Antarctica: A Novel

Forsideomslag
Random House Publishing Group, 21. jul. 2010 - 672 sider
The award-winning author of the Mars trilogy takes readers to the last pure wilderness on Earth in this powerful and majestic novel.
 
Antarctica may well be the best novel of the best ecological novelist around.”—Locus
 
It is a stark and inhospitable place, where the landscape itself poses a challenge to survival, yet its strange, silent beauty has long fascinated scientists and adventurers.
 
Now Antarctica faces an uncertain future. The international treaty which protects the continent is about to dissolve, clearing the way for Antarctica’s resources to be plundered, its eerie beauty to be savaged. As politicians wrangle over its fate, major corporations begin probing for its hidden riches. Adventurers come, as they have for more than a century, seeking the wild, untamed land even as they endanger it with their ever-growing numbers. And radical environmentalists carry out a covert campaign of sabotage to reclaim the land from those who would destroy it for profit. All who come here have their own agenda, and all will fight to ensure their vision of the future for the remote and awe-inspiring world at the South Pole.
 
Praise for Antarctica
 
“Forbidding yet fascinating, like the continent it describes . . . echoes Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air.”People

“[Antarctica] should be included in any short-list of books about the frozen continent.... Compelling characters...a rich and dense story...Robinson has succeeded not only in drawing human characters but also in bringing Antarctica to life. Whatever happens in the outer world, Antarctica—both the book and the continent—will become part of the reader's interior landscape.”The Washington Post Book World

The epic of Antarctica. This is the James A. Michener novel of the South Pole. If the meaty one-word title didn’t give it away, the writing would. The whole human history of the continent is here.”Interzone

Antarctica will take your breath away.”Associated Press

“A gripping tale of adventure on the ice.”Publishers Weekly

“Passionate, informed...vastly entertaining.”Kirkus Reviews

“Robinson writes about geography and geology with the intensity and unhurried attention to detail of a John McPhee.”The New York Times Book Review

Fra bogen

Andre udgaver - Se alle

Almindelige termer og sætninger

Populære passager

Side 36 - Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth; While all the stars that round her burn, And all the planets in their turn, Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the truth from pole to pole.
Side 199 - A Scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean and Reverent".
Side 210 - Shackleton privately forced upon me his one breakfast biscuit, and would have given me another tonight had I allowed him. I do not suppose that anyone else in the world can thoroughly realize how much generosity and sympathy was shown by this: I do, and By God I shall never forget it.
Side 36 - We're all right," he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement was helpful. Then we turned our bags over as far as possible, so that the bottom of the bag was uppermost and the flaps were more or less beneath us. And we lay and thought, and sometimes we sang. I suppose, wrote Wilson, we were all revolving plans to get back without a tent: and the one thing we had left was...
Side 136 - The risk one runs in exploring a coast in these unknown and icy seas, is so very great, that I can be bold enough to say, that no man will' ever venture farther than I have done ; and that the lands which lie to the south will never be explored.
Side 209 - I cannot think of failure yet. I must look at the matter sensibly and consider the lives of those who are with me. I feel that if we go on too far it will be impossible to get back over this surface, and then all the results will be lost to the world.
Side 35 - ... till we thought they would fall. We talked by shouting, and long before this one of us proposed to try and get the Alpine rope lashed down over the roof from outside. But Bowers said it was an absolute impossibility in that wind. "You could never ask men at sea to try such a thing," he said. He was up and out of his bag continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof to try and prevent the flapping and so forth. He was magnificent. And then it went. Birdie was over by the door,...
Side 35 - ... of the canvas itself and the loss of the snow blocks on the top: it was not drawing out of the walls. The crashes as it dropped and banged out again were louder. There was more snow coming through the walls, though all our loose mitts, socks and smaller clothing were stuffed into the worst places : our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks over the door.
Side 163 - C02 levels have risen sharply over the past 30 years. Some skeptics suggest that there is no such thing as global warming, or if there is, it is not the result of increasing levels of CO2. But the scientific consensus is that temperatures have risen about 1°F in the past 100 years. If the output of CO2 continues to rise, the earth's average temperatures will rise by about 5.5° by 2050. This would cause sea levels to rise and ice caps...

Om forfatteren (2010)

Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Galileo’s Dream. In 2008 he was named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment.” He serves on the board of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. He lives in Davis, California.

Bibliografiske oplysninger