Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson

By the year 2248, when Icehenge begins, humanity has long-established settlements on Mars though terraforming is far from complete. Spaceships ply the middle planets, and asteroid mining has been an industry long enough for people to have grown up in it. One of the key differences that has made long-term projects such as terraforming viable is a set of treatments, developed in the early twenty-first century, that stop aging in adulthood. People in the era of Icehenge expect to live on the order of a thousand years, though obviously nobody has managed that much yet. Robinson tells his tales of this epoch through three interlinked first-person novellas, one set in 2248, one in 2547 and one in 2610.

Emma Weil’s story starts on the interplanetary vessel Rust Eagle, and in the very first sentence she lets readers know that the journey will be interrupted by a mutiny. She is an ecological systems engineer, one of the best in the business, keeping spaceships’ life support systems in balance on long voyages as humans and the life forms that support them breathe in and out, eat and excrete, using and returning to the onboard environment oxygen and carbon dioxide and many other trace items that are nonetheless vital. The closer a ship can get to becoming a closed system the lower its running costs, an important consideration in the economics that Robinson has set up in the book.

Looking nearly three hundred years into the future — Icehenge was published in 1984 — Robinson considered that Earth would still be dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, but that they would work together through the Mars Development Committee to keep the Red Planet under their two thumbs. He doesn’t dwell on Earth, which is just as well given that the Soviet Union had less than a decade left to run, but posits that conditions on Mars would lend themselves to bureaucratic dominance and very little freedom, even deep into the terraforming process. In Emma’s time, people can move around in domed cities but outside the domes they still need life support of some sort, whether vehicles or suits. The Committee’s technocrats extend their control over the material conditions of colonists’ lives into thorough control of their lives in general.

Naturally, not everyone is willing to follow the Committee’s strictures. Some of them wind up in jail, orbiting Mars. Emma’s father is in that jail. Others have hatched a long-running plan; that’s the mutiny that Emma mentions in the first sentence of her account. Of course it only looks like a long plan to readers. To characters with a lifespan plausibly measured in centuries, spending a few decades putting certain things into motion is a modest investment, especially if the payoff is freedom or something even more audacious.

Throughout Icehenge, Robinson is modestly interested in terraforming and technological progress, but what he’s really interested in is history, what happens to it when people start living through longer reaches of it, and what happens to humans when they have lived two hundred years or more.

By the end of Emma Weil’s story, the titular structure has not appeared at all. In fact, the closest allusion is the mutineer captain saying that their plans involve spending some time at Pluto before proceeding with the part of the plan that Emma declines to join. The mutineers are fanatical, but not completely ruthless. She and a few others are allowed to return to Mars in a smaller ship that’s not needed for the plan. More surprises await, and readers learn why her account was written in such haste.

Three hundred years later, Hjalmar Nederland is an archeologist and Martian historian. At the age of 310, Hjalmar himself is an artifact of Martian history. But as he says, “Memory is the weak link. … [M]ost of my life is lost to me, buried in the years. I might as well be a creature of incarnations, moving from life to life, ignorant of my own past.” (p. 69) Some physical things have changed: as terraforming has advanced (Robinson resolutely does not write about how this works) the Martian atmosphere has thickened and is breathable without assistance at lower elevations. Some things have not changed: the Committee still runs Mars on behalf of the USA and the USSR, though its dictatorship seems to have mellowed over time, fencing people in with bureaucratic restrictions and established customs, rather than issuing decrees and enforcing them with deadly violence. Still, some subjects are taboo, and Hjalmar is thrilled that the loosening of one such taboo has allowed him to lead an expedition to the site of an old settlement, one that was precipitously abandoned during disturbances in the year 2248.

In the course of Hjalmar’s story, but quite separately from his work, an artificial structure is discovered on Pluto. Although in Robinson’s setting travel out toward Saturn is relatively common, Pluto is far off enough in its eccentric orbit that nobody was known to have visited. Rectangular slabs about ten times the size of those at Stonehenge, set upright on their short sides in a circle at Pluto’s north pole are obviously not a natural formation. Hjalmar’s team discovers Emma’s journal, outside the crater that held the settlement they are investigating. Her words contradict the received, Committee-approved narrative about the events in 2248. Further, Hjalmar finds a link to Pluto in the journal. From there, he constructs and eventually publicizes a theory about what Icehenge is, and how it got there.

Those are the bones of the story, but the real matter is Hjalmar exploring his life as he explores the archeological dig. What’s it like to pass your 300th birthday? Robinson shows how he has lived through stage after stage, leaving behind partners, children, grandchildren, though views differ on whether he has effectively abandoned them or given them the freedom to live their own lives. In the story’s present, he’s in a same-sex relationship that’s open and uncomplicated for a book published in the mid-1980s, though he had several long-term heterosexual relationships as well. Autobiography helps him remember, when he cares to. While reinvention is a hallmark of Hjalmar’s long span, that tendency does not seem to be universal. His present partner is high up in the Committee hierarchy and seems to have been in that career all along.

I think Robinson does a terrific job imagining how people might live such an extended period. They seem strange, but it is also a strange proposition to have lived for centuries, to have forgotten decades, and to be facing the prospect of still more centuries. I thought he was a little less successful in showing how societies change over time. By comparison, Ada Palmer‘s Terra Ignota series brings home just how differently people think and act in faraway times. In Icehenge, Robinson implies that the interpretation of the 2248 disturbances is still a live political issue, one that could shake the power that the Committee holds in the story’s present. That’s good for a coherent narrative — imagine a reader having to keep track of all the significant political events of the intervening years — but it doesn’t seem terribly plausible to me. On the other hand, some of the people who made fateful choices in the time of Emma Weil are still in important roles at the time of Hjalmar Nederland. I think there would be a lot more friction as the first generation to receive the anti-aging treatments cements itself in power and refuses to budge for the generations that follow, but that’s not an issue that Robinson particularly chooses to address.

Or rather, he does address it but in terms of psychology and precedence rather than of power. The third narrator of Icehenge, Edmond Doya, is one of Hjalmar’s great-grandchildren. Technology has kept advancing, such that bumming around the outer planets taking odd jobs and scraping by in space stations is a life that someone can live. Edmond has done just that, but with the odd hobby of a keen interest in Icehenge. In particular, he’s not convinced by the theory that Hjalmar advanced sixty years previously, one that has become the consensus view. Edmond’s tale takes place on a new expedition to Pluto, to go there and test the theories that have arisen about Icehenge. This section is more of a meditation about what is knowable, how power and money can shape public perception. Edmond comes to question things that a reader, having been carried along by the earlier narrative, has probably taken for granted. It upends the experience of the book, and made me re-evaluate whose evidence I had been accepting.

This is a marvelous book, ambitious literature that wears its learning lightly — I spotted a Wallace Stevens reference and suspect there are many more — and tells three great stories that re-shape each other as they go along. Icehenge remains an enigma, much like the people of the several worlds with their elongated lifespans. Icehenge invites readers to come along on the journeys, and find out what they think.

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My friend Henry wrote the introduction to the edition of Icehenge that I read. He also has an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson here in which they talk about the book’s genesis, and how, forty years after its first publication, it fits with some of his other works.