The future might well be a bit like this
Kim Stanley Robinson has yet to disappoint me. I don’t think his books are perfect, nor do I necessarily concur with every aspect of what I surmise his views to be, but they are always thought provoking, thoroughly researched, technically convincing, humanely characterised, tightly plotted and built from some pretty solid prose. He’s usually pretty ambitious as well, which is a virtue in a novelist as capable as he is.
2312, which is set three hundred years after its publication of date, is an attempt to describe the political and technical state of the entire human race, through a story that focusses on a small number of its members, members who are not big-shots in the sense that ‘world leaders’ are today, but who are nonetheless pretty influential. The year 2312 is to be regarded as some kind of fulcrum, according to some later fictional documents that are quoted in the book. The events of the book mark a turning point from the continued political fragmentation of humanity and the continued ecological degradation of the Earth, but there is no single big spectacular event, no battle, political accommodation, or revolution. There are certainly some dramatic things that happen, but they are acts of terrorism and police responses to those acts, culminating in the exile from the Solar System of a number of quantum computers embodied in realistic androids, along with a small number of humans that have been designing and exploiting them.
This relatively low-key plot (given the ambitions of the book as a whole), serves to direct the reader’s attention away from the usual big political concerns, and towards the more existential or philosophical matters that seem to be Robinson’s primary interest here. I’m not going to paraphrase him here, or pretend to tell you what the book is ‘about’, as I think he’s clearly more interested in the discussion than in any conclusions it may lead to, and it’s a very wide ranging and sophisticated discussion… He is interested here, as he always is, in relating what might simplistically be called ‘the arts and humanities’ to the science and engineering that might be considered the proper intellectual substance of serious SF; his research never neglects such areas, and he is often as likely to deploy literary or cultural theories as scientific ones. If there is a weakness to this aspect of his work, it is that he sometimes seems to regard cultural theories as bearing the same kind of relationship to their subjects as do physical theories; the fundamentally contingent, indeterminate quality of the meanings and understandings they offer sometimes seems to elude him, but he doesn’t let that lead him to excessively deterministic conclusions. Indeed, this book in particular is one that frequently left me asking ‘wait… what just happened?’
And irrespective of whether Robinson shares the kind of limited understanding that prompted the physicist Alan Sokal’s hoax on the cultural studies journal Social Text (which did make an important point about intellectual rigour), he is keen to engage with the ways that people and societies find meaning. He is one of few SF writers that is as interested in the future of art as the future of science, and he has some pleasing ideas (such as the lower-case goldsworthies and abramovics, as the names of art forms). Of all the visions of the future I’ve encountered in fiction, Robinson’s are the only ones that consistently leave me thinking that, yes, that’s probably how things will turn out. Along the way he keeps the pages turning with a constant flow of intellectual stimulation, an unfolding mystery, and the lives of characters that seem convincingly to embody the huge social changes he postulates. This is what SF should be.