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The Wild Shore

This is one of those books that I've been hearing about for years and finally sat down and read. (My sluggishness was not entirely my fault; it was out-of-print for some time and was simply not available in used bookstores around here. Naturally, mere months after I found a copy it came back into print in an elegant oversized paperback edition.) As often seems to be the case when I read such highly-touted books, I was somewhat disappointed by The Wild Shore (though not nearly to the extent I was disappointed by, say, William Gibson's Neuromancer).

The best aspect of the book is Robinson's facility with the English language: The book is extremely well-written, with lush and evocative prose. The world which Robinson has brought vividly to life is this: Around 1984, the largest cities in the US were nuked, but for various reasons no retaliation was carried out. The outside world quarantined the continent, which was left to rebuild from the ground up. 60 years later, a community of people in Onofre on the California coast are contacted by a larger community in San Diego who are organizing a resistance; it seems the outside world is sabotaging efforts to improve their technology (via spacebourne lasers) and are staging cover learn a lot about the world around them that they hadn't known.

Despite the quality of the prose, it never seemed to me that the book really went anywhere; it wasn't really about anything. Although the main character, Henry, is a young man nearing adulthood, it's not really a coming-of-age story, though he does face several hard tests in the book. The book explores the motivations of Henry and his friends as they join the Second American Revolution, but there seem to be no lessons to be learned from the book's climax other than, "Right ends, wrong means." While this may be a valid statement, it's somewhat disappointing in a 350-page novel, especially since what purpose there is in the book seems bereft of any moral weighing.

In a sense, it's Robinson's keen eye for realism (an admirable skill) which sinks the book; real life often seems to lack a point and seems rather unsatisfying, and this book is very realistic, given its premises. It's an impressive piece of craft, and every chapter feels like there ought to be something under the surface, but, ultimately, maddeningly, there isn't.

The Gold Coast

This second book in Robinson's "Three Californias" trilogy (the first being The Wild Shore) takes place in a future which is vaguely distopian: The world is still poised on the brink of global war (this novel was written before the Berlin Wall came down), the military-industrial complex's grip on the country is stronger than ever, and Orange County (where each volume of the trilogy takes place) is an overdeveloped mass of concrete and cars.

In this environment lives Jim McPherson, who teaches night classes, researches the County's history, and hangs out with his friends and does drugs. McPherson is full of both self-loathing and self-examination, and it's often difficult to tell when his thoughts and feelings are genuine or just constructed for the benefit of his audience - even when his only audience is himself. In short, Robinson created a slacker protagonist before the term became cool.

Jim's father - with whom he does not get along - works for the military-industrial complex, and spends much of the book being given the runaround by the Air Force on an important contract. Jim, meanwhile, hates the military and joins an underground group sabotaging warehouses of defense contractors. Eventually, of course, Jim is charged with a mission to sabotage the company his father works for, and after a charged argument with his father he loses his self-control and steals the weapons intended for the mission and cruises around the city performing random acts of major property damage.

The Gold Coast is filled with tidbits about the history of Orange County, how it grew into what it has become, and considerations of whether this is good or bad (or neither). It is also filled with a large cast of characters of varying depths and moral outlooks, each of them coping with their shaky economic situations as best they can, and most of them - one senses - being a little short on honesty and integrity (although, perhaps, not much more than most people). The novel works reasonably well as an extended character study, although it's nothing special. Its connection to The Wild Shore is tenuous at best: Both McPherson and Shore's protagonist are nominal patriots who want to act to improve their countries, but lack the power and perspective to really do anything useful. In that sense, the two books both glorify the individual, and emphasize that the individual is powerless to act on a grand scale; this is a frustrating message for people who want to see national or global change.

Icehenge

This is a delightful and haunting book which combines solid science fiction with intriguing character studies. The book takes place in three distinct pieces.

In the first, in the year 2248, a woman named Emma Weil becomes wrapped up in a covert plot to launch a starship by hijacking and modifying two asteroid miners. Man's governments have shown little inclination to do so, so some intrepid rebels decide to take matters into their own hands. Weil eventually declines to join them, and returns to her homeworld of Mars to join in the ongoing - and seemingly doomed - revolution occurring there.

Flash forward to 2547, where a scientist named Hjalmar Nederland is excavating one of the cities destroyed in the revolution, which the government has just now taken off the restricted list. In doing so, he discovers Weil's diary and her story of the revolution - and of the starship. Almost simultaneously, an expedition to Pluto discovers "Icehenge", a large circle of ice at the planet's north pole with the numbers 2-2-4-8 inscribed on one lith. Nederland sets out to prove that Icehenge was constructed by the members of the departing spaceship.

Even later than that, in 2610, Nederland's great-grandson, Edmond Doya, himself sets out to disprove his ancestor, to demonstrate that Icehenge was a hoax perpetrated by someone only a few years before it was discovered.

The book covers a wide range of ground, including the nature of human aging, what drives people to prove their own theories and the extent they'll go to to protect their conclusions, and, of course, the question of what is real and what isn't, and whether it really matters. It's a heavily - albeit subtly - psychological novel, and is particularly interesting in that it sets up a few science fictional concepts which are never fully resolved - because they're not the point of the story; they're "merely" the foil by which some of the other issues are played out.

As in The Wild Shore, Robinson proves an expert at creating landscapes and environments for his characters to explore and in which they struggle with their foibles. In my opinion, it's Robinson's best novel.

Red Mars

This first book of Robinson's dramatic trilogy about terraforming and colonizing Mars certainly has plenty to recommend it, yet at the same time it left something of a bad taste in my mouth. This is the third novel I've read by Robinson, and it may be useful to compare it to the two earlier works.

Icehenge is in some ways the direct forerunner of Red Mars, as the two books share several basic concepts, and even some detailed imagery (for instance, in both novels the protagonist looks at rows of cabbages being grown on a spaceship and notes that they look like "rows of pulsating brains"). Both novels have life extension technology as part of their backdrop, and both spend significant passages following the protagonist as s/he travels the Martian landscape. At times, one can almost imagine that Red Mars details the early days of the universe of Icehenge.

Even more interesting to contrast with Red Mars, though, is Robinson's first major novel, The Wild Shore. While reading TWS I often found myself in awe of Robinson's facility with the language, and his attention the detail in his world and characters, but the book ultimately left me feeling empty because I didn't feel it was really about anything. As a post-apocalypse novel it was replete with musings about the past and future in such a world, and it often seemed to be striving to be a coming-of-age tale, but ultimately it came off as more of a 'slice-of-life' piece (albeit of an extraordinary life). It was very understated.

In many ways, Red Mars is the polar opposite of The Wild Shore, and yet it seems only slightly more satisfying. The book is sweeping, with an encyclopedia's worth of characters, intense attention to science and detail, a complex plot revolving around both collectivist and 'great man' notions of political and social evolution, and some awe-inspiring science fictional developments.

But through it all, it feels as if the book has no soul, particularly where its characters are concerned. Overall, I feel like there's a translucent wall erected between the characters and the reader, so that the reader is rarely able to really get in and viscerally feel what the characters are feeling. Red Mars is the first book I've read by Robinson which is written in the third person, and I can't help but wonder if that's a big part of it. Both The Wild Shore and Icehenge feature long, nearly-poetic descriptions, reactions and asides by their narrators, and Red Mars seems to lack quite the same quality of narration. I wonder if Robinson doesn't quite feel comfortable getting into his characters' heads in this mode. Particularly since it's a book with a large cast, he might feel some obligation to be somewhat fair to his various characters' perceptions.

There are clearly characters who are going through some great emotional turmoil in the book. Maya Toitovna, for instance, spends much of the early chapters agonizing about her relationships with Frank Chalmers and John Boone. But after a while it seemed to me that her mental gymnastics were expressed with little more feeling than, "Maya was feeling upset about the situation. She went and cried to Nadia for a while, and Nadia was getting pretty tired of it."

The character who worked best for me was John Boone, but ironically he was perhaps the most simplistic of the major characters, as he was little more than a Captain Kirk/boy scout type in many respects. I may have liked him best simply because he was less angst-ridden than most of the rest of the cast.

Strangely, I also had some appreciation for Frank Chalmers, perhaps because I felt he was the most emotionally honest of the characters: He was largely driven by anger and frustration and tended to be destructive towards everything around him (although I'm not sure I got a good feel for why he felt this way; his rivalry with John didn't quite feel like it would account for it all). He seemed to be trying to come to terms with himself and his actions and generally try to tame his demons, and I was disappointed that he was killed near the end of the novel. He had of course done many reprehensible things throughout the story, including being responsible for John Boone's murder, but I find it a fascinating question whether such a character can atone for his actions in the long run. Now it seems we'll never find out (though since there's no body, there may be an outside chance he survived the flood that carried him away, and he might pop up again).

The other character bit that kind of irked me involved the Coyote, the stowaway on the original colony ship. We never learn anything about him, why he stowed away, why Hiroko (one of the original colonists) would have shielded him, or anything like that. But I imagine much of this would be revealed in later books in the trilogy (which I do plan to read).

As I said, I found Red Mars fascinating from a scientific and future-historical standpoint. I greatly appreciated that the book rarely lapsed into genericness, but told a distinct story that relied strongly on the actions of its characters, the specific structures built on Mars, and the situation back on Earth.

Although much of the technology early on smacked of deus-ex-machina (the magical machines that can separate matter into its component parts with hardly any effort at all), the issues involved in putting these building blocks together to create a human-livable environment was most intriguing, as were the hazards involved, and some of the early debate over whether Mars should be terraformed or not. (That the terraforming was haphazard at best made it seem all the more realistic.)

I was a bit jarred when the book jumped forward a decade or so from the earliest days to a time when Mars had a substantial population of tens or hundreds of thousands. I felt like I'd missed some major potentially interesting period of time. But I imagine that Robinson felt that way himself, and had probably tried to write a chapter about that era, and found that it didn't really add anything to the book. Eventually, when I reached the end of the novel, I felt the pace had actually worked well.

Much of the book is written in the style of a travelogue of Mars: Nadia Cherneshevsky's view of the planet just after the colonists have landed, John Boone's tour of the world after it had been somewhat tamed, with roads crossing it and several fairly major cities, and the race by several major characters at the end across the wild landscape being ravaged by manmade disasters. Some of this works quite well (particularly Nadia's journey over the natural Martian land formations), but since a good quarter of the 600-page book was devoted to this, it did seem to get a bit tiresome at times. The journey along the flooded canyons at the end especially seemed to go on and on and on.

The aforementioned disasters occurred when a fraction of Mars' populace launched an open revolt against the controlling forces from Earth. Earth had started using Mars as a resource base and a place to ship excess population, but had not provided resources for the Martian populace to support itself and develop into a healthy society; instead, in many regards it ended up resembling the crummy laissez-faire capitalist working conditions of 19th century America. When the top blew off, the Earth forces tried to crack down, with limited success, and that's when some of the most breathtaking (and horrific) events in the books occurred.

The sequence that sticks in my memory most in the whole book was when they brought down the space elevator. The question of "What happens if you have a huge space elevator cable snaking into the sky from a planet, and then it falls out of orbit onto that planet?" seems so obvious that I'm sure it's been tackled before (though I don't know where), but Robinson's descriptions were so vivid that it hardly seems necessary to seek out any alternative stories. The cable whips around the rotating planet, roughly at the equator, reducing everything within several miles of its impact to dust or goo. Similar cataclysms dot the last third of Red Mars at seemingly-regular intervals, turning it from a leisurely novel into a real page-turner.

Red Mars is packed full of all kinds of stories and ideas, and it seemed like it was a brand new book every hundred pages or so. I think it could have been more than it is - as I said, it often feels like the reader is kept at arm's length from the real feelings in the story - but it's still well worth reading.

The Years of Rice and Salt

I don't have much nice to say about this book because, in fact, it was one of the very rare books which I was unable to finish. Robinson's researching skills are prodigious and impressive, but research alone cannot carry a novel.

The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate-history novel in which the Black Death in the 15th century kills off 99% of the population of Europe, effective eliminating European culture. As a result, Chinese, Indian and Muslim cultures (and possibly American Indian cultures) become the dominant ones in the world.

The story is told as a group of souls are reincarnated throughout the centuries from the 15th to the 21st as new individuals trying to eventually learn to work together and support each other. As such, the novel is really a collection of linked short stories. The first story involves a Mongol warrior who is exiled and ends up being sold into slavery in China, albeit doing fairly well for himself. Later tales concern the discovery of American by a drifting Chinese war fleet, and the efforts of a few Islamic scientists to learn some essential scientific principles. The various cultures are engaged in centuries-long running attempts to conquer one another, and in the process gradually become more integrated.

Unfortunately, there really isn't any "there" there. There are no overarching themes to the novel that I can discern, and the plot device of the reincarnating souls is both implausible, jarring given the otherwise pedantically realistic nature of the individual stories, and just fundamentally uninteresting.

The real problem, though, is that Robinson badly, badly needs a strong editor. As with Red Mars, there are large swaths of The Years of Rice and Salt which could easily have been cut without losing any of the story. The book would have felt long at 400 pages (I stopped after about 475 pages), and at 750+ pages it's just ludicrously padded.

The individual stories vary from "dull" to "amusing". The Chinese expedition to America and their encounter of the Incas is an entertaining adventure and would have been a fun installment of an SF magazine. The studies of the Islamic scientists had its entertaining moments, but had a completely unsatisfying end. The story of the Chinese widow who falls in love with and marries a Muslim is relentlessly tedious. Other installments fall somewhere in-between.

Had the book chosen one story, worked through it in a more dramatic manner, and been cut down to a manageable size, then there's some material here which could have worked. As it is, this is a weak story, poorly told, and there's nothing here to recommend reading it.