Kim Stanley Robinson is an American writer of science fiction living in California. He's won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, and has written over twenty books. While not writing science fiction, he champions various environmental causes. His most famous works are The Mars Trilogy, which form a kind of prequel to 2312.
In the year in which this novel takes place, Swan Er Hong, a well known artist in residence on Mercury, discovers that a close acquaintance has died under mysterious circumstances. This death leads Swan to a mysterious message, and after delivering this message she finds herself involved in a police investigation which spans the solar system.
2312 is, in other words, another detective story set in space. The author, a man well versed in scientific concepts, punctuates this detective story with discussions of life on different worlds, with meditations on an increasingly gender-fluid society, and with speculations on what it means to be human in the presence of artificial intelligences and life extending technologies. It's nothing that writers like Asimov and Clarke haven't done before, though 2312 does offer a more modern insight into what the future might hold, both bad and good.
In science fiction there has been a longstanding division between the "hard" and "soft" varieties of the genre. An example of hard science fiction would be a novel like Permutation City, in which an understanding of virtual reality is essential to both a comprehension of the story and its resolution. An example of soft science fiction is - I hate to say it - a novel like Dune, in which a scientific understanding of the world isn't necessary to the story. Both Permutation City and Dune are good books, but in one a scientific understanding of the world is essential, and the other could have been written at any time between its actual date of publication and the Abbasid Caliphate.
This said, 2312 would, I think, fall firmly into the realm of soft science fiction. You could skip over almost all of the scientific stuff in this book and its plot would still make sense. This plot also isn't resolved through any technological process, or with an understanding of any scientific concepts. The authorities clamp down on the perpetrators, some characters go off to brighter futures, and some characters face punishment. That's it. Quantum mechanics plays into how the artificial intelligences work, but you need not understand what the author means by "decoherence" to grasp that the thinking machines are a concern for those in power. The way in which a city meets its end is also dependent on orbital mechanics to some extent, but I'm guessing that more than one reader skimmed over this part of the book.
But the above is far from a damning criticism of 2312. It is in fact not a criticism at all. Science fiction doesn't always need to be science-y to be effective, and sometimes a detour into the world of robots and rocketships is enough. It is fiction after all, and a good story's the most important thing. 2312 definitely has a good story, alongside some excellent characterization to boot.
The part about the artificial intelligences? Not really resolved or explained to anyone's satisfaction, but the ending is upbeat and it'll put a smile on your face.
I look forward to reading the author's Mars Trilogy this summer. Hopefully I can track down copies in a local bookstore.
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