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Antarctica
576 pages, Paperback
Published December 2, 2025
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About the author
Kim Stanley Robinson
251 books7,546 followersKim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He has published 22 novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his Mars trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes and feature scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. The Atlantic has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." According to an article in The New Yorker, Robinson is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers."
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 20, 2026
Apparently, this new and surreptitious edition of ANTARTICA has yet to cohere with the primary page for the novel (with some 3.3K logs; this page has, after this entry, only one) according to Goodreads. But, alas, I wanted to keep my logs in step with the edition I picked up.
A considerable disappointment. I mentioned previously: it's "very Michael Crichton-coded, meaning low sci-fi adventure, techno-ecocatastrophe, loads of technical jargon and exposition, but surprisingly even MORE verbose. Over a third of the way into the book and nothing of note has really happened... but the central trio of characters are interesting, and the cold isolation of the Antarctic is palpable."
Aside from the Crichton-adjacent template, only one of those points remains: Antarctica's alien, dry, deadly, and beautiful frigidity is well on display. It's clear KSR admires the lonely continent. But man, does he not seem to care about the story or characters. Crichton is fun, while being technical; KSR is no fun, while being oppressively technical.
Like the Antarctic, the novel can be frightfully dry, with KSR using his characters as mouthpieces for his debates on ecology and climate change—situated in what can best be described as a climactic town hall meeting—instead of making them well-rounded, lived-in characters. As a result, the dialogue is wildly inconsistent: sometimes palpably human, sometimes written as unrealistic delegates of long-winded exposition. At least he mostly eschews what may have been another irksome love triangle.
There are only a few sentences concerning the state of the world: roughly 10 billion people, with the world rapidly deteriorating. The rest, the vast majority of the novel, is contrarily bogged down by the minutiae of technicalities and logistics, geological detail, and polar history; necessary elements, of course, but far too overbearing. An interesting arrangement in theory, proven tragically insufficient here.
It's almost as if Robinson were aware of the novel's tepidity, and, in an attempt to inject some vitality into it, literally set off a couple of ecoterroristic explosions to get things moving. In fact, the following sections where our heroes are forced to trek across the biting ice, unassisted by outside communication or GPS due to the coordinated attack, makes a good analogy to my experience reading this: it was tiresome, arduous, and kind of a pain in the ass.
Not quite a waste of time, but I would have rather skipped this one had I known it would be so dusty.
A considerable disappointment. I mentioned previously: it's "very Michael Crichton-coded, meaning low sci-fi adventure, techno-ecocatastrophe, loads of technical jargon and exposition, but surprisingly even MORE verbose. Over a third of the way into the book and nothing of note has really happened... but the central trio of characters are interesting, and the cold isolation of the Antarctic is palpable."
Aside from the Crichton-adjacent template, only one of those points remains: Antarctica's alien, dry, deadly, and beautiful frigidity is well on display. It's clear KSR admires the lonely continent. But man, does he not seem to care about the story or characters. Crichton is fun, while being technical; KSR is no fun, while being oppressively technical.
Like the Antarctic, the novel can be frightfully dry, with KSR using his characters as mouthpieces for his debates on ecology and climate change—situated in what can best be described as a climactic town hall meeting—instead of making them well-rounded, lived-in characters. As a result, the dialogue is wildly inconsistent: sometimes palpably human, sometimes written as unrealistic delegates of long-winded exposition. At least he mostly eschews what may have been another irksome love triangle.
There are only a few sentences concerning the state of the world: roughly 10 billion people, with the world rapidly deteriorating. The rest, the vast majority of the novel, is contrarily bogged down by the minutiae of technicalities and logistics, geological detail, and polar history; necessary elements, of course, but far too overbearing. An interesting arrangement in theory, proven tragically insufficient here.
It's almost as if Robinson were aware of the novel's tepidity, and, in an attempt to inject some vitality into it, literally set off a couple of ecoterroristic explosions to get things moving. In fact, the following sections where our heroes are forced to trek across the biting ice, unassisted by outside communication or GPS due to the coordinated attack, makes a good analogy to my experience reading this: it was tiresome, arduous, and kind of a pain in the ass.
Not quite a waste of time, but I would have rather skipped this one had I known it would be so dusty.
February 6, 2026
Geez this guy is hard to read. But did finish this one. His characterization is ridiculous & juvenile and there’s very little that happens. It’s more a pedantic rumination of the beauty of Antarctica (a lot of non-fiction history-telling) and eco-utopian fantasy than an actual story. I enjoyed the descriptions of the landscape and what’s required to traverse it and live there— it’s a trip on my life list for sure. But it’s such a slog because of the shallow characters, silly crushes & incessant moralizing.
X: a general laborer who moons & weeps like a lovesick puppy over an Amazon mountaineer who dumped him then experiences an unlikely apotheosis at the end as a co-op savant to free the workers at McMurdo from their Northern profit-driven overlords… while remaining a 15-year old dork to the end.
Ta Shu: a Chinese feng shui master & “foremost geomancer” on an excursion, live-streaming to his followers his melodramatic experience of the continent & so deep feng shui-informed insights like: “this is a good place.” And Antarctica is too “yang” because men only explored it for so long so it must yin-ized. And we should be “loverknowers” of the continent, appreciating its beauty as well as being scientific? I really don’t know… new agey nonsense instead of more lyrical, actually human responses is a very odd choice.
The writing is very irritating too— there are pages and pages of scenes & exposition that are just strung together without really driving any plot: a subterranean waterslide under the old polar base, miles & miles of hiking, vague suspicions of interlopers on the ice (“ice pirates”) as well as groups who have somehow managed to secretly inhabit the continent with hi-tech & indigenous knowledge…? So it doesn’t work as a coherent plot. And it can’t be a character-based drama because they’re too lame. So there is nothing for the story to hang on. Characters often are “quiet while they think it over.” And we’re just standing there, watching them think… geez.
X: a general laborer who moons & weeps like a lovesick puppy over an Amazon mountaineer who dumped him then experiences an unlikely apotheosis at the end as a co-op savant to free the workers at McMurdo from their Northern profit-driven overlords… while remaining a 15-year old dork to the end.
Ta Shu: a Chinese feng shui master & “foremost geomancer” on an excursion, live-streaming to his followers his melodramatic experience of the continent & so deep feng shui-informed insights like: “this is a good place.” And Antarctica is too “yang” because men only explored it for so long so it must yin-ized. And we should be “loverknowers” of the continent, appreciating its beauty as well as being scientific? I really don’t know… new agey nonsense instead of more lyrical, actually human responses is a very odd choice.
The writing is very irritating too— there are pages and pages of scenes & exposition that are just strung together without really driving any plot: a subterranean waterslide under the old polar base, miles & miles of hiking, vague suspicions of interlopers on the ice (“ice pirates”) as well as groups who have somehow managed to secretly inhabit the continent with hi-tech & indigenous knowledge…? So it doesn’t work as a coherent plot. And it can’t be a character-based drama because they’re too lame. So there is nothing for the story to hang on. Characters often are “quiet while they think it over.” And we’re just standing there, watching them think… geez.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews