2312 (2012)
Kim Stanley Robinson (1952)
660 pages
Science fiction stories tend to imagine one of two distinct futures for humanity: a collapse into dystopian chaos, or a transcendent shift into a more advanced phase of existence. Dystopian societies have been generally described as resulting from both unforeseeable events, such as an asteroid hit or alien invasion, or unsustainable choices, such as human environmental or political shortsightedness. More optimistic writers have shown us overcoming and moving beyond our self-induced difficulties --- often after teetering on the brink of disaster --- to move ahead together to explore space as a united world.
In 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson envisions what could be considered a third, middle path into our future, one in which humanity survives, and science and technology continue their accelerated development, but in which people are fundamentally little different from us today. Looking three centuries into our future, Robinson assumes that a too long delayed response to global warming has led to significant ice melt and so rise in ocean levels. Inundated coastal areas have either been abandoned or had their cities built up Venetian-style, with skyscrapers towering over flooded former streets, and people using built-up promenades and boats to get around. Looking for relief, and resources to use on Earth, mankind has moved out into the solar system, establishing laboratories and mining settlements on other worlds. On planets, moons and asteroids communities and eventually colonies have grown from these initial footholds; in some places terraforming has been done to create human-habitable climates, while in others covered cities have been built. Technological development in the areas of computing power and robots threatens to cross that difficult-to-define boundary into the dream (or nightmare?) of artificial intelligence. Perhaps most dramatically, scientific understanding and developments have led to radical changes in medicine and human biology, leading to significantly longer life spans, and the emergence of what can best be referred to as new varieties of people, with extremely small or tall body types say, or mixtures of male and female characteristics.
Yet despite all of these marvels, in Robinson’s imagined future human nature has not fundamentally changed from our present day. The science and technology that have allowed expansion into the solar system have not resolved Earth’s significant problems: it remains a densely populated world with extreme inequality and balkanized politics. The colonies, for their part, have largely resolved the inequality issues that plague Earth, but people have carried their tendencies toward nationalism and provincialism out into the solar system; even as the colonies have grown independent of the Earth-side nations that founded them, and trade and travel have flourished, they struggle among themselves for access to and control of the resources of the solar system. And although Earth and these off-world communities remain reliant on one another in significant ways, their interactions are marked by escalating tensions; Earth-bound societies envy the prosperity of the colonies, which, aided by the limitations inherent to the physical realities of their off-world existence, have been able to experiment with new, more effective economic and political regimes.
These rising tensions in the solar system drive Robinson’s plot, his novel being part vision of our future and part detective story. His main character is Swan Er Hong, an artist living in a city on Mercury, who finds herself thrust into the middle of a mystery as the story opens, when her grandmother dies of apparently natural causes. Swan discovers that her grandmother had been leading a system-wide group of people trying to find a way to counter what they see as the growing threats from balkanization of political power across the solar system. Though she initially hesitates to join the group, the need for action becomes clear to her when an attack destroys her city on Mercury. She joins her new partners as they move back and forth through the solar system over a period of years struggling to understand who is at the center of the Mercury attack and other similar disasters, and how to stop them. In the year 2312 events come to a head, as conflicting parties struggle to impose their will on events that will impact the future development of civilization on Earth and throughout the solar system.
Despite the plot that ties the story together, Robinson’s novel is not a simple action-adventure story. It develops slowly, moments of drama alternating with sections that introduce to us the outlines of this future world. Chapters that advance the plot are interlaced with several titled simply “Lists”, which itemize things or ideas, confronting the reader with the variety of this future world, and still others labeled “Extracts”, which contain a few pages of what appear to be brief passages from some far future encyclopedia, looking back at the events leading up to this pivotal year of 2312.
All of these parts together present to us Robinson’s imaginative take on how our present day world will develop into the future, which can perhaps best be captured in his reference to “Jevons Paradox, which states that the better human technology gets, the more harm we do with it.”(348) Robinson makes clear that in 2312, the jury remains out on whether Jevons Paradox stands as an ineluctable destiny, or a fate that can be overcome; his main characters fervently desire to believe the latter, but events continuously conspire against their hopes. (William Stanley Jevons was an 1865 economist.)
Throughout the novel, Robinson leaves little doubt about where he sees our current choices leading us; in one of the Extracts chapters a future historian looks back, stating:
the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for the destruction of the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils. (138)In a similar vein, his main character, as she struggles to provide aid back to Earth and its people, observes with frustration the plight of the masses at the bottom of the income ladder:
Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. (350)
Enter Robinson’s world of 2312 not for the action and adventure, though his story also succeeds on that level, but rather to immerse yourself in a vision of what our collective future world could become. The detective story that drives the plot develops rather slowly through this book’s 600-plus pages, and ultimately the struggles and experiences of the characters as they uncover the dangerous forces at play in the solar system serve as only a part of the whole in our understanding of this future world Robinson imagines. What fleshes out his vision for us are the ideas and future-history Robinson details in the interludes and asides to the main story; in these we discover one of human kind’s possible futures, and how it will be driven by the consequences of the political and economic choices we are making today, and as well as our inherent capabilities and limitations.
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Maybe better to check-out after you finish reading the book, as I suppose it represents a very minor 'Spoiler', but there is an interesting representation of one aspect of the story at Orbit Books.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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