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Evidently with it being a new Kim Stanley Robinson novel you're in another world here, an alien environment in the future, but the nature of that new environment will always be shaped by and dependent upon who does the colonisation. Contrary to our usual preconceptions about such matters, Robinson takes the realistic view in this particular case that based on where we are now, it's just as likely to be the Chinese who will become the dominant power on the Moon in 2048. Red Moon indeed. What kind of impact with this have? What kind of tensions and issues will arise between the Chinese base on the south pole of the Moon and the USA and rest of the world on the north pole? And not just on the Moon but the nature of influence and domination on the Moon could also have consequences on Earth as well, or vice versa. Well, the beauty of Kim Stanley Robinson is that he takes those questions and projection about our possible future in a direction that we don't often take the time to...

The cover of Kim Stanley Robinson's latest exploration of man, nature and science might be a little deceptive, but only just a little. The image of a future New York with lower Manhattan flooded, presumably in the year 2140, is certainly representative of the focus that the author places on an important city and how it might very likely be affected by climate change in the near future, but this is not just another work of speculative environmental disaster fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson doesn't waste time on the hows and whys of something that seems inevitable to anyone who knows that we've already passed the point of no return as far as environmental change is concerned and just how likely such disastrous repercussions will be. No, Robinson is more interested in how we choose to move forward after the inevitable happens. This is typical of Kim Stanley Robinson. He's not content to just spin an entertaining science-fiction adventure in a futuristic New York, nor does he ...

Following the science-fiction exploration into the distant past of the Earth during the Earth's Ice Age in Shaman , Kim Stanley Robinson returns again to the far future and some of the themes of the Mars Trilogy books that made him famous; the issues around off-Earth colonisation, terraforming and the human questions associated with it. Moving on from there and from 2312, Robinson starts in the year 2545 and extends upon themes in the previous books in Aurora , taking a ship on a journey out of our solar system towards the sun of Tau Ceti, 11.9 light-years from Earth. Like many science-fiction stories dealing with multi-generational interstellar travel, there's obviously no-one around to remember exactly why the ship set out in the first place, and even their ultimate destination is uncertain until they more fully explore the planets and moons of Tau Ceti to establish which has the best Earth-like environment to establish a community. What we do know at the start of Aurora is ...