2312 is one of those novels I keep mentioning as a good thing, without ever having properly reviewed it; the most I've written about it is this post from last June, which exists mostly to pick a nit with M. John Harrison's review, although it does hint at some of my broader thoughts. L. Timmel Duchamp's review in these pages captures many of my reactions as a veteran KSR reader; Ernest Yanarella's review also provides a useful challenge to some of the novel's philosophical assumptions. But there are certainly some aspects of the novel that haven't received as much attention or challenge as they should have done, which is why I'm very pleased to see Vandana Singh's powerful and necessary critique.

To oversimplify (read the whole post), Vandana draws out three main aspects of the book: its attitude to culture, the authoritativeness of its viewpoint, and its broader ecological philosophy. The first two in particular are closely intertwined in the depiction of Earth as a 'development sink', and the characters' presumptuous attempts at aid:

Swan and Wahram are privileged spacers, and as such, unsurprisingly speak and act thus, although Wahram is more sensitive. Yet by not challenging their view in more than a half-hearted way, the author slips into a colonialist rant that threw me right out of the book

The key concept there, I think, is challenge. One of the things I said in my original blog post was precisely that "even the foundational assumptions of the story feel very open to challenge, to question, to disagreement" -- which is to say that I think Vandana is pretty much entirely right in her dissatisfaction with Swan and Wahram's actions, but where she felt those actions were challenged in only a "half-hearted way", I felt allowed, and even encouraged, to judge them. This is, for me, what the Dos Passos-esque fragmented structure of the novel does -- it dismantles any sense that an individual character's view is authoritative. The 'extracts' sections are historical: they frame the novel as this is what happened, not, necessarily, as this was right.

But. There are a couple of other issues that complicate my reaction. I've characterised 2312 on several occasions as a novel that talks the talk better than it walks the walk. I do think it deserves its Tiptree Honor Listing -- but no more than that, because as Vandana quite rightly points out, for all the talk about gender and sexual variation, Swan and Wahram's relationship is essentially a performance of contemporary heterosexuality. Equally, while I do think the novel is open to argument from its readers, its protagonists are the rich and, in most senses, privileged of its time: there is no countervailing viewpoint from the other end of the social spectrum (which I think is how most novels would go about providing challenge to a given character's actions).

More specifically, Vandana rightly highlights the absence of specific cultural gristle in much of the depiction of Earth. Earth is treated as a single failed system (capitalism) -- a powerful point to make, but a choice that inevitably leads to a certain amount of erasure. And the fact that Robinson uses Africa as, essentially, a synecdoche for the whole of Earth at the time of the novel is what you might call an interesting choice. The implication that the whole planet is in 2312 in as awful a state as Africa is today is rather a slur on contemporary Africa, reducing the whole continent to that one image. I think in a way it's particularly shocking to find this in a Kim Stanley Robinson novel because it's a piece of overtly pessimistic extrapolation: not only are the conditions that currently lead to exploitation and immiseration in parts of Africa going to continue, they're going to worsen and spread to the whole rest of the planet! There's no escape route offered, unless you're one of the lucky few who gets to be a spacer.

The final element of Vandana's critique brings us back to language:

The baldly stated notion that that humans are “meant to inscribe ourselves into the universe” is not that different from the kind of ideology that justified the British plunder of India, or the French and Dutch mangling of Africa — manifest destiny on a solar system scale. Earth is bound by history and nothing gets done, so humanity escapes to space, builds a variety of little utopias free from want (there’s always nitrogen from Titan if you want to fix your atmosphere) – the ultimate escapism. Since the language and philosophy and attitude of these far-future spacers is still the same old same old, I find it hard to believe that capitalism has been shifted to the margins, and that a more just, less exploitative system is possible in that future.

This is a powerful point, and one that I'm now too far from 2312 to respond to in detail; but certainly something I will be thinking about as and when I revisit it.

Because I am, in the end, still likely to revisit it. As Vandana notes -- in passing, because it's not her focus -- there are aspects of 2312 that sing; and these co-exist with the weaknesses discussed above. Likely as a result of my personal situation and readerly biases, for me the virtues outweigh the flaws, and I think it is in the end a book that deserves attention -- stringent attention, that holds it to high standards. And if it makes the Hugo ballot, as it may well do, can I still see myself voting for it? Perhaps -- after all, at that point, it will depend what else is in contention. But if we as a field do end up giving 2312 awards recognition, the least we can do is acknowledge what it is we're giving the award to, the bad as well as the good.