I love Kim Stanley Robinson's books, but this one was very disappointing. ( )

An epic tale of a possible human future.

You can't fault the author's imagination here. He obviously spent some time extrapolating science and human nature 300 years into the future and came up with some pretty off-the-wall stuff. The problem for me was mostly the shear overwhelming volume of it all. This future is so wildly imaginative that I could scarcely keep my feeble brain wrapped around all the concepts.

I also had some difficulty identifying with the main characters. One is a 140 year old, hermaphrodite, mostly female, galactic hippy that usually acts about 1/10th her age. The other is a younger and often wiser mostly male who's having a mid-life crisis and follows the woman around the solar system in an infatuated fog.

I almost gave up when the story kept bogging down describing cities that crawl around planets and asteroids (become spaceships containing odd self contained communities) that rocket between planets and avoided describing the very interplanetary conflict that was supposedly driving events. But I powered through for the sake of my book club and wound up appreciating the sweep of the story. ( )

Swan Er Hong's grandmother has passed away and left Swan with a posthumous errand: to carry a message from their home planet, Mars to a colleague of the grandmother's on Saturn. Swan herself is not privileged to know what the message contains; but it becomes clear that the big project to which her grandmother had dedicated her life is at stake. In her interplanetary journeys aboard terraformed asteroids to complete her mission, Swan comes to a new understanding of her role not only in relation to the assignment, but her responsibility towards the outcome and, her feelings toward Warham (the contact on Saturn). There are secret projects, covert plots, ethno-geographic leagues and many of KSR's hallmarks: environmentalism, Antarctic-like landscapes, a reference to Indian culture (e.g., Kali the death goddess), a female protagonist-- who despite her years-- acts oddly young and immature and, passages that read like credible non-fiction.... There are dozens of threads one could follow throughout the book; but the overarching theme is made self-evident in an interstitial chapter called, "Lists (15)" where KSR posits at the end of a 48-item catalog, "the opportunity to become more what you are... that's all you need." ( )

I finished this feeling unsatisfied. Without giving spoilers, this is a book that has two layers of plot: one largely personal and interpersonal, one about the 'big events' going on. If you've read Robinson before, this isn't surprising. In this book, I just didn't like it. The resolution of the 'big events' were unsatisfying, to say the least. Even though he straight up just says that events are resolved they just evolve, this is still an unhappy ending for me. (Minor spoilers-ish comments follow.) What happened with the qubes? It seems like that is a pretty major development and they are are just whisked off stage left. Their schemes? Well, schemes; that what schemes are. Unsatisfying even if, philosophically, kind of true. ( )

It took me a long time to get through this book and I almost gave up on more than one occasion but persevered but didn’t find it very engaging. Some interesting concepts that get you thinking about what the world we currently live in and the opportunities (and threats) of the universe. The lists and extracts portions I found strange. I also wasn't engaged by any of the characters. ( )