Book review: Icehenge

It's brilliant. But don't read me, read The work of disenchantment never ends: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge instead.

Re-read: 2020, during the time of Covid. Still good. But time to pick a few flaws, which are the common failure of projecting forward too much of today. Most obvious the Russian-US hegemony, which is long obsolete. Second is the quaint need to go down to the "post office" to pick up "mail". Somewhat subtler is the finding icehenge itself. By the last chapter, the "outer satellites" have become free-wheeling and there is little sign of political control, and yet the mysterious lack of exploration continues; everyone has become passive to the storyline, it seems. Caroline Holmes is just sitting around with nothing better to do until someone asks her to go look. But why? If she has ships that could just be sent off, surely others would have gone... which is to say, the universe is not self-consistent.

Similarly, the somewhat unsatisfactory HN wandering-off-in-the-canyons episode (did he really meet anyone? What really was the point?) is in the book ended by HN going off on an expedition. But in real life... why wouldn't he have gone back? Indeed, is it really plausible that a trail he found so easy to follow wouldn't already have been followed. Da Govt is curiously passive in allowing hated rebels to just sit around.

And to balance, a virtue: as well as a good story, there's some meditation on what an extended life would be like. Which by coincidence chimes with Look to Windward, which I've re-read even more recently.

And more real-ly, while KSR's characters know they can't know their earlier life, I'm slowly coming to realise that my early and maybe not-so-early life is fading away from me.

Re-read: 2024: still good. I think I am once again surprised (as I am by, say The Deep) at how good this is, for a young man to write. It - like The Deep - feels like it should have been written by someone older. Perhaps "Robinson gave the novella in rough form to Ursula K. Le Guin to read and edit while he was enrolled in her writing workshop at UCSD in the spring of 1977" is a clue? But this is better than most of LeGuin's. Coming up, as I am, to retirement the "but what do we do with our lives" question comes into sharper focus.

To add a nit: his world of 26xx is still one of rich and poor; yet all get the longevity treatment and all live long lives (this despite the in-story notes such as Hjalmar having in-person and therefore expensive annual appointments with a physician). I think this is implausible; there would be gradients; the very rich would be able to afford better, most likely. This could have been a political thread; but perhaps it would have been a distraction and bloating from what is a sparse, focussed book.