2312
Kim Stanley Robinson

Hachette Audio (Unabridged)
May 22, 2012 / ISBN B008563GFM
Science Fiction/ 19 hours, 15 minutes

Amazon

Reviewed by Jo Rogers

2313 is a long story about a woman named Swan Er Hong. Of Chinese ancestry, Swan was born and raised on the planet Mercury. There is only one city on the planet, Terminator, which rolls around Mercury along a special set of tracks. It always stays on the night side of Mercury, traveling just ahead of the sun.

Also traveling ahead of the sun are the strange people called Sunwalkers. Swan was one of them, after a fashion. She quite often took a tram out to a platform where the city would pick her up as it rolled ahead of the sun. She would watch the sun rise over the horizon and run fast enough to get back to the platform in time to catch the city as it rolled by.

One day, Swan almost waits too long. On this day, as she stood in her usual place, she was grieving the death of her grandmother, Alex. Alex was very active in government and though she was almost two hundred, no one expected her to die any time soon. Thus, when the aneurism in her brain ruptures, everyone is stunned. No one, not even Alex, knew the aneurism was there.

This story could have been shorter without the inclusion of science, but it wouldn't have made sense. Though the material was almost all presented in what writers call "the dreaded infodump," it is too interesting to want to chuck the book across the room and quit reading.

The reader, Sarah Zimmerman, does a superb job of bringing the story to life. So, if you add romance, mystery and suspense to the speculative fiction, you have "2312." If you love hard science fiction, you'll love this book. It won't be the last of Kim Stanley Robinson's books I read, and I think you'll feel the same way.