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Antarctica [Hardcover]

Kim Stanley Robinson (Author)
3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)


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Book Description

July 1, 1998
Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the most original and visionary voices in science fiction. In his highly successful Hugo and Nebula award-winning Mars trilogy, Robinson led us on an odyssey of transformation and discovery, as humans terraformed the Great Red Planet. Now, in his latest novel, he takes us to a harsh, alien landscape covered by a sheet of ice two miles deep. This is no distant planet; it is the last pure wilderness on Earth.

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. Explorers have crossed this vast, frozen terrain for many reasons: to stand in awe before the volcanic Mount Erebus or Antarctica's other natural wonders, to fathom the mysteries of ages past, to exploit its great stores of untapped mineral wealth, or to pit themselves against this cold, unforgiving continent.

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 from half a world away, 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 this last great wilderness.

As complex and compelling as his Mars saga, as powerful and majestic as the continent itself, Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica takes us to the remote and awe-inspiring world at the South Pole.


Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of the Nebula and Hugo award-winning Mars trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, as well as The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge, A Short, Sharp Shock, and other novels. He lives in Davis, California.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the near future, Wade Norton has been sent to Antarctica by Senator Phil Chase to investigate rumors of environmental sabotage. He arrives on the frozen continent and immediately begins making contact with the various scientific and political factions that comprise Antarctic society. What he finds is an interesting blend of inhabitants who don't always mesh well but who all share a common love of Antarctica and a fierce devotion to their life there. He also begins to uncover layers of Antarctic culture that have been kept hidden from the rest of the world, and some of them are dangerous indeed. Things are brought to a head when the saboteurs--or "ecoteurs" as they call themselves--launch an attack designed to drive humans off the face of Antarctica. This is Kim Stanley Robinson's first book since his award-winning Mars trilogy, and while some of the themes may be familiar to seasoned Robinson readers, the book is never less than engrossing. As usual Robinson does a masterful job with the setting of his story, and anyone interested in Antarctica won't want to miss this one. --Craig Engler

From 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 charactersAa U.S. senator's aide, a professional Antarctic mountaineer and a misfit doing grunt labor at McMurdoAare 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. (July) FYI: Each of Robinson's last three novels, Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars, won either a Hugo or a Nebula.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 528 pages
  • Publisher: Bantam; First Edition edition (July 1, 1998)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0553100637
  • ISBN-13: 978-0553100631
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,970,326 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. He is the author of eleven previous books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Fifty Degrees Below, Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Antarctica--for which he was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program. He lives in Davis, California.

 

Customer Reviews

75 Reviews
5 star:
 (16)
4 star:
 (18)
3 star:
 (19)
2 star:
 (17)
1 star:
 (5)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.3 out of 5 stars (75 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Different planet familiar story still enjoyable, April 26, 2002
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This review is from: Antarctica (Mass Market Paperback)
After his Mars trilogy, just about anything Kim Stanley Robinson was going to do was highly anticipated. The worst thing he could have done was try and repeat his earlier trilogy just in a different setting. To his credit, he did try something different here, but not different enough at times to really make the book come alive. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautifully written and passionate book . . . in the acknowledgements Robinson mentions that he spent several months on the continent and the staggering amount of research shows . . . even if you've never been to Antarctica this book will make you feel like you have. Every mountain every cold gust of wind every pure blue sky is described beautifully here and that love of the land comes through both in the writing itself and the characters. The story, however, feels like a slight retread of the Mars trilogy, with the underlying conflict being whether to keep the land pure and unsullied or to exploit it as best we're able. To this end several plots spin around showing the different aspects, from the tentative oil drilling to the political angles to the scientific and the people just visiting. This crosssectioning almost defeats the book because with so many characters and views you don't get to know the characters as well as you did in the trilogy, only in several moments do they really come alive to the reader and the sparks start to fly. So the book functions mostly like a travelogue, albeit a wonderfully written one and the passion here just about makes up for the plot, but there are times when you'll sit back and wonder if the book is missing something important. The tension that drove the Mars trilogy is absent here, either because the setting isn't as futuristic or simply because he's trying to do more with less . . . but in the end it's entertaining and even a slight book by Robinson is miles better than anyone's best at this point. Don't expect to get as excited by it as his earlier books have done for you, but pick it up anyway. The pleasures it offers may not be new, but they're pleasurable nonetheless.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining portrait of a remote place and its people, August 5, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Antarctica (Hardcover)
This book is less a story taking place on and more of a portrait of Antarctica in the future, and the people who are so enthralled by the place that their passion for the continent, its history, and their vision of their place in it comes across on every page. Cleverly mixing the continent's short history with the book's current characters and issues, Robinson has added immensly to the growing literature, both fiction and non-fiction, about Antarctica. THe story however, is less important than the setting and the characters, and this is the book's flaw. It makes the book seem a bit long at times, though just when our interest is waning, something dramatic happens, or we become absorbed in adventures of past Antarctic explorers such as Shackleton, Amundsen, or SCott.The authors descriptions of the people and the place are undoubtedly its strong point. An enjoyable read. Also recommended is Elizabeth Arthur's Antarctic Navigation, a work of fiction on the continent and one woman's obsession with it.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Mars Trilogy redux, June 1, 1998
By 
This review is from: Antarctica (Hardcover)
I'd been eagerly awaiting Robinson's new book - maybe too much so, admittedly, given the expectations he'd raised with the magnificent Mars Trilogy. But Antarctica is a disappointment: there's about 60 pages of story in the 400-page novel. Characters and situations are watered-down versions of their Mars analogs. Disappointingly, he hasn't advanced his program for economic, social and spiritual reform: I was hoping for something more than was presented in Blue Mars, and got the same, but less. One real strength of the book is his facility with creating tomorrow's future, in describing technology that doesn't quite exist yet, but is perfectly familiar. While passages of his prose are brilliant, in Antarctica his impulse to include every kitchen sink of his research really gets the better of him. Still, he's Robinson, and I don't know of anybody else with as lucid and passionate an opposition to modern capitalism. Antarctica is worth reading, but if you want real brilliance, re-read the Mars Trilogy
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
worst journey, banana sled, crevasse detector, dragon arteries, camp crackers, ice borers, rubble line, wrist phone, crevasse fields, belay rope, trekking groups, oil camps, hover craft, ice planet
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Kim Stanley Robinson, Mac Town, South Pole, Antarctic Treaty, Shackleton Camp, Ross Island, Cherry Garrard, Ross Sea, Cape Evans, Cape Crozier, Dry Valleys, Roberts Massif, Senator Chase, Ross Ice Shelf, New Zealand, Mohn Basin, Shackleton Glacier, Axel Heiberg, Phil Chase, Barwick Valley, Wade Norton, Mac Corns, Hut Point, Scott Base, Discovery Hut
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