ntarctica takes place in the early 21st century, at a time when the Antarctic Treaty is up for renewal. Wade Norton, assistant to Senator Phil Chase, is sent to Antarctica to investigate mysterious thefts and to gather intelligence to help ratify the treaty protecting Antarctica from exploitation. After flying to Antarctica and visiting McMurdo Station, Wade meets dozens of interesting people working there, including Valerie Kenning, who serves as a tour guide; X, a general field assistant; Ta Shu, a Chinese poet and master of feng shui; and numerous scientists ("beakers" to non-scientists) and NSF administrators.
Wade's investigations take him first to Antarctica's dry valleys, where he learns from geologists of potentially large oil and methane deposits in the continent. He next visits the South Pole Station, where he discovers more about the strange thefts that have been occurring, and about the odd but friendly subculture that has developed at the station. He then visits an African oil exploration camp at Roberts Massif, where he again meets X, and finds evidence that someone is restoring abandoned equipment for unknown reasons. During his visit the camp is destroyed by what appears to be sabotage, although no one is killed in the attack.
Meanwhile, Val is leading a six-person "In the Footsteps of Amundsen" expedition, re-enacting the first 300-mile trek to the South Pole. Ta Shu is along, broadcasting live to a massive television audience. They lose their sled and supplies in an accident, and find that all communications have been mysteriously interrupted. They must walk 100 kilometers to the nearest settlement at Roberts Massif. They arrive barely alive to find Wade and X in a similar predicament, and determine that massive sabotage must have occurred throughout Antarctica. Together the characters must try not only to survive but to learn what is happening on the frozen continent.
A perfect thematic prequel to the Mars Trilogy
Antarctica explores the same themes as Robinson's acclaimed Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars)--the stark beauty of natural landscapes, future technologies, humanity's relationship to the environment, and how people should interact politically. In many ways, Antarctica represents a concentrated distillation of the essence of the three massive Mars books, asking the same complex questions and coming up with virtually the same reasonable answers.
As with all of Robinson's novels, Antarctica combines sense-of-wonder-filled landscapes with an array of truly memorable characters. Robinson manages to portray Antarctica as profoundly as he did Mars through his use of vignettes from Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, and the other famous Antarctic explorers from the early 20th century, and through his sheer love of landscapes. The novel also has many interesting narratives woven together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
But it is the characters that make this novel truly worth reading. There are at least a dozen people in this novel who come completely to life. By the end of the book, it feels as if readers truly know some of the major characters, and want to know many others. This is not the case with the vast majority of hard SF novels.
Antarctica is superior hard SF from one of the field's best authors. This might also be Kim Stanley Robinson's most important novel, one that actually influences events outside of science fiction in the coming decades. Humanity will be making political decisions regarding Antarctica that determine whether it stays a scientific resource for all or if it's disastrously exploited for short-term gains. Readers can only hope that those making those decisions will read this book.
oundation and Chaos marks Greg Bear's contribution to The Second Foundation Trilogy, a new series of books based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation saga. Gregory Benford launched the trilogy last year with Foundation's Fear, which chronicled young Hari Seldon's audacious quest to build a mathematical model of humanity and thereby predict the future of the human race.
Foundation and Chaos brings the series full circle, spanning the months just before and a little after the start of Asimov's Foundation, which was published in 1951. Bear even recreates and expands key scenes from that book's early chapters. Through the science of "psychohistory," Seldon has predicted the fall of the Galactic Empire and a 30,000-year aftermath of barbarism and misery. Though it is too late the save the Empire, Seldon hopes to hasten the return of galactic civilization by establishing the "Foundation," a society based on psychohistorical principles and dedicated to amassing and preserving knowledge.
Applied mathematics alone can't ensure the success of Seldon's thousand-year plan, however. Keeping events on track will be the secret job of a "Second Foundation," whose members can alter people's thoughts and memories. Operating even further behind the scenes are super-secret legions of humanoid robots, also with "mentalic" powers, led by the 20,000-year-old Daneel Olivaw.
However, Lodovik Trema, a robot in the guise of an imperial bureaucrat, finds that the ancient and inviolable Laws of Robotics have been erased from his positronic brain after exposure to radiation from a supernova. Freed from the rigid, simplistic dictates of the Laws, Trema has to decide for himself what the right thing to do is. He encounters a band of dissident robots who, though still programmed with the Laws, disagree with Daneel and question his interference in human affairs.
Meanwhile, Seldon has to thwart the plans of an ambitious aristocrat who is espousing the paranoid theory that human destiny is being secretly controlled by robots. He's right, of course, but the "robots" under attack are not robots at all but "mentalic" humans who may represent the future of human evolution.
Just like Asimov used to write
For better or worse, Foundation and Chaos reads more like an Asimov novel than a Greg Bear novel. (Ironically, Foundation's Fear by Benford feels more like a Greg Bear novel.) Bear keeps in check his usual penchant for outre settings and ideas largely. If Foundation's Fear can be likened to a big-budget, thinking person's action movie, Foundation and Chaos is more like a no-frills BBC miniseries, impeccably written and acted but not likely to give readers an adrenaline rush.
Rather than being swept along by the story, readers may often feel more like they are following the moves in a particularly intricate game of chess. No one expected rich characterization from Asimov--his appeal was mainly cerebral--and no one expected the game pieces to burst into song.
On the other hand, in such novels as Moving Mars and Queen of Angels, Bear has shown that he can deliver both mind-stretching science fiction and complex, involving characters (actually, so did Asimov, but not very often). Foundation and Chaos presents a rather-too-large cast of human and robotic characters, troubled in turn by fear, self-doubt, regret, and loneliness, but between the slow, methodical opening gambit and the hurried, short-on-options endgame, there isn't room for the characters, human and robot, to show more than an occasional flicker of life.
Still, Foundation and Chaos offers more intellectual and emotional pleasures than most science fiction published today. Bear's Spartan portrayal of the Foundation universe is true to the spirit of the original, and with Benford he has revitalized a series that may endure longer than many empires.
