Antarctica is – like all of his other novels – unique in his oeuvre: Robinson never writes the same book twice.

At first sight it is a blend of near future adventure thriller, historical report, political treatise and landscape travelogue. But when I looked closer, rereading the parts I had highlighted to possibly quote here, it slowly dawned on me: this is KSR’s big epistemic novel. It is epistemology that subtly & cleverly holds together the different themes of this book: storytelling, imagination, science, ethics, politics, economics, the reality of nature.

As such, it might be the richest book Robinson has written – at least from an philosophical point of view. Robinson convincingly ties utopia and science together once and for all: this is no scifi, but realistic fiction about the essence & scope of science.

More on that after the jump.

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Full 5000-word analysis on Weighing a Pig Doesn't Fatten It ( )

It was a very entertaining read with themes close to my heart: dealing with overpopulation, and gotterdammerung capitalism. ( )

I hate the word "relevant/premonitory" when applied to SF. It seems a horribly pessimistic idea that we can only relate to things that are right in front of us or directly to do with us and our own tribe or corner of the world rather than just relating to a shared experience of being human. I´m not an Argentinian but I love Borges and Cortázar. I never grew up in the post-revolutionary USSR but I love the work of Andrey Platonov. Ditto with Iceland in the 1900s and Halldor Laxness´s “Independent People”. They´re relevant to me because they describe the experience of being humans. All books, no matter how contemporary, will one day be set in "the past". All books will one day describe a world that no longer exists. Re-reading for example "Lanark" by Alasdair Gray, somewhat closer in time and geography to my own upbringing at the British Council, I was struck by how that too is set in, both in terms of actual setting and in its mental landscape and attitudes, a Scotland that has now largely passed into myth just as much as the Scotland of clans and crofters and clearances had before it. Our world, or rather our worlds, our individual experiences and memories and perceptions that mold our realities, are always doomed to oblivion, even if the physical places survive. That´s what I like about “Antarctica” - it preserves these individual slices of worlds from being forgotten, at least for a little while, before climate change changes it forever.

For me, that´s where the relevance of SF comes from and it´ll remain relevant as long as humans still exist. I think people will always want to read about the past - people haven't stopped reading Dickens or Jane Austen, Shakespeare or Graham Greene because the world they describe has largely disappeared. The human conflicts and dramas they describe are as relevant as ever. So, even if our world changes beyond recognition - some people will still read books, and mostly they'll read the new stuff, the stuff that hasn't been written yet, but a few people will read the old books like “Antarctica”, because we all want to be Wade (one of the characters in the novel) and not because they are relevant, but because they're good. Unfortunately, I had to go back to one of Stanley Robinson’s earlier ones to recover the feeling that he can still write good SF. Will people read Stanley Robinson in the future…? Who knows? What I do know is that “Antarctica” is his best work so far.



SF = Speculative Fiction.

Book Review SF = Speculative Fiction ( )

Decent enough yarn that's packed full of jargon that you'll be Googling to find out what it is! ( )

I quite enjoyed this novel about living and working in the hostile environment of Antarctica, but came into it with some wrong expectations. Having read a number of Robinson's other fiction works, I was expecting there to be some elements of fantastical or scientific fiction, and kept anticipating something along those lines to happen. ( )