You may remember that a while back I was excited to start reading 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR) the moment it came out. I started it on May 22nd, and finished it on July 6th. One-and-a-half months. I do not take that long to read books, but with 2312 I had to put it down a little over halfway through because I was just not that into it.
“It’s not you, it’s me,” I told the book before letting it languish in the recesses of my Kindle, but like most everyone who uses that line, it was a half-truth at best.
You see, 2312 starts off well enough, with the Mercurian artist Swan er Hong dealing with the death of her beloved grandmother, Alex. As it turns out, Alex was a leader in the politics of the solar system, and her death may not have been natural. Enter inspector Jean Genette, a pint-sized human known as a ‘small,’ and Fitz Wahram, a roundish, toad-like human from Titan, who both are curious to know if Alex left Swan any information to pass along to them. Alex would not have used the network of artificial intelligences, or qubes, to pass along the information, because she and others are not sure anymore if they can trust that the qubes are working for humanity or for their own purposes.
I had high hopes for the book based on that premise, and back on 5/25/12, when I was about 10% in, I wrote, “I have trouble getting my head around some of the science, but it is balanced with interesting characters and a mystery to pull me past the parts that make my brain melt.” Unfortunately, the book turned up the power on the brain-melt ray after that and the plot became lost amidst a travelogue of the solar system. In the year 2312, we find, humans have spread throughout the system and genetically modified themselves as needed to fit each area’s niche (or just for the sake of it, I guess). You have the aforementioned smalls, who are about a third the size of a “normal” human, toad-like beings who live near Saturn, and relatively Earth-normal humans like Swan who nevertheless are both male and female and may have several genetic modifications made to their bodies for adaptive or cosmetic reasons.
There are also many wondrous settings to explore: hollowed-out asteroids that float between the planets, a flooded Manhattan, space elevators, and a rolling city that circumnavigates Mercury, to name a few. But as KSR geeks out on all the neat things we’ll be able to do to our bodies and environment in the future, he neglects to move the plot along for large swaths of the novel. I needed a lot less observations on how people live in crafted worlds and have sex in endless variations and more focus on characters and plot.
For much of the book, though, we only touch on moments in the lives of Swan, Wahram, and Genette, moving the plot forward minutely, while the large chunks of the book around each of these moments are as drowned in poetic language and techno-speak as future Manhattan is in water. I also found it too convenient that, while on Earth, Swan befriends an Earth native named Kiran who she rescues from poverty on Earth and deposits with friends on Venus, where he ends up discovering crucial information to move the plot along.
Add to all this a series of connective chapters that are “Extracts” and “Lists” that felt like a chore to read and which I only skimmed through past a certain point, and it slowed my reading speed down considerably, as nothing was pulling me forward. This would be when I stopped reading 2312 for an entire month, at about the 60% point of the book.
A couple of days ago, I picked 2312 back up to see if I could get through the rest; I hate leaving books unfinished. Lo and behold, the last third (roughly) of the book was much more plot- and character-focused. While it still didn’t have the satisfying thrill and pull of, say, KSR’s Mars trilogy, it moved a lot faster and at least provided an answer to the main mystery in the book and some character growth.
Maybe I am judging 2312 unfairly against some idealized memory of the Mars Trilogy, but in my mind at least, the Mars books were full of characters I cared about (whether I was rooting for or against them), with exciting and relatable science and politics thrown in. With 2312, even if I began to care about Swan or Wahram, the focus jumped around so much, and the places were given just as much emphasis as the characters (or more, usually), that I couldn’t nestle into the character’s minds and get to know them enough to care what happened to them next.
I feel like KSR wanted this book to be a piece of art more than one of fiction. He paints the world of 2312 vividly and in great detail, but there was not enough story woven through that world for me to want to explore it. It ended up being a bigger disappointment for being so highly anticipated.
Oh well, we’ll always have Mars.
Lithicbee 
That’s a shame. Andy. Why don’t you do a review of the Mars trilogy. Sounds like you enjoyed that series. 2312, as you’ve described it reminds me of a book called EON, by Greg Bear, though iirc, a better balanced one (been awhile since I read it though-over a decade). I’d be interested to hear what you have to say about EON.
I would love to re-read and review the Mars Trilogy at some point (and many many other books) but it is a matter of finding the time and balancing re-reads vs new reads. I read and enjoyed EON a looong time ago.