Antarctica
   Kim Stanley Robinson
  1998 Bantam Books NY USA
   ISBN: 0553100637


Set in the near future, all who come to this last great wilderness have their own agenda for its development once the international treaty expires.

Kim Stanley Robinson is well-known for his Mars saga set in the future on another planet, in Antarctica he brings his formidable talents closer to home to create a hair-raising possibility about our own last continent, the South Pole.

Intertwined with rich historical information about the adventurers of yore, their feats & their fears, their beau gestes and their pettiness, Robinson has given us a relentlessly unfolding drama of corporate profit-taking at the expense of employees in the most hazardous of job sites; of ecology protectors contemplating insane protests; of ludicrous yet intensely frank real-time televised travelogues.

In the beginning, it all seems so clean and mild. The only enemy the weather, then bad, strange things begin to happen. And as the cracks deepen this isolated community that depends upon the sanity of the whole to keep it from killing itself off, finds itself in dire straits from those coming in for fun, profit or politics.

This is science-fiction & adventure at its best, all rolled into one. Sometimes I felt I was reading a Hammond Innes like Ice Station Zebra, sometimes it was pure extra-terrestrial & sometimes I felt Kim Stanley Robinson was dragging me into the most exhilarating storm imaginable.

For me it was a bit of a slog, yet my husband sailed through it, often reading out portions, rocking like mad in his chair for the cheek-chewing tension. A fine yarn with a fascinating new vocabulary & very serious implications.

For more Kim Stanley Robinson reads see: Red Mars; Green Mars; Blue Mars; A Short, Sharp Shock; Pacific Edge; The Wild Shore & The Gold Coast.
(04/12/99)

Rebecca