Games

2127. The Ross ice shelf has shattered due to volcanic activity and much of Antarctica's ice has fallen into the sea, raising global sea levels by seven metres. Three billion people - a fifth of the human race - have been displaced, triggering the greatest economic and humanitarian crisis in history. With Earth's governments and metanational corporations distracted, the colonists on Mars have launched their second revolution. The surviving remnants of the First Hundred - whose lives have been extended vastly by genetic treatments - are spearheading the revolution. Their hope is to forge a new relationship with Earth based on mutual respect and understanding, but to the teeming billions of Earth Mars is an escape route, a place to begin again. In the aftermath of revolution, a new way of existence has to be found if the human race is to prosper. Blue Mars is the third and concluding volume in Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Mars Trilogy , his account of the colonisation and ter...

Forbidden Planet are hosting an interesting event at the British Library in London on 9 June. SF heavyweights Iain M. Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson will be discussing a large number of topics related to SF and their work. For more info, including tickets, check out Forbidden Planet's website.

Swan Er Hong, a notable performance artist native to Mercury, has her life abruptly changed by the death of her grandmother, Alex. As Swan is asked to investigate the project her grandmother was working on, her home city is subjected to a brutal terrorist attack. This sparks a series of journeys back and forth across the Solar system, from Mercury to terraformed Venus to drowned Earth and out as far as Io and Titan, as Swan and her allies attempt to discover the threat nature of the threat to humanity. 2312 is Kim Stanley Robinson's first widescreen, big-budget, blockbuster SF novel in some considerable time. His recent novels (such as the recent Galileo's Dream or his near-future Science in the Capital trilogy) have been modest in their ambitions, but 2312 trots out the same Robinson who charted the colonisation of Mars in such fascinating, exacting and sometimes-frustrating detail over the course of three books in the 1990s. The novel works on several levels. On one, it p...