ANTARCTICA

Kim Stanley Robinson’s futuristic novel about Antarctica, published in 1998, is still up to date.  The science fiction plot is a mere skeleton, but on it hang magnificent chapters  descriptive of the still incredibly cold, white and brown landscape features and geology that scientists strive to understand and prospectors compete to exploit.  The place dwarfs the people.  It is unimaginable by any experience elsewhere on earth, but this book helps us to conceive of it.