2312

Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 is a solar-system wide political drama set (unsurprisingly) in the year 2312, after humankind has colonised most of the inner solar system, with a terraformed Mars and Venus and Titan in various phases of being terraformed. The protagonist is over 100 years old, somewhere in between female and male, and is from Mercury, and over the course of the story she comes to realize who she is and what she wants and deals with her inner demons while being a key player in effecting huge political changes to the solar system's political order. If you've read any of Robinson's other work, you'd agree that's a pretty normal kind of plot line. It feels like it is a sequel to the Mars trilogy, but that's not made explicit and apparently Robinson says that they are different timelines. But there's nothing in the book that makes that explicit, so you can quite happily read it as a continuation of Mars, set 120 years after the end of that trilogy.

For a novel that contains so many committee meetings, 2312 is a very rewarding book. It reflects on a lot of the issues facing us today (on Earth, the sea levels did end up rising 9 metres, there were mass extinctions, and the planet is still beset by chaos and occasional fighting), and possible solutions to those problems. It's well worth a read just for the bird's eye view of today's problems, but some of the potential solutions, and a sense of a potential future for humanity throughout the Solar system is fascinating. And it's written from a much personal viewpoint than the Mars trilogy, so it's a much more readable and relatable book than the Mars books were.