This is the longest book I’ve read in some time, but then I read it while engaging in one of the longest trips I’ve ever taken, a visit to the Antarctic peninsula by a 130-person capacity cruise ship called the Sylvia Earle. While Jill read the primary documents about the continent—accounts of the Scott and Shackleton expeditions—I let Stan Robinson summarize those for me in his near future SF about people who want to work and live in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth. Perfect fodder for a writer whose previous books were about terraforming Mars. Robinson’s book came from his own visit to Antarctica as a fellow for the NSF U.S. Antarctic Program’s Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995. The first third of the book, after a small action hook, is a slow burn through the details of what it is like to be in Antarctic as well as recaps of those adventurers who had strived to be the first: the first to go the farthest south, the first to the pole, the first to traverse or climb this or that. Halfway through, Robinson’s plot finally begins (somewhat predictably), leading to a climax that allows him to postulate about many, many things, from the effects of population growth, resource extraction, climate change, and sustainable living, to feng shi and employee co-ops and scientific endeavors. The paperback edition I read is 650 pages and Robinson packs it with a lot of thought experiments.

I enjoyed it, but some of that may have been the fact that I could look out my window, or reflect on the continental landing I had just completed, as Stan writes about the beauty of ice fields and the glassy ocean and how the cold hits your nose and tries to freeze the snot in your sinuses. While I did not engage in any of the hardships suffered by his characters or the explorers before them, it was certainly less difficult for me to imagine what they went through by being so close to the places it happened. I have no doubt that Robinson got his research right, nor that he spent long nights contemplating the Antarctic Treaty and its tenuous hope for a world where science rules over politics, or at least calls the shots. What he creates in this novel, however, is no utopian solution, recognizing such a thing is hopeless, but he does provide some clues as to how people might work towards something other than the dystopia we seem to be barreling towards. In the decades since this book was first published, science fiction has seen the birth of a burgeoning subgenre alternatively termed solarpunk or hopepunk. If that subgenre ever becomes a thing, Robinson’s Antarctica surely seems to be an early example if not precursor.