I read maybe one sci-fi book a year. My barrier to entry is generally the writing itself. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I find that most contemporary sci-fi books - as with most "genre" books - tend to be poorly written, sacrificing craft in favor of the fascinating worlds, etc that they present. So, it's always a pleasant surprise when I encounter a work of sci-fi that's also really well written because I am a bit of a futurist at heart and love to delve into these worlds. (It's not for nothing that Star Trek: The Next Generation was my favorite show as a kid.) I'm happy to say 2312 is such a work. Kim Stanley Robinson is perhaps most famous for his Mars trilogy, and from what I gather this book is typical of his earlier style. I haven't read the Mars trilogy, so I can't speak from personal experience. However, after 2312 I'm definitely intrigued.

It's difficult to summarize this book because it's really more a history of a possible future than a traditional novel. Sure, there's a main character and a central conflict, but so much of the book deals with the meta factors of life in space cohabiting with technology that it does the book a disservice to say it's simply the story of Swan Er Hong. Swan is Mercurial - in both the sense that she's prone to sudden mood shifts and that she's from the planet Mercury (there are a lot of little puns like that throughout) - and when we first meet her she's mourning the recent death of her grandmother. The plot picks up from there with Swan getting tangled up in a type of solar system manhunt/mystery. But, 2312 isn't a mystery, not really anyway. For one thing, the action scenes are few and far between and when they do arrive they're over before you even notice. No, the focus here is most definitely on exploring the time and place. Curiously enough, the strongest narrative voice here speaks from an even more distant future so that while reading one gets the dizzying sense of looking back on a time that for one reading today hasn't yet occurred. An interesting technique, but I could see how some might consider it gimmicky.

The greatest weakness here is also the novel's greatest strength. While the world building is fascinating it can at times drag on. It's worth enduring, however, as some of the most beautiful passages depict things never seen by human eyes: sunsets that last for 16 "days" on the moons of Saturn; clear aquarium "terrariums" floating in the nothingness of space; etc. Again, from what I gather, this is typical of Robinson's work, so if you're okay with that you shouldn't have any reservations about diving in. If this is the only sci-fi book I read this year, I'm glad it was such an enjoyable experience.