Icehenge
On the North Pole of Pluto there stands an enigma: a huge circle of standing blocks of ice, built on the pattern of Earth's Stonehenge--but ten times the size, standing alone at the farthest reaches of the Solar System. What is it? Who came there to build it? The secret lies, perhaps, in the chaotic decades of the Martian Revolution, in the lost memories of those who have lived for centuries.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
5mentions
3people
2017–2022years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Kim Stanley Robinson is insufferable. He has so many deep misunderstanding about politics, economics, and even things like climate science and limits to growth that are his core schtick. And the flaws are so embedded into the central plots of his books that it is really hard to suspend disbelief and ignore.
I originally encountered the Mars Trilogy as a teen and it is fair to say that it changed my life. I feel in love with the romantic portrayal of Mars colonization, and eventually ended up working at NASA. Recently I decided to go back and re-read the trilogy and found myself unwilling to finish even the first book. I just couldn't stand it. So you're not alone.
You might like Icehenge though. It works more as a stand-alone novel (or 3 novellas, really) set in the same universe, but with a focused plot and the politics mostly relegated to the background. It's a very under-rated book, being overshadowed by the more well-known RGB Mars trilogy that followed.
- I don’t read any YA. It’s mostly classic sci-fi, and some detective stories and occasional political thriller here and there. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but the only time I recall past tense stories is when a character is describing something that happened off-scene. Narration is always present tense.
I can think of a handful of exceptions where the whole story itself is narrated from the perspective of someone telling a story, but those are notable exceptions for having a weird narrative gimmick (e.g. the excellent but dated Icehenge is written in the past tense because it consists of personal diary entries).
- A personal tangent. In the spirit of the OP, I guess.
I read Justine (1st book of the Alexandria Quartet) back in my early 20s, circa 1993.
The way I found it was utterly weird. I was helping my dad sort out his old stuff my mom wanted him to throw away, mostly lots of yellow late 50s early 60s notebooks from his college. And some old English books. And Justine. My dad said he couldn't remember where he got this book, and said somebody must have given it to him back in the 60s, and he never read it.
I've never heard of it or Lawrence Durrel, but I knew about Gerald Durrel due to My Family and Other Animals which was something that recommended for kids around the early 80s, I guess, and I think I even read it when I was much younger.
I assumed Justine was a dime detective or spy novel, since I knew that's the stuff my dad likes. Or some biography. Nothing too literary for him, thank you very much. He asked if I wanted to read it or he'd throw it away. I looked at the blurb, which didn't tell me much, shrugged and said ok. I was between books. The book was a 60s printing, yellow pages, somewhat disintegrating, but all pages were intact.
So I read it. It was tough. But I persevered. And I liked it. Very much. Well, the sex scenes were kinda shocking but by that time I've read more explicit ones.
And to my surprise I discovered that the science fiction novel Icehenge, by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I read and re-read and re-read 7 years prior at even a more impressionable age, was very much a tribute to Justine. At least its middle part. It even includes a science-fiction in-universe pastiche of Cavafy's The City.
Icehenge and Justine remain sort of embedded in my brain. As Cavafy's "The City" in Durrel's translation (attributed to one of the fictitious characters in the novel itself) , which in my opinion is the best translation. I'm able to recite it by heart to this day, and there are days when I'm highly tempted to print it and hang above my desk at work. But I wouldn't like the questions. I think.
I've wanted for 20 years now to read the rest of the Alexandrian Quartet, but I've never gotten around to it. Swamped by school and then by work and then by family. Maybe someday. And maybe I'll be disappointed.
As for His Dark Materials. I read it too, but didn't like it, something didn't click. Except The Golden Compass which was good.
- Reminds me of an old Kim Stanley Robinson SF novel called Icehenge, which as I remember it revolves around life extension without corresponding memory preservation, so that history becomes a way of understanding your own past. I think it did interesting things with the unreliable-narrator trope and the idea of historical revisionism.
Definitely recommended, and I'm feeling a strong urge to dig it out and reread it; it's been decades. It'd be pleasingly appropriate to discover that I'm misremembering or have a drastically different response to it this time.
- I tried that not long after reading Icehenge, but didn't really get on with it. Again, that was decades ago, so maybe I should give it another look. Gene Wolfe does tend to reward older readers; I'm pretty sure most of his Urth books whooshed right over my head as a teenager.
