Customer Reviews

ICEHENGE.

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Kim Stanley Robinson debuted with this book and The Wild Shore practically in the same year, something that doesn't happen too often. Even rarer, it turns out that both book are key works of the authors and deserved to be read years after they were first published. The Wild Shore gets most of the glory because it's slightly better and part of a trilogy (all three of which are highly recommended) and also because it's less "SFish" than Icehenge. Icehenge has a similar structure as Asimov's The Gods Themselves in that the book is made of three distinct pieces with three distinct characters who all further the plot without ever meeting . . . sort of. There is some crossing of stories here, but not directly, but Robinson's charactizations are what shine through. All of the parts are written in the first person and each character has an individual voice, uniquely showing different views of a future society where life is good but not great, where you can live for hundreds of years but forget about the place where you were born. The plot partially concerns some monoliths (shades of 2001!) being found on Pluto, with the pervading theory that they were built by humans . . . the only question is by who and why. The first story sets up everything else and might give clues into what happened but the other two sections are what deal with the formations proper. The first guy has one theory, his great-grandson years later has a totally different one and both go about proving them. In the end though it's impossible to say and this is a book that will have you considering a lot of aspects of the plot long after you've put it done. Robinson didn't take the easy way out and give a neatly pat ending, which some readers may not be too fond of. But considering the themes of the book, of memory loss and forgetting the past, it fits in perfectly. It's not his best book but if you've enjoyed anything else he's written there's no reason why you shouldn't give this a shot.

OK, I know this book was published before the Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) and before "The Martians" but it was the last of the Mars books I read. This book brought Robinson's whole Mars reality back vividly into my mind.

I don't know if I would have enjoyed this book as much as I did had I not read the Mars trilogy first. Having the background of the trilogy allowed me to focus on the story unfolding in this book.

If you like Robinson's examination of society through the fiction that he writes then you will like this book.

The aspect of the book I found most enjoyable is its examination of how history is created and how a search of facts and historical objects can lead to many different interpretations of the same data. The book seems to me to be saying that we can't ever truly know what happened in the past; we can only examine the available information and take a guess. We should never forget that the victors make the history whether they were in the right or not.

The book itself is a triptych surrounding the creation of a monument near the north pole of Pluto. It is set in the future in the same fictional universe as the Mars trilogy and The Martians. I'd say it is most like The Martians in that it is a collection of three short stories that all deal with the same theme and build one upon the others. Each of the three stories could be taken individually and be interesting but they are related and the relationship between them is what gives this book it's unique quality. In the first part of the triptych Robinson provides an account of events in the form of a journal written by one character. In the reading of this journal one identifies with the character writing it and in a sense becomes her friend. As the book progresses the reader is confronted with the possibility that she never really existed and that the journal was written as part of an elaborate hoax. When confronted with this, Robinson's development of the journal writer's character in the first section of the triptych and of the supposed history of what happened to her presented in the second part makes the reader instinctually reject the proposal that she never existed. The evidence presented in the third section is very clear that the hoax exists but the reader is still led to believe that the journal writer was real and that even if the journal is part of a hoax it is still an authentic journal. There are no definite answers or conclusions presented in the book but none are truly necessary. Robinson presents the facts and lets the reader reach their own conclusion. Near the very end a final theory is presented that I reached about halfway through the third section. All the parts fit and it is a wonderful end to the story.

Anyway, I hope someone finds this interesting and helpful.

-Anthony

If I hadn't already read KSR's Mars Trilogy, I'm not sure I would have liked this book much. This book was written 10 years before Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars were published, but KSR obviously had already thought through a number of the terraforming and long life issues he would deal with in those books. For that reason alone, this book is extremely interesting as a precursor to the trilogy (although it actually is set in a future time when Mars has an established atmosphere and settled government).

However, there was a darkness to this book that disturbed me. The main character in the middle section constantly struggles to avoid falling into a deep, immobilizing depression. There is little joy in this book, and overmuch political machinations, hopelessness and depression.

My thoughts on Icehenge are difficult to gather - it's a gripping story, a page-turner. Page-turner-ness is an important criterion for any book to rated highly. However, even though I loved reading the book, and hated when I had to pause, I am still left somewhat empty after reading it, because ultimately, it doesn't get across what I think the author wanted to get across to us - which is the vagaries of historical research, and how human fallability, and human ego, especially as they are enhanced by a human life-span that has reached the 600 year range, interferes with our ability to ever accurately reconstruct the past, no matter how advanced our scientific archeological technology might progress.

The story takes place in three different times, all after we have colonized Mars. The first part is the Mars rebellion of 2248, told from the point of view of a woman who ended up hijacked by a rebellious faction who were planning on going out of the solar system to escape the dreaded corporate committee that rules Mars. The second part takes place a few hundred years later, and involves the discovery of "Icehenge", a stonehenge-like construction of ice on Pluto, with a sanskrit inscription and a date of 2248. The main character of this section is an archeologist who reconstructs through "scientific" means that the group of rebels from part I made icehenge on their way out of the solar system.

The third part of the story is a few hundred years after the second, and involves a main character who does a lot of research and ends up being able to go to Pluto, and then "substantively" proves that icehenge could not possibly have been built by the rebel group, since it must be relatively recently constructed.

The society and culture that Robinson created in this book is very believable and interesting; his characters are fantastic - I cared for them all, whether they were jerks or good people; his writing style is readable and exciting. But still, the story just doesn't leave me thrilled to have read it. The potential was there to make a real important inquiry into the nature of historical reconstruction, and thus be a commendable treatise on our own fallability in accurately reconstructing history and our ego-stupidity in assuming that what we "discover" must be the "truth". But, unfortunately, he doesn't quite do that.

But, in all respect, this is also an early work of Robinson's, before reaching maturity, so to speak, as a writer.

It's definitely worth the read, absolutely. But if you are in the mood for something more meaty, then pass this one up, and head for something else.

3 stars becuase the writing style is so awesome, but the story doesn't go as far as it could have in enlightening us about the author's point of view.

Having saturated myself in Robinson's excellent Mars Trilogy several years ago, Icehenge ended up being one of those purchases that sat on my shelf for some time. Picking Icehenge up several years after its publication has not detracted at all, as the author's easy creation of a realistic solar society still remains on course and, given the advances in genetics over recent years, all the more plausible.
Icehenge is a story set in three parts told by three connected people over several hundred years. Robinson seeks to take archaeology into the future to demonstrate that the provision of primary written evidence is inevitably biased and that written evidence of what we will do will become too distorted and too historically complex for our future generations to be in any better position to understand than our archaeological techniques can today.
The opener, narrated by Emma Weil tells of her unwitting participation in a somewhat idealistic attempt by the underground Mars Starship Association to set off for pastures new beyond our solar system. Her love affair is woven in as both a motivator and an explanation for the links between Weil and Davydov, giving us a story of a group of people determined to leave the solar system to colonize pastures new. Heavily influenced by the political situation on Mars at the time it culminates in Emma's return to Mars to be part of the uprising and final destruction of New Houston. A voyage in both the physical and mental sense, part I is intensely reflective and demonstrates the struggle between idealism and reality, between fact and perception.
A `footnote' to the opening text is Davydov's desire to leave a megalithic message and this is picked up in second story, narratted by (at the time) maverick archaeologist Hjalmar Nederland who was present at the fall of New Houston. His expedition to uncover this lost city of the rebellion and question the official version as denoted in the Aimes Report is a personal odyssey that culminates in his discovery of a truth that contradicts the official version, yet doesn't upset the political apple cart. He then moves on to be a leading part of the IceHenge discovery and the links between both it and Emma Weil.
Whereas Weil's journey is from `good citzen' to rebel, Nederland's is the opposite - though mainly in the intellectual community. What is ironic is that it is the understanding of Weil's last days and transition that sends Nederland unwittingly back to the path of officialdom, rather than truth.
This is further continued in the third story, that of Edmond Doya, the great-grandon of Nederland whose passion for all things archeological and his upbringing off-planet forces him to question the reality of Emma Weil's testament, Nederland's explanation for Icehenge and, in doing so, the perception of history. His search leads him to Pluto where a final dating methodology is established seeming to give a final proof to his findings and concluding several historical records and theories. Robinson throws in a final thought with Doya's colleague advancing a further theory to close the cycle begun by Emma Weil some many years ago.
As well as being a well written, plausible exposition of a humar solar society in the distant future, what Robinson's Icehenge achieves is to question our perception of history, of how history is written and how the need to understand our origins can cause those explorers or seekers of historical truth to make assumptions and give explanations which, though plausible, are created through suggestion.

I've long had to admit that while I liked Stan Robinson's writing, I had never read any of his novels, just his short stories in magazines and collections. No more, although the case could be made that Icehenge is a collection of three novellas. In fact, parts of Icehenge were published as "To Leave a Mark" (in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) and "On the North Pole of Pluto" (in Orbit 21). This is the reason why I picked Icehenge to read first, before Robinson's first published novel, The Wild Shore; that is, to satisfy my anal retentive (does that have a hyphen?) desire for reading things chronologically. Icehenge is three stories inter-connected, each from a different time period and point of view. The first tells of Emma Weil and the Martian Unrest. The second of Nederland and his archaelogical investigation into the Unrest. And last is Doya, who questions whether Nederland's "proof" is actually an ingenuous hoax. Complicated? Yes, but also done in such a way that the convolutions are easy to follow. Robinson admires Philip K. Dick--his graduate thesis was on Dick's novels--and it shows in the theme of this book: what is real? What can we trust? Several people have recommended his latest novel, Red Mars, to me, and I do intend to read it...after I finally read all these others of his that have been sitting on my to-be-read shelf for far too long.

Composed of three parts in which each centers on a different character, this novel develops in very unexpected ways to highlight the problems of knowledge of the past even in a future setting where people live for hundreds of years. The puzzle of the construction of a Stonehenge-like monument on Pluto is at the center of this story covering 362 years and set against the background of a developing solar system-wide human civilization. The author's first-person narrative/auto-biographical approach works well for telling this story too. Along the way a recurrent sub-theme explores what it means for humans to live very much longer than we do now. Very enjoyable read!

This is a fantastic book by an excellent author. Icehenge gives you the journals of three individuals all somehow connected with a mysterious monolith on Pluto. This is a suspenceful story that keeps you asking "Who built Icehenge?" to the very last page.

"Icehenge" is a great science fiction novel at a number of levels. On the surface it is a something of a mystery, namely, who put those ice megaliths on Pluto? Robinson maintains the air of suspense right up to the book's end (and beyond, depending on how you look at it). Perhaps the most interesting aspects of "Icehenge" are some of the underlying themes Robinson incorporates into his narrative. One is the concept of virtual immortality, as the people in the novel's future world have life spans of up to a thousand years. Robinson explores some of the possible downsides to such a medical feat, such as extensive memory loss (most of the novel's older characters cannot recall their own childhood) and deep, debilitating depressions (`funks') induced by a feeling that life lacks purpose - not hard to believe if you can imagine yourself living for 500 or so years with another 500 to come. Additionally, Robinson speculates on the nature of history and acheology as forms of scholarship. Using the novel's debate about the origin of the Icehenge monument on Pluto, he notes how something as apparently straightforward as the exploration of past events can be subject to massive debates and controversy, as events and facts are reinterpreted, new evidence is found and accepted beliefs are turned on their head - with all of the ensuing social and political implications. As such, "Icehenge" is a great metaphor for our own day and age. The only criticism I would have is that writing this novel in the early 1980s, Robinson too confidently projected some of the realities of his own time into his imagined future. Thus, there is the now odd reference to the Soviet fleet and Soviet colonies on Mars. If you can get past this, "Icehenge" is a very enjoyable and intriguing book.

Icehenge was an extremely enjoyable mystery. The use of three strong characters telling the story from their individual perspectives over the ages was refreshing and innovative. While much different from the later Mars Series, it gives the reader an exciting journey into the discovery of our solar system (and beyond).