'It stands at Pluto’s North Pole – a mesmerising icehenge. Slabs of ice frozen harder than stone, towering two hundred feet above the crater-pocked surface. The central slab bears an inscription in Sanskrit.A message from an alien race? Or the mark of a human-powered voyage that might have passed this way? There were vague rumours of such a ship, forgotten decades ago. But could the crew have survived? Did the ship exist at all?'Blurb from the 1997 Voyager paperback editionThis marvellously structured book is divided into three sections, each telling a tale from a different viewpoint, separated in time by decades or hundreds of years. The first section (a diary of Emma Weill) begins in 2248 at the start of the doomed Martian revolution against the control of the Mars Development Committee, a conglomerate of Earth Companies who are determined to squeeze as much profit from the Red Planet as possible.Emma is a hydroponics expert on board an asteroid mining ship and become embroiled in a plot by the Mars Starship Association, who are planning to connect three separate ships and attempt to escape the Solar System; their aim being to settle on a new planet on one of our neighbouring stars. Emma sees no possibility of their completing their mission and, with many other of the crew who refuse to join the rebellion, returns to Mars where the revolution is being ruthlessly quashed.Nearly three hundred years later, Hjalmar Nederland, an eminent archaeologist and opponent of the MDC, has been given permission to excavate the ruins of a crater, which once was a domed community, and which was destroyed during the revolution. Hjalmar is seeking to prove that it was not – as history would have it – the revolutionaries who blasted the crater, but the Committee police. During his search he discovers an abandoned vehicle containing the diary of Emma Weill.Hjalmar has a vested interest, since he was a child living in the crater when the dome was breached. Since then, his life artificially extended by gerontology treatment, he has been driven to find the truth and expose the committee’s actions of three hundred years ago.Sixty years later, Hjalmar’s grandson, Edmond Doya, becomes obsessed by the discovery at the North Pole of Pluto of an icehenge, a monument which is thought to prove that Emma’s starship revolutionaries left a sign of their departure, since there is mention in her diary of plans for a henge existing on the ship at the time.But as he investigates further, he realises that what he suspects will discredit his grandfather’s life’s work.‘Icehenge’ is interesting to read as a presage to Robinson’s Magnum Opus ‘Mars Trilogy’ in which another Martian revolution takes place, again fighting against the exploitation of Mars by Earth Multinational companies. Although a much shorter work, this is a very clever piece of writing which examines the ethics of rewriting history, and allowing the populace to believe in something which is not true. Is it morally right for any population – even if it is for their greater good – to be living in a society with a fictional history.There are many precedents in World History, but Robinson by cleverly placing this outside our time, and bringing it down to a personal level by involving three main individuals, cuts through the obfuscation and allows us to contrast this future situation with our own.There is also much – rather as in the work of Fred Hoyle, and which also shown in Robinson’s later work – which is critical of the relationship between politics and science, here shown by Hjalmar’s determination to find the truth despite the efforts of the Committee.
I loved this! It is great for people who can't get enough of KSR's Mars trilogy. It's a much earlier imagining of some of the ideas that he must have developed over years of research in order to write those later books with his amazing attention to detail. At the same time, it's a completely different kind of thing - a science fiction book that is also a mystery. We see the story told through the experiences of three characters, each story set hundreds of years apart. In this universe people can expect to live for hundreds of years, but can only recall things from no more than about 80 years previously. This means that each stage of life is more like a reincarnation in which a person might be able to use something they've learned in a previous life, but have no ability to recall how they learned it - unless they kept journals or diaries that they can refer back to.So we see the mystery from several different angles over time, and we get a variety of different solutions to it, including a good look at conspiracy theories. I figured out the answer long before the explanation at the end, but that in no way lessened my enjoyment of the story. As with all KSR stories, the enjoyment is in the way it's told along with the detailed exploration of human society and the myriad ways it can be constructed.
What do You think about Icehenge (1998)?
This is the worst book I have read this year, and is quite possibly a top five choice for the last five years.This book was either as bad as I thought it was or it was way too smart for me, which is quite possible. I knew that I should have bailed on this book about 1/4 of the way into it, but I decided to stick around because I was hoping that the ending would tie everything together with a clever twist or revelation. The more I hung around, the more I realized that there were fewer and fewer pages for this twist or revelation to take place. I was so optimistic that even with less than a page left, I kept hoping for something to take place just to make the time I spent reading this book worth it.My first thought that I should cut my losses was when I realized that there was way to much real estate being given to explaining/describing the environment in detail. This is not normally a bad thing, but I felt as though the author was trying to fill up the pages by trying to pass off superfluous detail as creative writing.The second clue was that the word 'Icehenge' didn't show up until almost the halfway point of the book, and even then it did not become the main focus of the book until the last 1/3. This is, by the way, the reason that I picked up the book; to find some clever connection between Stonehenge and Icehenge, as promised on the jacket.Three stories/autobiographies from three different characters. Two of them were only mildly interesting, and by mildly, I mean that once you dug through the layers of useless description, there were only a page or two that actually intrigued me enough to make me want to turn the page on their own merit. The third story actually explores Icehenge but with zero payoff, making reading this autobiography a waste of time as well. Count in the fact that one of the stories might be misdirection and the other, which is based off of it, might be as well, then you truly put the book down after the final page to feel very unrewarded. It is like you have been promised to be taken on an exotic vacation only to be put on a slow moving/boring Greyhound bus for hours and when you arrive at your destination, you realize it is the dilapidated park in your own neighborhood.This is a shame too, because I actually liked some of the ideas put forth in the book such as the longevity of the human life span, the funk one encounters with extra years due to a lack of purpose and the idea that longevity of memory is not included with an extended life span. But these ideas are mentioned and not truly expanded upon in a way that would have made the book more interesting. None of them would have saved the book from the fact that it did not answer its own question or at least leave me thinking in any constructive way after I turned the final page, but at least I would have been somewhat more entertained by this book.
—Darren Vincent
I loved "Red Mars" back in the day, and had somewhat diminishing returns from the two subsequent books. It was good to step back into that world, and fascinating to see what Robinson does with a society with a medical treatment that makes people live for a thousand years. The book is divided into several sections, each with a different narrator, and a few hundred years apart. The arc follows the events that may (or may not) involved the creation of a monolith built from ice. Read it for how characters are affected by eternal life, with very non-eternal memories.
—Janet
"Icehenge"consists of 3 first-person narratives that lead the reader through a revolution on Mars, an archeological dig in the ruins of the revolution many years after, and, finally, to the (then) planet Pluto to investigate the mysterious Icehenge of the title. All three stories interconnect. They each leave the reader with a possible 'truth' concerning the Mars Revolution and the creator of the Icehenge. In the end the reader is led to a final conclusion, but possibilities still haunt the truth.This is not Robinson's best work. The writing is dry. What little action there is is plodding. The middle section could be trimmed. However, I am glad to have read it. Revolution and mysterious objects on other worlds are themes that will never get stale in sci-fi.
—Jason
