I gave 2312 three stars when I reviewed it here, and I stand by that number, but I want to be honest about something the number doesn’t show, which is how close I came to putting it down entirely around page ninety and never picking it back up. I was annoyed at it. The prose felt like it was actively resisting me some nights, all that fragmented headline material breaking up the story right when I wanted momentum, and I remember texting a friend that I thought Kim Stanley Robinson maybe didn’t want readers to actually enjoy this one.
A year later I keep catching myself thinking about the Mercury chapter, dodging a lethal sunrise, in totally unrelated moments, cooking dinner, walking to the market, half-asleep. That’s not nothing. I’ve read plenty of books I enjoyed more in the moment that left no residue at all a year out, and here’s one I fought with the whole way through that’s apparently taken up permanent real estate somewhere in the back of my head.
What I think actually happened is that I was reading it for the wrong thing the first time, wanting a character-driven plot it was never trying to be, and getting frustrated every time it declined to be that. Once I stopped expecting Swan to become someone I loved and just let the book be a very strange, very thorough tour of a terraformed solar system, most of my frustration turned out to be about my own expectations rather than anything actually wrong with the book. I don’t think that means my three-star review was inaccurate exactly, it was an honest account of reading it the way I read it. I just don’t think it’s the review I’d write today.
This has made me a little more suspicious of my own first reactions generally, not just to books. The wedding that ran badly, the game that cost me a Friday regular for a month, there’s a pattern here of things that felt like straightforward failures in the moment turning into something more interesting once enough time passed for me to actually see the shape of what happened instead of just how it felt while it was happening. I’m not going back and changing the rating. I think the honest record of how a thing landed the first time matters more than tidying it up in hindsight. But I wanted this on the record too, because pretending my first read of anything is the final word on it would be its own kind of dishonesty.