Reviews and Comments

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.

In an effort to catch up on some of the most popular SFF published in the last couple of decades, I finally turned to this, the first in The Expanse series, now made into a TV series on Netflix. And it’s easy to see what has made it so popular and cinematic: the action here is exciting, the characters fairly complex, and the political machinations between Earth, Mars, and the Belt intriguing and interesting. The latter is probably the best selling point of the book, at least for me. Corey (a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank, but I’ll refer to the collaboration with their chosen sobriquet because it truly is the work of both) has imagined a future in which humanity has escaped the gravity well that is our home planet, but not made much progress in escaping our solar system. This “on the cusp” of something bigger defines the book, in which an alien…let’s call it a virus…is discovered and what happens when different groups interact with it. But the book is anchored in the point-of-view of two characters, who affect the politics, but aren’t politicians, and that saves the book from being too heady and firmly keeps it in the tradition of action-adventure.

Now, for the negatives. The two POVs, both male, display some annoying modern (or possibly 20th century) tendencies, especially with regards to women. Oh brave new world where we still can’t get beyond sexism, I greet thee. On the plus side, Corey uses these character flaws to try to deepen both the characterization and utilize it for some plot surprises, but after reading the more enlightened future of Becky Chambers, the element grated a bit on my sensibilities. While not going full Bruce Sterling (whose Shaper/Mechanist series had some great depictions of how humanity would be changed by space), Corey explores some of what might be the differences in future groups who grew up entirely in space, and how those differences might become a new racism.

The other negative, although I was able to overcome my squeamishness, was the amount of body horror here. The aforementioned Belter differences pale in comparison to what the alien virus achieves, even so much as being described by the characters as making their human hosts zombies. But it’s much worse than that. This would likely put me off the TV series, depending upon how much of that is depicted; in reading, I’m able to get beyond it. Given that the opening leaves a pretty stark description of this as the cliffhanger, it’s not that Corey doesn’t warn the reader about what’s coming, however.

All in all, I enjoyed the book and am intrigued enough by the ending (which is an ending, but not) to be interested in continuing the series at some point.