Note: My read but “waiting to be reviewed pile” is growing. Short rumination/tangents/impressions are a way to get through the stack before my memory and will fades. My website partially serves as a record of what I have read and a memory palace for future projects. Stay tuned for more detailed and analytical reviews.

You’ll soon understand why I haven’t posted regularly. There’s a substantial article (mostly complete) with original (and laborious) research on the horizon. Stay tuned!

1. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984)

4.5/5 (Very Good)

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984), a fix-up from two previously published stories “To Leave a Mark” (1982) and “On the North Pole of Pluto” (1980), tells three interconnected tales that all connect to a mysterious monolith left on Pluto (the titular Icehenge).

In part I (2248 A.D.), hydroponics specialist Emma Weil, stationed on a mining ship in the asteroid belt, finds herself caught up in a radical act of defiance to coincide with a revolt on Mars–the creation of a spaceship for a voyage outside the solar system. She must confront the pull of home and the multitude of ways the power of the state informs and manipulates her life. In part II (2547 A.D.), historian and archaeologist Hjalmar Nederland discovers evidence of the revolt on Mars long covered up by authorities, the diary of Emma Weil, and the monolith on Pluto — a testament to the act of defiance? In so doing, he too, must reckon with Mars’ bureaucratic dictatorship and its amorphous ability to claim narratives of resistance as its own. In part III (2610 A.D.), Edmond Doya, a descendant of Nederland, spins his own conspiracy theory casting all that went before into question. As the threads intersect and split and cross, a voyage sets off, again, for Pluto and its icy pillars—a testament to our desire to find meaning in a disenchanted world.

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