Told from three different points of view, this is the story of how an ice monolith similar to Stonehenge, made from ice taken from Saturn’s rings, is discovered on Pluto and its possible origins debated and reformulated. It is also the story of a futuristic society that has colonized the solar system and expanded the human lifespan such that people are practically immortal and memory has become meaningless.

The novel spans an immense length of time, beginning with the adventures of an expert in life-support systems; her ship is shanghaied, and she is pressed into the service of revolutionaries venturing on a manned mission out of the solar system for the first time, then released into an uprising on her home planet Mars. The story then jumps several hundred years into the future when an archaeologist discovers this woman’s journal in the remains of a Martian city destroyed during the revolution and theorizes that the ship that left the solar system built Icehenge as a monument to its achievement. Finally, the story shifts again to the point of view of an intellectual dilettante who visits Icehenge and exposes the truth — but never satisfactorily.

There is a lot to chew on here, too much to properly summarize, from grasping the nuances of life in the future solar system to parsing out the various speculations on the meaning of the mysterious monolith. Icehenge will hold the attention of the hard science fiction fan — particularly those who have already read and enjoyed Robinson’s Mars trilogy — until the final, puzzling revelations on Pluto.

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