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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enough snow to make you blind, 24 May 2000
If you enjor KSR's books (Mars, Gold Coast etc.), then you'll enjoy this. If you haven't read any of his books before, this is not the place to start.KSR is an author I have enjoyed for years, capable of painting beautiful and detailed pictures of the landscapes and people around the central characters. The Mars books are cold and inhospitable, and KSR paints an equally bleak picture of this frozen earhly wasteland, but takes an awful long time doing it. The characters and plot are OK, and enough to drive a determined reader through the book, however, unless you're a completist, I wouldn't put it top of your reading list. Why four stars then? The descriptions of Antarctica were enough to make me shiver and reach for that extra sweater.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Stunning book, 24 Aug 1999
By A Customer
This is an amazing book, full of vivid descriptions of Antarctica and careful renderings of personalities and situations. The most disturbing thing about the book is that it presents a frighteningly realistic picture of the possible future. This book is highly reccomended and it's made me want to visit Antarctica just to find out how much is true!
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Immersive, thought-provoking and rich - an excellent depiction of Earth's last wilderness, 8 Jun 2008
"Antarctica" is the tenth novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the highly-acclaimed Mars Trilogy. The story takes place in the near future, at a time when the Antarctic Treaty - designed to prohibit military involvement on the continent and to establish it as a scientific preserve - has expired, bringing Earth's last wilderness under threat. When scientific sites begin to be attacked in Antarctica, sabotage by underground environmental groups is suspected, and Wade Norton, advisor to the influential and eco-conscious US senator Phil Chase, is sent to Antarctica to investigate.
As with all of Robinson's novels, "Antartica" embodies a vast amount of detailed research, including an extended visit made by the author in 1995, sponsored by the United States' National Science Foundation. Such first-hand experience shows in his superb evocation of place: from the confines of McMurdo Station, the largest settlement on the continent, to the heights of the Transantarctic Mountains and glaciers, to the inhospitable polar ice cap and the South Pole itself. Moreover, the landscapes are infused with a heavy sense of history, with numerous stories and legends of Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton - the first explorers - referenced throughout the book. This is a wide-ranging novel concerned with heritage, science, the struggle for survival, and the balance between exploitation and understanding of our natural environment.
Indeed - in common with much of Robinson's writing - it is the complex relationship of humans with their environment which lies at the heart of this novel. Although Robinson's sympathies lie ultimately in the environmentalist camp, it should be said that he is careful to acknowledge competing attitudes. Every one of his characters has their own Antarctica, so to speak, and we are made to feel sympathetic not only to the scientific establishment, but also to the industrial interests of the less economically developed world, the ecoteurs, and those (the 'ferals') attempting to live self-sustainably and permanently on the continent. The novel's single failing in this respect is that it is hampered in the end by a search for resolution, rather than allowing the debate to linger in the reader's mind.
For most of the novel the pace of the narrative is slow, and except for a period of about 150 pages in the middle, there is little action or tension - two factors which many readers may find frustrating. However, this is a novel driven more by ideas rather than by plot or by character. It is hard to imagine that a shorter book - or one more tightly-plotted - could have done justice to the vastness of the subject as Robinson achieves here.
All in all, "Antartica" is an absorbing and rich imagining of what is often perceived to be a sterile and hostile place. With global warming becoming an increasingly pressing issue, it arguably has even more relevance now than when it was first published in 1997, depicting the unspoilt environment we could lose all too soon.
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