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Notes -
I about wrote some of my reflections on the trilogy here last year.
The gender question is interesting, especially since the trilogy does seem to be very concerned with sex (the various relationships between the first 100, Hiroko's weird sex cult, the loose sexual relationships between the children in the hidden colony). 2312, a later work with many similarities to the Mars Trilogy, also extensively deals with the trans question, although kind of in a background way (everyone is just implied to be trans because why not). This does make me think a lot less of KSR as a thinker: there's a lot more kowtowing to current thing going on than I would like to think.
2312 came out in 2012, and presumably was written in 2011 sometime, at the latest. That’s at least 5 years before trans stuff really filtered out into normie world, I think.
I think KSR is a bit of an overrated author in the world of SF, but he tends to be well ahead of the current thing.
To his intellectual credit, he strikes me as more of a harbinger of doom than a follower.
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