2312 was published by Orbit in 2012 and won the Nebula Award. Set three hundred years in the future, the entire solar system has been colonized and terraformed (in various degrees). Mercury’s city, Terminator, rolls on tracks around the planet, always staying in the terminator zone between burning day and freezing night. Venus is being slowly terraformed. The asteroid belt has been hollowed into thousands of terraria — rotating habitats with custom ecologies inside.
Swan Er Hong is a performance artist and designer of terraria on Mercury. Fitz Wahram is a diplomat from Titan. When Swan’s grandmother Alex dies under suspicious circumstances and a terrorist attack destroys Terminator’s tracks (causing the city to be caught by the sun), Swan and Wahram are drawn into an investigation that spans the solar system.
Robinson uses the detective plot as a framework for exploring what humanity becomes when it has three hundred years of biotechnology, AI development, ecological engineering, and social experimentation behind it. Gender is fluid (Swan has both ovaries and testes). AI has become ambient (quantum computers called “qubes” may or may not be conscious). Earth alone remains degraded — flooded, hot, ungovernable — and the novel’s political question is whether the spacefaring civilization has an obligation to intervene.
Collecting 2312
First edition (Orbit, London, 2012): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $20–$40
- Signed first: $50–$100