7 /10 1 Votes
Cover artist Mark Weber Publication date 1984 Pages 262 Originally published 1984 Page count 262 Country United States of America | 3.5/5 Goodreads Language English Media type Print (Paperback) ISBN 0-441-35854-3 Publisher Ace Books | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Genres Novel, Science Fiction, Speculative fiction Similar Works by Kim Stanley Robinson, Science Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Icehenge by kim stanley robinson
Icehenge is a science fiction novel by American author Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 1984.
Contents
Though it was published almost ten years before Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and takes place in a different version of the future, Icehenge contains elements which also appear in the Mars series: extreme human longevity, Martian political revolution, historical revisionism, and shifts between primary characters are all present.
Plot
Icehenge is set in three distinct time periods. The first part is the diary of an engineer caught up in a failed Martian political revolution in 2248. The middle part is narrated by an archaeologist on the project, three centuries later, that finds the engineer's diary; at the same time, a mysterious monument is found at the north pole of Pluto. In the final part, the archaeologist's great-grandson investigates the possibility that the diary and the monument were both planted by a wealthy recluse who lives in Saturn orbit.
Development history
The first part of this novel was originally published as the novella To Leave a Mark in the November 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction'.
The third part of Icehenge was originally published as the novella On the North Pole of Pluto in 1980 in the anthology Orbit 18 edited by Damon Knight. Robinson gave the novella in rough form to Ursula K. Le Guin to read and edit while he was enrolled in her writing workshop at UCSD in the spring of 1977. Views of Saturn from the space station inhabited by the character Caroline Holmes in this section were inspired by images of Saturn taken during the Voyager flybys.