2312

With 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson expanded upon many of the themes presented in his seminal work in the Mars trilogy— one of my all-time favorite science fiction series. Terraforming, longevity, human sexuality, the significance of art: Robinson explores these in detail as well as investigating how all of these developments shape what it means to be human. There are characteristics of the future history in 2312 that appear to just assume the events of the Mars trilogy as history. And as always, the Earth is a mess.

What Robinson adds with this novel are some of the post-cyberpunk themes that remind me of William Gibson and Ian McDonald: artifical intelligence, quantum computing, radical anthropogenic evolution.

Mooch recommended it to me, much as he originally recommended the Mars trilogy to me almost twenty years ago.