Happy Nice Mall

Last fall, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson was asked to predict what the world would look like in 2050. He was speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, and the atmosphere at the summit was described as “last, best”. “hope to save the planet” – it was bleak.

But Robinson, his novel, “Ministry of the Future” drawing a path for humanity that narrowly averted a biosphere collapse, it sounded a note of cautious optimism. Overcoming emotions at times, he raised the possibility of a near future marked by “human achievement and solidarity.”

“It shouldn’t be a stand-alone day dream for a writer to sit in his garden and imagine there could be a better world,” Robinson told the crowd.

It’s a tough time being a utopian writer or any utopian. Catastrophic dystopian stories abound in movies, television, and fiction; headlines are on the verge of apocalypse. Other masters of utopian speculative fiction—giants like Ursula K. Le Guin and Iain M. Banks—are gone, and few fill the void. At the same time, utopian stories have never been more necessary.

“You can probably count the most important utopian novels in the palm of your hand,” Robinson said in an interview. “But they are remembered and shape people’s understanding of what might be good in the future.”

At 70, widely regarded as one of the most influential speculative fiction writers of his generation, Robinson stands as perhaps the last of the great utopians. “It might just be work,” he said. Recently, however, his writing is making a real-world impact, as biologists and climate scientists, tech entrepreneurs, and CEOs of green tech start-ups look to his fiction as a possible roadmap for avoiding the worst consequences of climate change.

Robinson was treated like a celebrity at the United Nations climate summit last fall. He’s met with diplomats, ecologists, and business leaders, and he’s sued for the implementation of some ambitious ideas in his setup – geoengineering to stop glaciers from melting, replacing airplanes with solar-powered airships, realigning the economy with carbon quantitative easing, new cryptocurrency that can finance decarbonisation.

“These are the deeply researched, plausible futures he’s written about,” said Nigel Topping, the UK’s top climate action champion, who invited Robinson to the summit.

Robinson’s ability to incorporate intense scientific and technical detail, economic and political theory, and mundane policy proposals into his fiction has made him a leading public thinker outside the realm of science fiction.

“There aren’t many writers trying to take a literary approach to technical problems and a technical approach to literary problems,” said novelist Richard Powers.

Robinson’s path as a science fiction writer has taken an odd, in some ways, path. He made his name on humanity’s distant future through his visionary work on the colonization of Mars (“Mars Trilogy”), interstellar, intergenerational deep space travels (“Aurora”), and humanity’s distant expansion. solar system (“2312”). Recently, however, it has been returning closer to Earth and the current devastating warming crisis.

Robinson said that futuristic stories about space exploration are now irrelevant to him. He’s skeptical that humanity’s future lies in the stars, and ignores tech billionaires’ ambitions to explore space, admitting he says, “I’m partially responsible for this fantasy.”

In more recent novels – works like “New York 2140” A strangely uplifting climate change novel set after New York City was partially submerged by rising tides and the “Red Moon” set in a lunar city in 2047 – traveled back in time, into the present. Two years ago, he published the “Ministry of the Future”, which opened in 2025 and will emerge as the world is shaken by floods, heat waves and escalating ecological disasters in the next few decades, and an international ministry was established to save the world. planet.

“I decided it was time to go straight to the topic of climate change,” Robinson said. “The real story is what will come up in the next 30 years. This is the most interesting story, but the stakes are also very high.”

Robinson’s latest book “The High Sierra: A Love Story” is unlike any of his previous books: It is Robinson’s first major nonfiction work and the most personal he has ever published.

Throughout the book’s 560 pages, Robinson brings together the geological, ecological, and cultural history of California’s High Sierra mountains with the story of falling in love with the area as a young man in the 1970s and returning over the decades. Interspersed with dense chapters on granite composition, plate tectonics, glacier formation, and the region’s flora and fauna – he describes the marmots, the large, silly-looking rodents that thrive there, as “wonderful people” – Robinson describes his adventures in the back countryside and reveals how they have shaped him and his work.

It includes pieces of poetry he wrote while backpacking, recounting his psychedelics experiments in his 20s, and reminiscing about his relationships with his literary heroes – science fiction writers like Le Guin and Joanna Russ, as well as Zen Buddhist poet Gary Snyder, who praised Robinson for his book Sierra “an entirely new language.” for bringing it.

The book also offers a glimpse into how Robinson’s time in the wilderness pays homage to the natural world that satisfies his science fiction. Robinson often based his descriptions of Martian landscapes on his observations of the ethereal peaks, valleys, and basins of the Sierra, sometimes rewriting notes from his hiking diaries directly into his novels. When writing about space exploration, he used his own insignificance, exuberance, isolation and feeling in a geological time period, from the sometimes otherworldly feeling that being in the mountains gave him.

His turn towards nonfiction and autobiography in nearly 40 years of his career has long puzzled readers, and even Robinson. She has always thought of herself as a boring, “white-bread suburban house-husband.”

“My sense of being a novelist, get out of the way,” he said. “It’s not about me, ignore the man behind the curtain.”

Robinson spoke to me several times from his home in West Davis, California, where he lives with his wife, Lisa Nowell, a chemist, in an ecologically sustainable planned community called The Villages. Most days, she writes at a small table in their front yard, with a tarp to keep her dry when it rains and a fan to keep her cool when it’s hot, but lately, she said, she hasn’t written as much. I would like. He recently returned from northern India, where he spoke at a climate conference hosted by the Dalai Lama. Later this month, he plans to travel to Davos, Switzerland, where he will hold a lecture on how to tackle climate change at a conference hosted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

An in-demand and somewhat reluctant public intellectual, Robinson struggled to find time to start a new novel. But he also reaffirmed his confidence with his enthusiastic response to climate fiction and began mapping ideas for new work based on the story he told in “Ministry of the Future.”

Robinson discovered his love of science fiction at the University of California, San Diego, where he majored in literature and earned his doctorate. in English. Literary critic Fredric Jameson, who was a professor there, encouraged him to read Philip K. Dick—and Robinson became addicted.

In the 1980s, he released his first science fiction series, officially an innovative trilogy that followed three different futures for Orange County, California, where he grew up. Each book followed a classic futuristic sci-fi formula – a post-apocalyptic post-nuclear attack; one is a dystopian set among the remnants of uncontrolled suburban sprawl and environmental degradation, and the other is a utopian where the region turns into an ecological paradise. The “Three Californias” trilogy was nominated for major sci-fi awards. Robinson was praised in the New York Times for having “almost invented a new genre of science fiction.”

Since then, Robinson has freely experimented with sci-fi tropes, writing everything from an alternative Chinese history to an epic about deep space exploration to a speculative historical novel set in the Ice Age. However, he is known for his deeply researched utopian stories that use science fiction as a framework to explore alternative social, economic and political systems.

It’s hard to write utopian fiction, Robinson said: It’s not easy to write a gripping story about the mechanisms that drive social progress.

“Novels are really about what happens when things go wrong,” Robinson said. “Citizenship sounds like blueprints if you suggest plans for how things will work out. Architectural plans for a utopia, let me show you how the sewer system works so you don’t get cholera. Well, that doesn’t sound exciting.”

But things can go horribly wrong on the road to utopia, as with the “Ministry of the Future,” which began when a devastating heatwave in India killed millions.

“It’s a very low bar as a utopia,” Robinson said. “I mean, if we avoid mass extinction, we avoid everything dying, great, this is utopia where we are right now.”

When Robinson is asked to predict the future, he often hedges, as he often does. He argued “We are all living in a great science fiction novel that we wrote together.” – but not sure whether it will be utopian or dystopian.

“No one can make a successful prediction of the future,” he said. “Unless maybe by chance.”