2312

This is my first time reading Robinson, and I was instantly floored by this man's skills as a writer. I have told my peers that if he didn't write genre fiction, he'd probably have a prestigious literary award to his name. His descriptions of the settings this story travel to alone are worth the read. At points, it felt like I was taking a guided tour of the solar system: riding the rings of Saturn, jogging along Mercury to stay ahead of the coming dawn, and my favourite part, public transit by way of hollowed out asteroids with man-made climates built inside. Just imagine the next time you travel being asked “on your way, would you like to experience the environment of an ice age expidition, safari, rain forest or rural France?”
The characters, philosophies and basically everything about this book is brilliant. In short, (cliche warning) it's a tour de force.
This book is about 15% plot, and the rest is concept, setting, and character, and that's the way I like it. But I hold back on 5 stars only because the lack of plot combined with the size of the book, and the long bouts of descriptive writing meant I had a hard time keeping momentum. When a side character's story came back to the fold, I would realize I'd forgotten what that character's part of the story was, and would get kind of lost. Maybe this is a 2020 problem as much as any (I was reading this when the second wave of COVID hit and the American election happened, and my attention was obviously strained) so maybe this is an unfair criticism. But such was my reading experience.
I recommend highly to any reader not afraid of a little detail, but not really for people who need a “page turner”.