Although she did not drink martinis, she graciously prepared a double for me every evening before dinner. I introduced her to Tanqueray gin and Noilly Pratt vermouth, the ingredients for a perfect martini. Sensitive husband that I was, I courteously congratulated her every day on a fine martini, cautiously suggesting that it might be a touch drier. Day after day, I congratulated her, suggesting that it might be a touch drier still. One day I sipped the martini and bathed her in kisses: “Betsey, you’re wonderful, it’s perfect.” She did not take well to my gushing. Betsey almost never raised her voice, but raise it she did: “I knew it! I knew it! Of course I’m wonderful! Of course it’s perfect! You’re drinking straight gin.”
(Eugene D. Genovese, about his wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage)
(No, I haven’t read the whole book. If I want to read a radical socialist turned right-wing opportunist, I can always read Marx.)
There are some recurring themes in Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction: ecology, anticapitalist politics, mountain-climbing, and in particular time – the ephemerality of the present, the irrecoverability of the past, the contingency (or otherwise) of the future, the unreliability of memory. 
