2312

Title: 2312
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Rating: 4 out of 5

I've decided that my summaries have been getting too long, so I'm going to make future summaries shorter. This book was over 500 pages, but here we go.

Summary (with spoilers):
Swan lives on Terminator, a city on Mercury that glides along planet-wide tracks to avoid being caught in the sun. As Swan grieves at the death of her grandmother, Alex, she learns that Alex was involved in secret political dealings. Alex has left several letters that Swan must deliver, causing Swan to meet up with Wahram, Inspector Gennette, and Wang.

In addition to being overcome with grief, Swan is a rather unusual person. She had her qube, Pauline, installed in her head. She's also undergone various physical modifications.

Swan tries to figure out what Alex was working on, but no one will tell her directly what's going on, except that it has to do with Earth, and that they don't trust the qubes. Swan travels to Earth via terraria (hollowed-out asteroids turned into small worlds), to meet up with her former lover, Zasha. On Earth, some ruffians attempt to kidnap her, but she is saved by Kiran. In return, she gets him off-planet to Venus, where he becomes a double agent for two major political powers.

Swan meets up with Wahram on Mercury. After attending a conference, they decide to don some spacesuits and walk back to the city platform. En route, they witness an explosion the almost hits Terminator and destroys the tracks. They rush back to the city, but it's already been evacuated. Since the sun is rising, they need to get to safety. They decide to run sun-ward to the next platform, which has an underground system mirroring the tracks above ground. They make it to the platform, and while they are waiting for the elevator to arrive, Swan jumps in front of Wahram to protect him from a solar flare.

They hike along the underground tunnel for weeks, trying to reach safety, whistling Bach to pass the time. Swan gets increasingly ill from radiation poisoning. Eventually, they go to the surface to break the monotony, even though they are sun-side, and a vehicle passing by rescues them.

Swan spends time with Inspector Gennette, who thinks the attack on Mercury was caused by lots of small rocks thrown so that they would all land at the same time. He's also suspicious of the cubes. Swan and Wahram go to Earth to help with various development projects and then decide to repopulate Earth with all of the animals stored in the terraria. Thousands of animals are sent through the sky in gel balloons. On Earth, Swan and Warham realize they have feelings for each other.

Swan and Warham become passengers on a space craft, when Pauline informs Swan that a similar attack is planned on the Venus sun shield. They use the space ship to deflect the small projectiles, which means that everyone has to evacuate. Swan and Warham get into space suits and float in space, waiting to be rescued. However, their rescue ship is attacked before it can pick them up, and Warham's leg is injured. Eventually, they are rescued, but their time waiting in space is reminiscent of their time in the tunnel.

Meanwhile, these strange humanoid qubes have been wandering about causing trouble, so Inspector Gennette exiles them all in a star ship. The book ends with the marriage of Swan and Warham.

My Thoughts:
My summary doesn't do the book justice, as its strengths lie in world building, character development, and philosophical discussions. It was a book that would make me stop mid-page and think for 20 minutes about the concepts. I enjoyed the discussion of the pseudo-iterative routines of Warham, the question of qube-human relationships, and the descriptions of the various terraria.

My favorite part of the book was when they were wandering through the tunnel, and also the description of animals floating down to Earth. The chapters completely filled with terraforming descriptions were hard for me to get through, but most of them actually did have a relation to the plot. I believe the book could have been 100 pages shorter, but I enjoyed the complexity and depth of the world that Robinson built.

This book has won the Nebula and is up for the Hugo this year. I would have voted for it if I had signed up for a voting membership.