Rating: 
Summary: Occasionally Entertaining.
Review: I liked this book, but I'm not entirely sure why. Without the Antarctica setting, the book would just be an economic, political, social, and environmental debate. The rather unique setting is able to take these different areas and show them from many perspectives. The book also has a mystery that keeps you interested until it is fully revealed in the last 1/3 of the book.The history of Antarctica is recounted mostly through conversations of lesser characters. The main characters are believable and their backgrounds are explained in some detail. The actual "science fiction" parts of the story are always kept in the background, and while sometimes interesting, are rarely absolutely necessary. I didn't like the last 1/3 of the book. This was mostly because it wasn't in fitting with the rest of the book. Two groups that were previously only hinted at are brought in and add little to the story other than to bring the mystery to a close. The ending leaves a lot to be resolved, and I'm not sure there won't be a sequel.
Rating: 
Summary: A story from a true believer.
Review: First, the obligatory comparison to the Mars trilogy. I didn't enjoy Antarctica quite as much as I did Red Mars, but I found it substantially better reading than the rest of the trilogy. That out of the way... There's some quality in the stories of the Lensmen or Conan the Barbarian that have caused them to persist in print, or at least in the collective memory of genre fiction enthusiasts, long after most of what appeared beside them in the pulps has faded (mercifully) into obscurity. I think it's a sort of authorial passion, a sincere belief on the part of the writer in his or her characters and the story. Antarctica is redeemed by this sort of passion. The strength of belief with which Robinson tells the story transforms a collection of passages which might otherwise be simply irritating into one of his better novels. It's not so much his own belief in his politics (there _is_ some incredibly bad environmentalist literature out there) as much as something more ineffable, some experience Robinson incurred during his own time on the ice continent that he manages to convey in these pages. Because really, most of the novel consists of
(1) Retellings of the more notable expeditions (Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton) of the early exploration of the continent. As told by Robinson, though, this isn't extraneous exposition, but a testament to human folly, courage, and willpower, the collected stories of men made of iron and boot-leather. (2) Almost Michener-esque descriptions of Antarctican landscape and culture. Yes, it's ice, ice, and more ice. In the hand of a skilled writer who's seen it firsthand, though, it becomes a beautiful desolation that first makes you want to go there and then makes you wonder if you should want to go there -- whether your own presence would somehow make the landscape less what you came there to see. (3) Groups of characters vigorously agreeing with each other about how dysfunctional capitalism is. OK, this gets preachy. But Robinson can preach well, and somewhere the idea that a what a few thousand people do on Antarctica should become a world-changing philosophical event for a globe of billions no longer seems like an absurd case of the tail wagging the dog, but of those few thousand daring to believe they should wag the dog. Oh yeah, and there's about a hundred pages worth of plot tucked away in there somewhere, regarding an eco-terrorist action that destroys the Antarctican communications infrastructure and the characters having to find their ways back to human settlements before their food and medical situations become critical. But seriously, this is peripheral. Writers of speculative fiction should take as a charge what Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the frontispiece of Cat's Cradle: "Live by the foma [harmless untruths] that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." Antarctica is about people learning to be brave and kind and healthy and happy, and about the continent that catalyzes this transformation.
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