5 of 6
—MN
Fiction
Antarctica
By Kim Stanley Robinson
Bantam
516 pp.; $24.95
Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica, published in the United Kingdom last year, came out in the United States this summer. Robinson, a prolific and much honored science-fiction writer, spent six weeks in Antarctica on a grant from the National Science Foundation, and this novel mirrors his own experience, living in survival conditions at Antarctica's McMurdo base camp.
In most hard sci-fi, the nuts and bolts of technology and scientific innovation provide the real show. Any enlightenment achieved by the characters in such books is the product of sheer intellectual muscle. Antarctica adheres to this principle. "Scientists are smart people," one character tells Wade, a politico on a fact-finding trip. "They know that knowledge can become power, and with the power that science wields in this world, they control things." So far, this is standard sci-fi fare.
But Robinson introduces an innovation. In Antarctica, the scientist continues, there are "no distractions. … You can see what really is true, naked out here." This is the central thesis of Antarctica: truth is found in the physical landscape, and although this is the case everywhere on earth, elsewhere the trappings of society interfere with our comprehension of the earth itself. "[Antarctica's] people are full of passion," writes Russell Letson in the June 1998 issue of Locus, the bible of the sci-fi and fantasy community. "And they are operating in an environment whose raw sensory impact runs right off the scale." That sensory impact, undiluted by smog, pavement, or skyscraper, serves as Robinson's revealed truth.
Each of the characters in Antarctica searches for meaning in the utopia of Antarctic cold: Wade, the political adviser checking out Antarctica so that his senatorial boss will know how to deal with various treaty proposals, is looking for a place where reality and policy intersect; Val, the tour guide, is searching for a reason to make the best of things, an attitude taught to her by her dead mother and grandmother. "Making the best of things," Val thinks, "was what courage meant … right action in the face of life." X, Val's ex-lover, is wandering directionless through his duties as General Field Assistant for an exploration company. "Alienated, anonymous," he thinks as he drives a SPOT train through the white landscape, " … the Good for Anything, The Man with No Name." (Robinson's symbolism is hardly subtle.) And then there is Ta Shu, a practitioner of feng shui, who is relaying his Antarctic journey back to millions of viewers in East Asia via fibervideo. In the David Carradine/Kung Fu tradition, he periodically interrupts the narrative with metaphysical musings. "We live an hour," he intones, "and it is always the same. No distractions to the spirit. A white plain to infinity."
Eventually, the characters discover a set of "ferals," back-to-the-land settlers living in the ice, consuming only what they need to survive, and demanding that Antarctica be respected as the last unspoiled place. The respectful posture of these ferals toward the earth provides each character with an answer of sorts. Val joins the ferals, Wade manages to negotiate a protective treaty that will protect their attempts to live off the land, X stops drifting and takes charge of an ecologically sound exploration company, and Ta Shu drones the moral of the tale: "Ice like white paper before the first brush stroke. The original emptiness from which all begins."
Robinson suggests that the feral relationship to the land provides answers for us as well: All mankind should "go feral" to some extent, matching production exactly to the consumption each person needs to live. Keeping human populations small, living off the land at subsistence level without doing it damage; this, Robinson writes, is enlightenment, "sacred inhabitation … joyful or worshipful living in a land—to be the land's human expression and part of its consciousness, along with the rest of its animal and plant consciousnesses." Robinson denies that he takes a utopian point of view, but anyone who writes, "The whole world must be treated as a wilderness . …Even Manhattan can be made a wilderness of a certain kind" certainly qualifies.
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