Abstract

Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 (2012) has been mainly approached from an ecocritical perspective. I focus here, however, on the love story between its protagonists, Swan Er Hong and Fitz Wahram. Robinson considers posthuman sexuality and gender, and the meaning of marriage in the posthuman future of our species. Swan and Wahram disrupt intersexuality, heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity from a progressive perspective, but Robinson's main challenge to his readers is his focus on love. Relying mainly on Alain Badiou's In Praise of Love, I argue that, beyond the freedom which humans enjoy regarding sex and gender in Robinson's twenty-fourth-century solar system, in 2312 he is specifically celebrating mature love beyond superficial passion. Robinson considers, besides, how posthumans aspiring to extreme longevity may see marriage from an angle that defies Zygmunt Bauman's views about the ephemerality of romantic relationships and the current questioning of marriage itself.

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