Hugo 2013 Reviews: 2013 by Kim Stanley Robinson

The last of the Hugo-nominated books that I read, and in many ways one of the largest.  I haven’t read any of Kim Stanley Robinson’s other books, so I don’t know how common this style is for his writing, but I gather that they generally span quite a range of places and people.  What I would call epics, though the term is usually used more with fantasy than with sci-fi.

The world-building was far and away the strongest part of this book, in my opinion.  The many ways that people might adapt things in space to allow humans to live there (and adapt humans as well) were considered, and by the end of the story large amounts of them had been shown.  So far as I could follow it the science (of the parts we can know right now) was accurate, and I trust that people who can follow more than me probably verified it as well.  It’s that kind of story.

What it isn’t, as much — again, in my opinion — is anything much of an actual story.  To me, it read a lot more like “stuff happened” than “connected events leading to a revelation or change.”  As presented, changes happened aplenty, and the POV characters may even have been integral in some of them happening, but for the majority of the novel the POV characters weren’t acting toward causing many of those things to happen.

Analyzed from a promises/resolutions point of view, the novel started with Swan’s life disrupted from losing a family member, and you could say that the rest of the novel was her gaining a new one, forging a new connection in the world.  On the other hand, you could say the inciting incident was Swan’s grandma dying, and the resolution being the fruition of her plans.  So far as I recall, neither was given much prominence by Swan herself, which means that neither played strongly.  It might have been a novel of Swan finding herself, or finding her way, but again Swan doesn’t appear to be dissatisfied with much that gets resolved by the end of the story.  She doesn’t appear to change, and with the majority of the book from her POV, that gets rough for me.

Other side characters, and even POVs, eventually get woven into the end of the book, but I will admit to heightened expectations after seeing the good reviews the book had received, and so I was kind of expecting a bigger bang of colliding plot-lines at the end.

In the end, 2312 reads more like “a year in the life” book, with a few other POVs thrown in and some pastiche material added from the world-building notebook, than it does a story with a defined beginning and end.  There must be people that this appeals to, but I am guessing I’m not one of them.  The ideas were grand, but the story did nothing special for me, so in the end it falls to the bottom of my rankings.

1: Redshirts
2: Blackout
3: Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance
4: Throne of the Crescent Moon
5: 2312