read: 2312 (A Novel) (3 stars)

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An epic tale of a possible human future.

You can't fault the author's imagination here. He obviously spent some time extrapolating science and human nature 300 years into the future and came up with some pretty off-the-wall stuff. The problem for me was mostly the shear overwhelming volume of it all. This future is so wildly imaginative that I could scarcely keep my feeble brain wrapped around all the concepts.

I also had some difficulty identifying with the main characters. One is a 140 year old, hermaphrodite, mostly female, galactic hippy that usually acts about 1/10th her age. The other is a younger and often wiser mostly male who's having a mid-life crisis and follows the woman around the solar system in an infatuated fog.

I almost gave up when the story kept bogging down describing cities that crawl around planets and asteroids (become spaceships containing odd self contained communities) that rocket between planets and avoided describing the very interplanetary conflict that was supposedly driving events. But I powered through for the sake of my book club and wound up appreciating the sweep of the story.

View all my reviews on Goodreads