Antarctica
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Overview
From the award-winning author of the Mars Trilogy comes a thrilling new novel....
Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning Mars trilogy, is one of the most original and visionary writers of fiction today. Now, in his latest novel, he takes us to a harsh, alien landscape covered by a sheet of ice two miles deep. This is no distant planet—it is the last pure wilderness on earth.
A stark and inhospitable place, its landscape poses a challenge to survival; yet its strange, silent beauty has long fascinated scientists and adventurers. Now Antarctica faces an uncertain future. The international treaty that protects the continent is about to dissolve, clearing the way for Antarctica's resources and eerie beauty to be plundered. As politicians and corporations move to determine its fate from half a world away, radical environmentalists carry out a covert campaign of sabotage to reclaim the land. The winner of this critical battle will determine the future for this last great wilderness....
Synopsis
Kim Stanley Robinson, who took us around the solar system with his award-winning Mars trilogy, brings readers to an equally alien setting — this one on our own world. In Antarctica, it's the near future, the world is overpopulated, and Antarctica is at the heart of an environmental war over who can lay claim to the beautiful continent's natural resources. But in addition to a slew of countries eager to lay their hands on Antarctica's natural assets, there's a growing supply of nature-loving terrorists who value the South Pole more than human lives, and there's no easy answer to the question of who provides the biggest threat. One thing is for sure — Antarctica's intelligent and gripping story is guaranteed to keep you cool through the brutal summer heat.
Washington Post Book World
Dense as a diamond and as sharp; it makes even most good novels seem pale and insignificant by comparison.
Editorials
Daily News of L.A.
Has the breathtaking scope, plausible science and intellectual daring that made Red Mars a hit.New York Times Book Review
An absorbing novel. . .a scientfically informed imagination of rare ambition at work.NY Times Book Review
There is no finer writer of science fiction today than Kim Stanely Robinson, and he is at the top of his form in Antarctica ... a body of work distinguished by two elements all too rare in modern science fiction: a sense of character and a sense of place. Robinson writes about geography and geology with the intensity and unhurried attention to detail of John McPhee. This is fiction so sturdily underpinned by facts that you might forget the story takes place sometime in the next century.Washington Post Book World
Dense as a diamond and as sharp; it makes even most good novels seem pale and insignificant by comparison.VOYA
Robinson is one of the best hard science fiction writers working today; here he continues to play with some of the ideas that made his Mars trilogy so powerful and fascinating. The novel is set in the early twenty-first century at a time when Antarctica, whose human inhabitants had hitherto been only scientists in isolated research stations, is being targeted by corporations eager to gain access to its untapped mineral resources-and by rich tourists on "adventure vacations" that recreate the dangerous exploration journeys of a previous era. The international treaty regulating development is up for renegotiation, and the interests of powerful corporations and resource-poor Southern nations mean that the "hands off" policy that preserved Antarctica for scientific research may soon no longer be in force. Appalled by this, radical environmentalist "ecoteurs" plan a campaign to stop or at least delay Antarctic exploitation. Against this backdrop, Robinson follows a diverse group of characters, including an American Senator's aide sent to investigate the "Antarctic situation," an adventure tour guide who finds it increasingly difficult to deal with some of her more abrasive clients, a technician at the U.S. McMurdo Station who has been unlucky at love, and a Chinese video artist who beams a running commentary to an audience of millions. When the ecoteurs strike, these four and others must survive in an environment that once routinely killed the hardiest explorers of a more rugged period, and somehow contribute to a solution that will satisfy both an increasingly needy world and those who wish to prevent the rapacious destruction of the environment. Robinson tells his story with reporter-like authority, changing perspectives from character to character as he weaves together the events they are involved in to paint a detailed picture of Antarctica's past and its hoped-for future. VOYA Codes: 5Q 5P S A/YA (Hard to imagine it being better written, Every YA (who reads) was dying to read it yesterday, Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12 and adults).Library Journal
After winning Hugo and Nebula awards for his Mars Trilogy (e.g., Green Mars, LJ 3/15/94), Robinson comes down to Earth with this near-future story of the race to uncover Antarctica's mineral wealth.Library Journal
After winning Hugo and Nebula awards for his Mars Trilogy (e.g., Green Mars, LJ 3/15/94), Robinson comes down to Earth with this near-future story of the race to uncover Antarctica's mineral wealth.Jean-Louis Trudel
...Antarctica is a memorable read, seasoned with Robinson's dry wit, and an invitation to think of our planet's most alien continent.— SF Site
Kirkus Reviews
What does the author of the best-ever Mars epic (Blue Mars, 1996, etc.) do for an encore? He shifts to Antarctica, an environment as near to Mars as you can get on Earth, in a novel set a few years into the 21st century.Earth's population has risen above ten billion. Global warming is no longer just a theory: Summers in Washington, D.C., for instance, have gone from unbearable to life-threatening. The Sahara is rapidly taking over all of northern Africa. Hardly any forests remain. Oil resources are also waning, and thus there is a call, just as renewal of the international treaty banning mineral exploitation of Antarctica stalls in Congress, to tap into the oil reserves near Ross Island. Surreptitious drilling may already be going on there, in fact, and so an environmentalist senator named Phil Chase dispatches his chief aide, Wade Norton, to investigate. Norton falls in love with the inhospitable continent and, along with others, becomes an 'ecoteur,' someone so committed to saving the planet that he'll engage in sabotage on its behalf. A young laborer (dubbed 'X' by the author) joins the campaign, partly to improve his low self-esteem and partly to impress a young scientist and guide, Valerie Kenning.
Obviously, Robinson has no love for the 'globally downsized post-revolutionary massively fortified stage of very late capitalism' portrayed here. He lays in lore and history and atmosphere with great care: the amazing cold and the equally amazing capacity of humans to endure it; unlikely wildlife; volcanoes steaming amid mountains of ice. And Robinson brings to life the expeditions of Roald Amundsen and Edward Wilson, as well as the history of scientific inquiry intothe 'least significant' continent. Passionate, informed, mildly flawed, and vastly entertaining.