If you enjoy world-building then 2312 is a must read. Kim Stanley Robinson has all kinds of brilliant ideas about the solar system 300 years from now. Most of them are based on the idea of terraforming- a way of altering an astronomical object to make it suitable for habitat. A lot of the places that get terraformed in 2312 were engineered as a way of preserving ecosystems and communities on Earth that became uninhabitable after global warming and the mass extinctions of the 21st century.
Robinson takes us to almost every planet and a large variety of moons and asteroids, each of which have been terraformed into unique environments. Venus aptly has cities named after goddesses and famous women. One of them is made of seashells (which must be a reference to Boticelli's Venus). By terraforming Venus, engineers used a giant shield to deflect all the solar radiation that formerly made the planet inhospitable. They also bombarded it with meteors in order to increase its spin. Then on Mars they built supersized hexagonal canals that were connected to each other at their vertices, allowing the whole planet to become irrigated. The peak of Olympus Mons is a top destination for space travelers, and the site of an important wedding ceremony in the book. Saturn's turbulent atmosphere is also visited, and there's a fun little segment where people go surfing on the rings of the planet.
Mercury's the home of Swan, a hundred-something year old designer who's as irritable as any protagonist I've encountered. She teams up with a group of investigators interested in solving the reason why Mercury's main city Terminator was destroyed. They think it has something to do with robotic humans called 'qubes', making 2312 yet another warning about the consequences of machines becoming humanized.
This book changed my perspective on the solar system. Though I'd read about other planets and their moons before, I'd never actually visited them in my mind. And there were so many asteroids that got engineered in interesting ways that it made me wonder if terraforming will ever be possible as an art form. Robinson went out of his way to dedicate whole chapters to listing off these worlds. That brings me to the next interesting thing about this book: a lot of it is experimental. Some chapters are fragmented and encyclopedic, while others are poetic and ambiguous, leaving a lot to the reader to decide what happens in between the gray areas. However, most of the book is written in the standard narrative form we're all familiar with.
One of the gripes some people have with 2312 is that the main characters are either unlikable or just plain boring. Swan may be stubborn and bratty, but I found her more interesting than some of the other strong female leads in literature, who show no emotion at all. Speaking of no emotion, there's Wahram, Swan's love interest, who's a total square. I was surprised he didn't turn out to be a robot. Despite their faults they make a good couple, and you start to see why their differences draw them to each other near the end of the book.
Of all the intriguing ideas Robinson came up with, the one below made me feel like a more complete person. It's hard to explain why, but if you enjoy reading, writing, and science the way I do, you may have some use for it:
"To form a sentence is to collapse many superposed wave functions to a single thought universe. Multiplying the lost universes word by word, we can say that each sentence extinguishes 10^n universes, where n is the number of words in the sentence. Each thought condenses trillions of potential thoughts. Thus, we get verbal overshadowing, where the language we use structures the reality we inhabit. Maybe this is a blessing. Maybe this is why we need to keep making sentences."
The idea of thought being a dimension of space is what particularly draws me to it. Like time there are infinite varieties of thought, and therefore an infinite potential of sentences, each of which are defined here as existing in their own realm as a thought-form. This means that the activity of writing a sentence can be an act of creation; that as the pen moves across the paper, new universes are being born after each period. So, a whole book would contain its own multiverse. And a library? Well, there's no word for that yet.
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