Icehenge: Amazon.ca: Kim Stanley Robinson: Books

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Voted one of the best science fiction novels of the year in the 1985 Locus Poll, Icehenge is an early novel by Kim Stanley Robinson (author of the trilogy comprising Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) and takes place in the same universe. The story is part mystery and part psychological drama, divided into three distinct sections.

In the year 2248, Mars is ruled by a Politburo-like committee that actively discourages dissent as well as travel and exploration of other planets. Scientist Emma Weil becomes involved in a covert plot to convert a stolen ship into a self-supporting spaceship. She turns down a chance to accompany the starfarers, and returns to her beloved Mars where she joins the revolution already in progress.

Three centuries later, archaeologist Hjalmar Nederland unearths a governmental cover-up of the true facts behind the old revolution. At the same time, a Stonehenge-like monument is discovered on the north pole of Pluto, and Nederland sets out to prove his theory that the monument is connected to revolutionaries and their contemporaries who left for the stars. Seventy years later, his great-grandson Edmond Doya becomes convinced that Icehenge is a hoax, and attempts to disprove Nederland's theory.

In addition to futuristic issues such as interstellar travel and the terraforming of Mars, Robinson's characters grapple with politics, careers, families, and aging. Icehenge is a worthy introduction to the author's winning combination of hard science and believable characterization. --Bonnie Bouman

Review

"Unforgettable." --The Baltimore Sun

"In a genre not often distinguished by strong characterization, Robinson is a welcome exception. Yet even the memorable community of his The Wild Shore did not prepare us for this brilliant triptych in which the monolithic artifact of the title and the events surrounding it are described and examined from widely different points of view. The distinct, personal voices of the narratives, as they construct and deconstruct their elegant theories, are a pleasure rare in SF." --Publishers Weekly

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First Sentence
The first indication I had of the mutiny came as we approached the inner limit of the first asteroid belt. Read the first page

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Concordance

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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover

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3.9 out of 5 stars (20 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Who build Icehenge?, Jan 9 2003

By	Andrew J. Porwitzky (Havre de Grace, MD) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a fantastic book by an excellent author. Icehenge gives you the journals of three individuals all somehow connected with a mysterious monolith on Pluto. This is a suspenceful story that keeps you asking "Who built Icehenge?" to the very last page.

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4.0 out of 5 stars A commentary on the science of historical perceptivity, Dec 12 2002

By	ilmk "ilmk" (UK) - See all my reviews

Having saturated myself in Robinson's excellent Mars Trilogy several years ago, Icehenge ended up being one of those purchases that sat on my shelf for some time. Picking Icehenge up several years after its publication has not detracted at all, as the author's easy creation of a realistic solar society still remains on course and, given the advances in genetics over recent years, all the more plausible.
Icehenge is a story set in three parts told by three connected people over several hundred years. Robinson seeks to take archaeology into the future to demonstrate that the provision of primary written evidence is inevitably biased and that written evidence of what we will do will become too distorted and too historically complex for our future generations to be in any better position to understand than our archaeological techniques can today.
The opener, narrated by Emma Weil tells of her unwitting participation in a somewhat idealistic attempt by the underground Mars Starship Association to set off for pastures new beyond our solar system. Her love affair is woven in as both a motivator and an explanation for the links between Weil and Davydov, giving us a story of a group of people determined to leave the solar system to colonize pastures new. Heavily influenced by the political situation on Mars at the time it culminates in Emma's return to Mars to be part of the uprising and final destruction of New Houston. A voyage in both the physical and mental sense, part I is intensely reflective and demonstrates the struggle between idealism and reality, between fact and perception.
A 'footnote' to the opening text is Davydov's desire to leave a megalithic message and this is picked up in second story, narratted by (at the time) maverick archaeologist Hjalmar Nederland who was present at the fall of New Houston. His expedition to uncover this lost city of the rebellion and question the official version as denoted in the Aimes Report is a personal odyssey that culminates in his discovery of a truth that contradicts the official version, yet doesn't upset the political apple cart. He then moves on to be a leading part of the IceHenge discovery and the links between both it and Emma Weil.
Whereas Weil's journey is from 'good citzen' to rebel, Nederland's is the opposite - though mainly in the intellectual community. What is ironic is that it is the understanding of Weil's last days and transition that sends Nederland unwittingly back to the path of officialdom, rather than truth.
This is further continued in the third story, that of Edmond Doya, the great-grandon of Nederland whose passion for all things archeological and his upbringing off-planet forces him to question the reality of Emma Weil's testament, Nederland's explanation for Icehenge and, in doing so, the perception of history. His search leads him to Pluto where a final dating methodology is established seeming to give a final proof to his findings and concluding several historical records and theories. Robinson throws in a final thought with Doya's colleague advancing a further theory to close the cycle begun by Emma Weil some many years ago.
As well as being a well written, plausible exposition of a humar solar society in the distant future, what Robinson's Icehenge achieves is to question our perception of history, of how history is written and how the need to understand our origins can cause those explorers or seekers of historical truth to make assumptions and give explanations which, though plausible, are created through suggestion.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Phil Dick ideas, Thomas Pynchon style, Sep 18 2002

By	Glen Engel Cox "www.engel-cox.org" (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've long had to admit that while I liked Stan Robinson's writing, I had never read any of his novels, just his short stories in magazines and collections. No more, although the case could be made that Icehenge is a collection of three novellas. In fact, parts of Icehenge were published as "To Leave a Mark" (in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) and "On the North Pole of Pluto" (in Orbit 21). This is the reason why I picked Icehenge to read first, before Robinson's first published novel, The Wild Shore; that is, to satisfy my anal retentive (does that have a hyphen?) desire for reading things chronologically. Icehenge is three stories inter-connected, each from a different time period and point of view. The first tells of Emma Weil and the Martian Unrest. The second of Nederland and his archaelogical investigation into the Unrest. And last is Doya, who questions whether Nederland's "proof" is actually an ingenuous hoax. Complicated? Yes, but also done in such a way that the convolutions are easy to follow. Robinson admires Philip K. Dick--his graduate thesis was on Dick's novels--and it shows in the theme of this book: what is real? What can we trust? Several people have recommended his latest novel, Red Mars, to me, and I do intend to read it...after I finally read all these others of his that have been sitting on my to-be-read shelf for far too long.

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