Over the Christmas holiday I took a break from "deep" reading to settle down with some purely escapist fare, Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction epic "2312." It was published in 2012 and clocks in at 657 pages. Even so, it reads faster than "Clarissa." But anyway ...
I got into it quickly, and was soon highlighting segments and jotting notes in the margins, an activity that years ago I would have regarded as the worst kind of vandalism. Today, I regard marginalia as a thing of beauty and have no problem embellishing my books, both fiction and non-fiction, with scribbles, arrows, underlines, etc.
Anyway. Robinson's book chronicles life in the year 2312, teasing the reader both with flashbacks (in the form of excerpts from a history text) and a mounting narrative the mystery of some transformative event occurring that year that changes the course of human history. It is told from the point of view of Swan, who is an amalgamation of the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic and the British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy.
I toyed with the idea of writing a full-length review. The book, in my opinion, is a twisted mess of infatuation with technology and confused thinking about history, economics and social life. Indeed, one of Robinson's own sentences describes what I believe is one of the book's main problems: "By the early twenty-fourth century, there was too much going on to be either seen or understood."
I'm going to bail out of this one. I don't have time to wade through the book again, which I'd really want to do before attempting a serious analysis of the bewildering ideological problems that undermine the narrative. Also, I'd want to look at some of Robinson's other books, particularly his award-winning Mars trilogy, where I gather that the issues of economic and social issues are more clearly worked out. A book ought to stand on its own, obviously, but I concede that it's possible that "2312" might make more sense if placed in that context. Because on Robinson's Mars, apparently, capitalism doesn't exist.
Suffice to say, Earth in "2312" is still run under winner-take-all capitalism, and there is virtually no ice anywhere. Those who have left either live on other planets or their moons, or aboard hollowed-out asteroids that have been transformed through geo-engineering to satisfy every possible whim. These asteroids are known as the terraria.
Robinson is an intelligent writer. He clearly grasps the hard sciences, and that's where the text spends most of its time -- detailed descriptions of the processes used to transform a hunk of rock hurtling through space into a paradise, for example. Or, in what I thought was the most intriguing part, descriptions of how people are able to live on Mercury without being fried to a crisp. Ecology is, apparently, always a component of Robinson's sci-fi. That's to his credit.
It is this essential strain of "2312" that prompts today's post. I'm including below two excerpts from Robinson's book that contain a good deal of insight into the predicament in which humanity now finds itself: an ecological crisis prompting a startling comment by another novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, in the latest issue of The Sun magazine: "I don't actually feel sure humanity will be around in fifty or sixty years."
Back to Robinson. The first excerpt is from the chapter entitled "Swan in Africa," on page 443 of the paperback edition:
Earth the bad planet. Despite its wind and sky, she was coming to hate it again, and not just because of the awful (gravity), but rather because of the evidence everywhere of what her species had done to the place, and was still doing. The dead hand of the past, so huge, so heavy. The air seemed a syrup she had to struggle through. On in the terraria one lived free, like an animal -- one could be an animal, make one's own life one way or another. Live as naked as you wanted. On the God-damned Earth the accumulated traditions and laws and habits made something that was worse than any body bra; it was one's mind that was held in place, tied in straitjackets, obliged to be like all the others in their ridiculous boxed habits. Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice -- as if they were in a space station -- as if the bad old days of the caged centuries had never gone away. They didn't even look at the stars at night.
That's a hell of a paragraph. Sitting in boxes, staring at littler boxes.
Okay, so here's the next one. It's from the chapter entitled "Swan and Zasha," and it appears on page 100. Again, Swan (who spends most of her time in Mercury) is here visting Earth:
Through gaps in the cloud layer she should see the light-but-dark blue of the Terran sky, subtle and full. It looked like a blue dome flattened at the center, perhaps a few kilometers above the clouds -- she reached up for it -- although knowing too that it was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything. The blue itself was complex, narrow in range but infinite within that range. It was an intoxicating sight, and you could breathe it -- one was always breathing it, you had to. The wind shoved it into you! Breathe and get drunk, oh my, to be free of all restraint, minimally clothed, lying on the bare surface of a planet, sucking its atmosphere as if it were an aqua vitae, feeling in your chest how it kept you alive! No Terran she had ever met properly appreciated their air, or saw their sky for what it was. In fact, they very seldom looked at it.
No, we don't look at it. Or anything beneath it, for that matter. Not really. Sitting in boxes, staring at littler boxes. Oblivious to the destruction of the only planet (that we know about) where it is possible for human beings to live.
I got into it quickly, and was soon highlighting segments and jotting notes in the margins, an activity that years ago I would have regarded as the worst kind of vandalism. Today, I regard marginalia as a thing of beauty and have no problem embellishing my books, both fiction and non-fiction, with scribbles, arrows, underlines, etc.
Anyway. Robinson's book chronicles life in the year 2312, teasing the reader both with flashbacks (in the form of excerpts from a history text) and a mounting narrative the mystery of some transformative event occurring that year that changes the course of human history. It is told from the point of view of Swan, who is an amalgamation of the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic and the British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy.
I toyed with the idea of writing a full-length review. The book, in my opinion, is a twisted mess of infatuation with technology and confused thinking about history, economics and social life. Indeed, one of Robinson's own sentences describes what I believe is one of the book's main problems: "By the early twenty-fourth century, there was too much going on to be either seen or understood."
I'm going to bail out of this one. I don't have time to wade through the book again, which I'd really want to do before attempting a serious analysis of the bewildering ideological problems that undermine the narrative. Also, I'd want to look at some of Robinson's other books, particularly his award-winning Mars trilogy, where I gather that the issues of economic and social issues are more clearly worked out. A book ought to stand on its own, obviously, but I concede that it's possible that "2312" might make more sense if placed in that context. Because on Robinson's Mars, apparently, capitalism doesn't exist.
Suffice to say, Earth in "2312" is still run under winner-take-all capitalism, and there is virtually no ice anywhere. Those who have left either live on other planets or their moons, or aboard hollowed-out asteroids that have been transformed through geo-engineering to satisfy every possible whim. These asteroids are known as the terraria.
Robinson is an intelligent writer. He clearly grasps the hard sciences, and that's where the text spends most of its time -- detailed descriptions of the processes used to transform a hunk of rock hurtling through space into a paradise, for example. Or, in what I thought was the most intriguing part, descriptions of how people are able to live on Mercury without being fried to a crisp. Ecology is, apparently, always a component of Robinson's sci-fi. That's to his credit.
It is this essential strain of "2312" that prompts today's post. I'm including below two excerpts from Robinson's book that contain a good deal of insight into the predicament in which humanity now finds itself: an ecological crisis prompting a startling comment by another novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, in the latest issue of The Sun magazine: "I don't actually feel sure humanity will be around in fifty or sixty years."
Back to Robinson. The first excerpt is from the chapter entitled "Swan in Africa," on page 443 of the paperback edition:
Earth the bad planet. Despite its wind and sky, she was coming to hate it again, and not just because of the awful (gravity), but rather because of the evidence everywhere of what her species had done to the place, and was still doing. The dead hand of the past, so huge, so heavy. The air seemed a syrup she had to struggle through. On in the terraria one lived free, like an animal -- one could be an animal, make one's own life one way or another. Live as naked as you wanted. On the God-damned Earth the accumulated traditions and laws and habits made something that was worse than any body bra; it was one's mind that was held in place, tied in straitjackets, obliged to be like all the others in their ridiculous boxed habits. Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice -- as if they were in a space station -- as if the bad old days of the caged centuries had never gone away. They didn't even look at the stars at night.
That's a hell of a paragraph. Sitting in boxes, staring at littler boxes.
Okay, so here's the next one. It's from the chapter entitled "Swan and Zasha," and it appears on page 100. Again, Swan (who spends most of her time in Mercury) is here visting Earth:
Through gaps in the cloud layer she should see the light-but-dark blue of the Terran sky, subtle and full. It looked like a blue dome flattened at the center, perhaps a few kilometers above the clouds -- she reached up for it -- although knowing too that it was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything. The blue itself was complex, narrow in range but infinite within that range. It was an intoxicating sight, and you could breathe it -- one was always breathing it, you had to. The wind shoved it into you! Breathe and get drunk, oh my, to be free of all restraint, minimally clothed, lying on the bare surface of a planet, sucking its atmosphere as if it were an aqua vitae, feeling in your chest how it kept you alive! No Terran she had ever met properly appreciated their air, or saw their sky for what it was. In fact, they very seldom looked at it.
No, we don't look at it. Or anything beneath it, for that matter. Not really. Sitting in boxes, staring at littler boxes. Oblivious to the destruction of the only planet (that we know about) where it is possible for human beings to live.
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