Skimmed a whole lot of this book. Partly my fault for having read too much Robinson, including 2312 quite recently. Partly because he basically copy pasted a number of themes and vignettes directly from that book into this one (Mandragon, rewilding the Earth, etc), with very large parts of the rest copied from his earlier works like the one on Antarctica. Guy likes what he likes but it gets friggin old!

Not sure what to think about Mary x Frank, it’s not quite gross and he did treat it with some care but still incredibly awkard/slightly smelly. KSR has never been good at the interpersonal stuff anyhow.

Very high level, it suffers from the combination of his IMHO unearned optimism (his grand society wide planet changing exercises were a lot more believable when they were set farther in the future and on other planets!) and a huge dose of already poorly aging “the news in my book” syndrome. Cryptocurrency mentioned positively, having just missed COVID, and the Ukraine war, makes it really suffer as a near-future work.