Antarctica
A Novel
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3.8 • 23 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The award-winning author of the Mars trilogy takes readers to the last pure wilderness on Earth in this powerful and majestic novel.
“Antarctica may well be the best novel of the best ecological novelist around.”—Locus
It is a stark and inhospitable place, where the landscape itself 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 which protects the continent is about to dissolve, clearing the way for Antarctica’s resources to be plundered, its eerie beauty to be savaged. As politicians wrangle over its fate, major corporations begin probing for its hidden riches. Adventurers come, as they have for more than a century, seeking the wild, untamed land even as they endanger it with their ever-growing numbers. And radical environmentalists carry out a covert campaign of sabotage to reclaim the land from those who would destroy it for profit. All who come here have their own agenda, and all will fight to ensure their vision of the future for the remote and awe-inspiring world at the South Pole.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the early 21st century, things are beginning to change in Antarctica. Scientists still come down to the American base at McMurdo to do research, but they now bump shoulders with tourists hoping to retrace the treks of early explorers. More seriously, with the world's oil fields almost depleted, multinational corporations are jockeying for position, conducting secret explorations for oil and spending millions to defeat the renewal of the Antarctic Treaty, which has reserved the continent for purely scientific research for half a century. And other, even more secretive groups apparently haunt the Antarctic outback as well: feral human societies and radical environmentalists whose motives are only partly understood. Antarctica is undergoing major climactic change, too, perhaps the most dramatic example of the global warming that has turned much of the world's former temperate zone into a steam bath. The Ross Ice Shelf has largely broken up and the enormously greater Antarctic icesheet may be about to follow suit. Robinson (Blue Mars) brings to this novel a passionate concern for landscape, ecology and the effects of the "Gotterdammerung capitalism" that he sees as the most serious threat to the survival of our species. His major characters--a U.S. senator's aide, a professional Antarctic mountaineer and a misfit doing grunt labor at McMurdo--are well drawn, but ultimately the novel is about the land itself. Moving back and forth between breathtaking descriptions of the alien, out-of-scale beauty of Antarctica, gripping tales of adventure on the ice and astute analyses of the ecopolitics of the southernmost continent, Robinson has created another superb addition to what is rapidly becoming one of the most impressive bodies of work in SF. FYI: Each of Robinson's last three novels, Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars, won either a Hugo or a Nebula.
Customer Reviews
Loved it
I enjoy everything I have read by Kim Stanley Robinson, so, as usual, I trusted him and let the book carry me. It was a leap of faith in this case, because for the first half of this pretty long book, nothing much happened. People went out on the ice and snow and didn’t have mishaps. It was mostly description of the Antarctic, the geography, the inhabitants, the early polar expeditions. (Those early guys had mishaps aplenty, but the contemporary trekkers had GPS, and radar to show them where crevasses were, and satellite imagery, and self-warming gloves and space suits with food and water.) And then, well, things got interesting in a hurry. A real south polar adventure, with a healthy topping of environmentalism.