Storyline: 1/5 
 Characters: 4/5 
 Writing Style: 4/5 
 World: 5/5 
 2312. It sounds impressive. Foreboding perhaps. Monumental. We're to think of Clarke's 2010 I suppose. So I was expecting a radical and abrupt shock to science and space. I didn't get what I expected. I think that this was probably misdirection, not oversight, however. This was the antithesis to Clarke's scientific revolution. This is civilization's revolution: gradual, difficult to map, rocking forward and then backward, coaxed by humanity, thwarted by humans. This was a sequel - I hadn't realized - to Robinson's Mars trilogy. Perhaps it is not advertised as such because the author wanted it to be treated as a stand-alone work. Call it a spinoff, then. There's no need to have read the Mars Trilogy first, it is simply history for this book. 
 Robinson's had 19 years to improve his writing skill set since he penned the series' first, Red Mars. He made good use of those intervening years. The writing here is much more graceful, the characters are drawn smoothly, and his many speculations are better integrated into the whole. It is much more artful, full of analogies and allusions. Still, it is Kim Stanley Robinson. That means the characters are often eccentric, lovers of mysticism and life as public performance. They're not necessarily likeable but they're real, deep characters. Since it is Kim Stanley Robinson, that also continues to mean that he's going to embed dozens of his pet intellectual hobbies and discoveries. These will never be complete, never the final, full, or persuasive exposition of the topic he happened to be interested in when writing. Thus we'll be peppered with his then-current obsession with rhetoric, self-help praxis, quantum computing, glaciation, etc. And since its Kim Stanley Robinson, he's going to spend a fair amount of time liberating us from our current biological and sociological boundaries of sex. I've never particularly enjoyed his preoccupation with the theme; he's deliberately shocking and hedonistic, but it does fit with his broad conception of the future. 
 The weakest part of this story is the plot. It starts off at arms distance because our main character does not understand what is at stake, the players at the table, or the rules of the game. To handle this approach deftly, an author has to generate intrigue and mystery; let us yearn for knowledge alongside the main character. Robinson doesn't do this; his real interests are in touring the solar system and showing you how things have changed since the 2220s - the final years of the Blue Mars volume. I recall this almost identical path and device in that book and remember thinking that it was creative and eye-pleasing; it detracted from plot then as well. This seems to be yet another quality of Kim Stanley Robinson (though this is only my fifth book of his, so I might be generalizing from too small a sample) - a sort of literary attention deficit disorder. He just cannot seem to stay in one place and on one topic. Without an engaging plot, the book is more of a futuristic documentary. Robinson never did manage to generate real suspense or tension. When we (and the main character) finally did turn to confront the mystery directly, I found it disappointingly unoriginal and to undermine much of the nuanced social and political subthemes on power that he had dealt with so deftly. Additionally, our main character never seemed integral to the conflict, and at times it was painful to see the leaps Kim Stanley Robinson had to go to keep the character relevant. 
 The biggest accomplishment of the book is that the reader gets to understand the year 2312 from someone who already lives there. Robinson's mind was there with all the technology, the political divisions, and posthuman changes. Our main character was not someone from this planet or from this century. She was surprised at behaviors we'd presently consider normal and off-hand with actions we would consider bizarre. But you understood it. Robinson helped the readers to comprehend a society 300 years from now and with vastly different values and daily lives. There's a lot of this future that I did not like, as in I would not want to be part of their society or be around these people. (view spoiler)[I would think, as homo sapiens did of homo sapiens celestis that those off planet were "perverse, wicked, decadent, and horrible. Destabilizing human history itself." (hide spoiler)] It was a realized future, though, in text. That is one of the things I want a great book to do. 
 This is yet another book from Robinson that is more of an accomplishment than a joy to read.