred in the long course of our actual history. To paraphrase Lincoln, we would have done the same as they, if our positions and circumstances had been reversed. And that’s a worthwhile insight to dramatize, as I believe KSR does, not only in The Years of Rice and Salt, but in a very different way in 2312 as well. Yet the corollary of the foregoing has to be: we are, viewed collectively, improving as a species, little by little, and those improvements are coming about in part due to the efforts of the best of us in ALL cultures and races. Our better angels slowly become better at ministering to our demons, and, yes, the reverse as well. And that insight, that potential and truth, is also very much a part of KSR’s mix, and lies at the center of his sensibility.
The imperialist, colonialist oppressors in 2312 are not white but of all races; they’re not straight, of two distinct genders, and displaying a narrow range of body types, but are of all possible sexual orientations, genders, gender mixes, and body types; they’re not of one cultural type but of an incredible diversity of cultures; they don’t cleave to a single narrow set of culturally enforced standards of physical beauty but celebrate endless permutations in standards of beauty — but dig it: they’re still the oppressors. And the poor people they oppress represent a similarly wide, if non-identical, diversity, though, because of the effects of their oppression, a diversity that is not as robust as it could and should be in its own right — but dig it: they’re still the oppressed. For all the leveling and egalitarianism that may have occurred or taken hold in some areas, the negative power relations have still carried over, even if they are, in the future portrayed, largely color blind and gender blind and so on. Revisiting 2312 with the above-stated set of contrasts in mind might allow us to discover a somewhat different set of interpretive dynamics at play in the novel than have so far been suggested in this discussion.
March 21, 2013 at 3:39 pm
I meant to sign my name to the above comment.
Ron Drummond
March 19, 2013 at 3:54 pm |
Thank you for this essay. My brother gave me 2312 for Christmas and told me that he had read it, then said, “I’ll let you decide what you think.” This did not sound good. I got half way through it and put it down. I haven’t picked it up again, though my response to it was — I didn’t find it interesting enough to keep going. (I will grant that I’ve been having trouble reading science fiction and fantasy lately.) In his Mars trilogy, Robinson did talk about the ethics of changing another planet, and his sympathies seemed to lie with the Red Mars faction, rather than the terraformers. So this book would be a change. Maybe it didn’t grab me because KSR was not thinking things through.
Your essay reminds me how easy it is to be taken over by the stereotypes in the surrounding environment. If one’s culture is American and white and middle class, there is a huge amount of crap waiting to move in the moment one relaxes.
The city on Mercury is awesome. It’s from one of the first stories Robinson published — in Damon Knight’s Orbit series. I have it because one of my stories was in the same volume. His early short stories (in the 1970s) were amazing.
March 19, 2013 at 8:41 pm |
Thanks, Eleanor! Your comment about the “huge amount of crap waiting to move in” is right on. I would add ‘invisible’ since so much of the crap is the sea we swim in and don’t see.
March 19, 2013 at 3:57 pm |
A second comment, after looking at Cheryl’s comment. It is possible that KRS is being ironic in his treatment of Swan. If so, he lost me.
March 19, 2013 at 8:44 pm |
He lost me too, there. I have to say that none of my ire is directed at KSR as a person — as I’ve mentioned, I admire some of his other works, and when I was once part of an e-roundtable with him and other authors, he was perfectly amiable and intelligent. Which is my point, that some of our deepest assumptions and their implications are invisible even to us. And therefore we have to be especially wary…
March 19, 2013 at 5:04 pm |
The content of this review of KSR’s latest reminds in bold face, thta in Port-au-Prince, post-earthquake, the headquarters Directorate of the international NGOs was erected right next to the new, post-earthquake destruction of the old one, Haiti’s presidential palace. This proclaims via architecture who owns / runs Haiti.
March 19, 2013 at 5:06 pm |
Despite the book’s egregious flaws, it got a nod (but not a win) from the Tiptree Awards, it’s nominated for the Nebula and probably has a fair shot at winning and I will be very, very surprised if it isn’t nominated for the Hugo.
March 19, 2013 at 8:46 pm |
Alas, I’ve stopped expecting to make sense of awards! Despite some really intelligent and open-minded people in the community, the bulk of it seems to be quite comfortable with attitudes that I find unacceptable. Sigh.
March 19, 2013 at 9:25 pm |
I did feel that a lot of the book rang hollow and I didn’t really connect with the characters, but I hadn’t really considered how dismissive they are of other cultures. Pretty horrible all things considered.
March 19, 2013 at 11:22 pm |
Your point about KSR leaving out the Indian space program is spot on. Even in the 90s his vision of white people colonizing the solar system was one of the least credible aspects of the Mars books.
March 20, 2013 at 1:36 pm |
Yes, yes, yes! Thanks, Vandana. I skimmed the last third or so of the book because I was just so annoyed by it overall, perhaps because of high expectations disillusioned. (I have a love/hate relationship with KSR’s writing, but the early reviews and enthusiasms for this book had me thinking it would be his masterpiece.) I don’t know if I would have enjoyed it more if I didn’t know who wrote it and hadn’t heard any of the extreme praise for it, but maybe.
In any case, in addition to the faults you point to above, some of which bothered me and some of which I didn’t notice or was immune to, the novel seemed to me like the book Hugo Gernsback always dreamed of: explicitly didactic techno/scientific extrapolations rigged onto an adventure story plot. To do that, KSR draws some inspiration from John Dos Passos’s modernist USA trilogy published in the 1930s (just as SF was becoming a pulp staple; it’s an inspiration John Brunner would also draw from for Stand on Zanzibar in 1968), making 2312 a particularly well written and innovative SF novel for 80 years ago. Perhaps that’s the key to appreciating it. After all, in comparison to The Cometeers and Triplanetary, it really is a good book, and remarkably progressive for its age.
March 20, 2013 at 6:22 pm |
Eighty years is a little harsh. My guess, based on the internal evidence of unexamined assumptions, is that the novel was actually published in some alternate reality of the 1970s. In this alternate time line it’s in conversation with Delany’s “Dhalgren,” where Swan is written to contrast with the Kid. In fact, “2312” is likely one of my favorite novels of the 1970s.
April 21, 2013 at 1:54 pm |
[…] memorable images – but may be defeated by the impossibility of its self-appointed task: as Vandana Singh has written, the novel trips over its own assumptions as it pushes its frame of reference ever outwards; […]
December 11, 2013 at 3:40 am |
“So for instance the Mars settlement is dominated by the Chinese but because they have some kind of adolescent issue with their home country, they take Indian names.”
Venus, not Mars.
January 5, 2014 at 4:07 am |
[…] the ecological sense or lack thereof in 2312‘s radical transformation of the solar system, Vandana Singh’s review noting that 2312 really doesn’t take account of most of the Third World in his future, James […]
May 27, 2014 at 12:11 am |
[…] writing in English or in translation). Consider Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, on which I wrote a lengthy critique (while not at all a hate-fest, like the Simmons work, it is deeply problematic). Both the Simmons […]
October 21, 2016 at 4:00 am |
[…] Yanarella and L. Timmel Duchamp, and recently revisited by me in the light of Vandana Singh’s critique. I said then that how 2312 stacks up in an awards context will depend on its competition; I think, […]
October 22, 2016 at 2:43 pm |
[…] to me to deserve their recognition. (That said, Vandana Singh has an important critique of 2312 here, that I’m going to come back to in a separate […]
October 22, 2016 at 2:59 pm |
[…] were not having that much success anyway” (p. 399). As Vandana Singh has pointed out in her astute critique of the novel, Robinson’s decision to reward this high-handed, thoughtless interference—and […]
August 16, 2018 at 5:13 pm |
[…] them seem to connect to anything. Indeed, it’s hard to connect much of anything to anywhere. As one not-a-reviewer noted, “Swan Er Hong and Wahram prefer to run away from problems they don’t understand,” and the […]
January 1, 2023 at 10:08 pm |
[…] them seem to connect to anything. Indeed, it’s hard to connect much of anything to anywhere. As one not-a-reviewer noted, “Swan Er Hong and Wahram prefer to run away from problems they don’t understand,” and the […]