Read this one during a stretch when I was, for whatever reason, incapable of finishing a paragraph without opening a dictionary tab, and 2312 did not help. Robinson’s not shy about the science, and there’s this recurring device, chapters made of fragmented lists and headlines, that either does something for you or throws you off the story completely, and I flipped between both reactions depending on the night.
The premise carries a lot of weight. It’s three hundred years out, Earth’s a mess, and humanity’s built terrariums in hollowed-out asteroids and started terraforming everything from Mercury to Venus, and the main character is a hundred-and-forty-year-old woman from Mercury with brain implants that give her a genuinely odd, animal-inflected personality. She’s not always sympathetic, on purpose I think, and there’s a murder-mystery skeleton underneath all the world-tour material that never quite gets the attention it needs.
What Robinson’s actually strong at is the tour itself. There’s a stretch where you’re dodging a lethal sunrise on Mercury and it’s genuinely thrilling in a way the human plot mostly isn’t. I never fully connected to Swan as a character, and I’m apparently in good company there, but I stayed for the terraforming logistics and the strange post-scarcity economics I could never quite pin down, which is maybe the point, or maybe just a gap. Three stars. Recommended if you want the solar system’s real estate more than you want a plot, and I mean that as a real recommendation, not a backhanded one.