Interweaving memoir and good old fashioned ice adventure, Kim Stanley Robinson takes readers along on the journeys that have happened before and the journeys that may never happen again.
In May of 1911, Robert Scott and the twenty-four men under his command said good-bye to the sun and settled in for the long Antarctic winter. When the sun returned in September, they were going to try to become the first people to reach the South Pole. However, a week past the winter solstice, Scott's second-in-command took a team on a trip to Cape Crozier to man-haul two sledges through the perpetual night of the Antarctic winter, exposed to the coldest temperatures human beings had ever traveled in. This side trip was, at best, a dangerous distraction and at worst, a disaster. Yet, chronicled by zoological assistant (and major expedition funder) Apsley Cherry-Garrard, it became The Worst Journey in the World, one of the best adventure books ever written.
Kim Stanley Robinson first read Cherry-Garrard's book in his twenties and re-read it again in 1995, as part of his preparations to Antarctica that he made that year as research for his Mars novels. It was a dream excursion: he traveled around the continent, by snowmobile and helicopter and airplane. All the while, Cherry's book loomed larger and larger in Robinson's mind, and he tried to follow in their ill-fated footsteps.
Ultimately, in The Best Journey in the World, we see Robinson stepping on ice and finding an earthly holy place. As he searches for what can, and cannot. be found again, he takes readers on a journey of realization that is not just about being the first to get somewhere but about falling in love with what the world has to offer us. That being with people who also feel a kinship to a place worthy of preserving is itself, an act of devotion. Replete with gorgeous photographs taken in a place many will never set foot, and woven throughout with Robinson's sharp, funny, and personal voice, prepare to take the best journey in the world.
