Icehenge

At the farthest reaches of the solar system, on the north pole of Pluto, stands a ring of monuments made of enormous blocks of ice: it resembles Stonehenge, though ten times its size, standing alone there, and no one knows what it is or who built it. To solve the mystery, the clues lead back to the years of the Mars rebellion centuries earlier, and to the diaries left by the people who lived on Mars at that time. The novel is composed of three first-person accounts from three different eras and three different characters. The first is the diary of Emma Weil, a planetary life-support engineer caught up in the Martian political rebellion of 2248, taken aboard a mutineers' ship to help them refit an interstellar vessel, who ultimately chooses to stay and return to the doomed Martian revolution. The second takes place three centuries later, when the archaeologist Hjalmar Nederland investigates the failed revolution and unearths Emma's diary beside a ruined city; at the same time, the ice monument on Pluto's north pole is discovered, and he tries to prove a connection between the monument and the Martian revolutionaries of that era, while his personal feelings are stirred by Emma across the centuries. The third part's protagonist is Edmond Doya, Nederland's great-grandson, who travels to Pluto to visit the ice monument but suspects that both the diary and the monument are an elaborate hoax staged by a reclusive billionaire, and tries to overturn his ancestor's lifelong theory. This was Robinson's first Mars novel before the "Mars trilogy," and it already reveals the core concerns that run through his later work: radically extended human lifespans, Martian political revolution, the rewriting and distortion of historical narrative, and the rotation of perspectives among characters of different positions.