HuckleBuck411
I persevered and forced myself to finish this novel. Here is my “list” (those of you who read the book will understand this) to describe Kim Stanley Robinson's writing style: verbose, grandiloquent, sesquipedalian, obfuscatory, pretentious, jargon-heavy and circumlocutory. Yes, I had to use copilot to find a lot of these words, my sardonic homage to Robinson's novel. Robinson's view of human civilization in the year 2312 is a progressive wacko's wet dream. Of course, Earth is a mess; all animal species have gone extinct on the now coastally flooded Earth, due to human mishandling of the planet. All the problems facing us today are still present and worsening on Earth, but somehow in the time period between now and then Earth managed to colonize and either terraform or begin terraforming the rest of the solar system, including hollowing out and building various diverse biomes inside asteroids (some as protectorates for Earth's missing animal populations); this seems like a major contradiction to me. By this time there are many different sexes, and it is common for females to add on male genitalia and vice versa for males. Personal AIs (qubes) are either worn as jewelry or implanted in the brain. These qubes play a major part in the thin plot of the story, a plot almost lost in the unending grand descriptions of the solar system's planets, their moons, proto-planets, asteroids, etc. and their very diverse human populations. The colonist's life spans have been increased to close to 200 years and the main character, 130-year-old Swan Er Hong, is a very high-strung, body modified, adrenaline junky. A resident of Mercury, she at one time was an architect of many of the asteroid biomes but now considers herself an artist making pieces of abstract sculpture from various materials that are melted or transformed in the raging solar radiation during Mercury's daytime. The other main character in the story is almost the complete opposite of Swan, Fitz Wahram, a slow-moving, toad-like, bug-eyed, body-modified, man who is a diplomat from Titan. Throughout the story they meet, separate, meet again and get into various dire circumstances as they flit around the solar system. Much of what takes place is only tangential to the actual plot involving investigating various tragic occurrences throughout the solar system that may not be natural or random. The reader really has to wade through a lot of bulk to get to the plot that finally picks up toward the end of the book. Kudos to anyone else hanging on to the end of this one.
I persevered and forced myself to finish this novel. Here is my “list” (those of you who read the book will understand this) to describe Kim Stanley Robinson's writing style: verbose, grandiloquent, sesquipedalian, obfuscatory, pretentious, jargon-heavy and circumlocutory. Yes, I had to use copilot to find a lot of these words, my sardonic homage to Robinson's novel. Robinson's view of human civilization in the year 2312 is a progressive wacko's wet dream. Of course, Earth is a mess; all animal species have gone extinct on the now coastally flooded Earth, due to human mishandling of the planet. All the problems facing us today are still present and worsening on Earth, but somehow in the time period between now and then Earth managed to colonize and either terraform or begin terraforming the rest of the solar system, including hollowing out and building various diverse biomes inside asteroids (some as protectorates for Earth's missing animal populations); this seems like a major contradiction to me. By this time there are many different sexes, and it is common for females to add on male genitalia and vice versa for males. Personal AIs (qubes) are either worn as jewelry or implanted in the brain. These qubes play a major part in the thin plot of the story, a plot almost lost in the unending grand descriptions of the solar system's planets, their moons, proto-planets, asteroids, etc. and their very diverse human populations. The colonist's life spans have been increased to close to 200 years and the main character, 130-year-old Swan Er Hong, is a very high-strung, body modified, adrenaline junky. A resident of Mercury, she at one time was an architect of many of the asteroid biomes but now considers herself an artist making pieces of abstract sculpture from various materials that are melted or transformed in the raging solar radiation during Mercury's daytime. The other main character in the story is almost the complete opposite of Swan, Fitz Wahram, a slow-moving, toad-like, bug-eyed, body-modified, man who is a diplomat from Titan. Throughout the story they meet, separate, meet again and get into various dire circumstances as they flit around the solar system. Much of what takes place is only tangential to the actual plot involving investigating various tragic occurrences throughout the solar system that may not be natural or random. The reader really has to wade through a lot of bulk to get to the plot that finally picks up toward the end of the book. Kudos to anyone else hanging on to the end of this one.