This was  re-read, after I’d read the Science in the City trilogy (Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting). The first thing that struck me was the repeat of characters between this and both Escape from Kathmandu and the Science in the City trilogy. In fact, this is in some ways a dry run for the trilogy. The politics and the science fit right together, but it’s not quite like the trilogy is a sequel. It’s clear that Robinson made good use of his time at the US Antarctic base as a writer-in-residence. I don’t know all that much about extreme survival, but all the details hang together very well and it has a lot of verisimilitude at the very least. It’s a bit eco-utopian, but then that’s of course one of his ongoing themes.

He’s written better, but there’s lots worse out there.