Kim Stanley Robinson's Blog, page 4

NY2140, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Embrace Change

(Top image of New York City with 13 meters sea level rise, a bit less than in New York 2140, by FireTree.net)

Hurricanes, floods, fires, this has become part of a reality many have to face in the year 2017. The vulnerability of human infrastructure to natural events has become an evidence that has been violently brought home to our minds, and suddenly human affairs become part of Earth's environment again. All these issues are familiar to the reader of KSR's works, with extreme climate events being key events in many KSR novels: Blue Mars, Forty Signs of Rain/Green Earth, and most recently in his latest novel New York 2140.

Stockholm University's Resilience Center defines resilience as:

Resilience is the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. It is about how humans and nature can use shocks and disturbances like a financial crisis or climate change to spur renewal and innovative thinking.

...and this fits New York 2140 to a tee!

First, a shout out to Orbit that presently manage the KSR Facebook page (like!) -- and also to the fan-essentially-self-managed KSR Facebook group that's been running since 2009 (join!).

Here comes the usual list of links of everything KSR since the last update in June:

KSR presented his latest novel New York 2140 at the heart of the action, in the iconic Strand bookstore, located in Broadway, Manhattan. See the video of the May event for Science Friday Book Club with host Ira Flatow here.

KSR discusses the bedrock of science and economics in New York 2140, his writing process for the novel, and of course, the Anthropocene in this great audio interview for Generation Anthropocene.

While in Barcelona in March this year, KSR spoke to the Spanish Jot Down magazine. The discussion ranged from his career and the Mars trilogy to progressive taxation, the EPA under Trump and the basque Mondragon system he often mentions, to mysticism, space exploration and art. A really complete interview! (Spanish version here) Some excerpts:

After World War II there was quite extreme progressive taxation, even in the US under Eisenhower, a Republican president. After you made four hundred thousand dollars a year, that in our days will be like four million dollars a year, the tax rate was 91%. So essentially they capped the wealth, and you could not be a multibillionaire like we’ve got today, because everything you made after a certain amount went to support government programs. And you can advocate these kind of things without being a complete communist or a completely utopian person like a martian. You can talk about policies that used to be enacted and could be enacted again, there’s legal and precedent base.

 

Within the already existing capitalist order you have alternative orders that are legal, they don’t need to be revolutionary, you don’t need to get into the chaos of Barcelona 1936 where anarchists and communists were fighting against each other over how to make a completely new society… Instead you have something like Mondragon where in the already existing society there is a change coming from inside.

 

A lot of scientists are fairly naive and underdeveloped about what is their project. They don’t have much in the way of theory. Science needs to think of itself more as a humanism and more as an utopian politics that’s already enacting itself in the real world. This is what my books are trying to suggest. I’m doing what I can by telling stories about what science is, how science works and what scientists should do in terms of being political actors.

 

Wilderness is a nice idea, but once you alter the atmosphere and the oceans there is no wilderness anymore, all the planet is a mongrel planet, and what you want to do then is to avoid extinctions. That takes working landscapes, like farms that also support some wildlife, or zoos, or landscape enclosures. I’ve read about these parts of Europe that are being almost abandoned, like central Spain, central Poland, the center of the US, Montana or North Dakota… Where is not easy or economical to do agriculture, people leave for the cities, and so big places of the countryside are empty now of humans. This is extremely interesting, because we need that. It’s not wilderness, but ex-human land where humans built towns or roads and abandoned them. We might have a world that includes some semi-wilderness, or empty land that is still human land or even lightly agricultural… Everything except for purity, I don’t really worry about purity anymore.

The May discussion between KSR and George RR Martin at UC San Diego to support the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop can be seen in its entirety here.

The April discussion at Rutgers University, where KSR presented New York 2140 and participated in a panel with Rutgers faculty on climate science, urban planning, urban agriculture and the environmental humanities can be found here.

A short written and a short audio interviews ahead of KSR's presentation at Arizona State University on "The Comedy of Coping: Alarm and Resolve in Climate Fiction" in September. Mark Stapp, director of ASU’s Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice shared his expert perspective on aspects of New York 2140's future real estate: for him, Franklin Garr's financial instrument, the Intertidal Property Pricing Index, "doesn’t seem far-fetched at all".

While in New York City, KSR stopped by Radio Motherboard's (Vice) studios for a podcast on NY2140, climate change, capitalism, Trump, nuclear weapons, technology, automation, and more.

This Is Zero Hour dedicated an episode to planetary revolution and immigration, and spoke to KSR and Megan Essaheb (complete podcast here, KSR video excerpt here)

New York 2140 is among the novels the New York Times looked at and asked their authors about in an article focused on climate-themed fiction, along with Paolo Bacigalupi, E.M. Forster, Jeff VanderMeer, Maja Lunde and others.

If you haven't had the opportunity to attend one of many "SF in SF" events, here is a recording of the last one with KSR, along with Cecelia Holland and Terry Bisson!

From last year's Balticon comes this discussion with Fast Forward, where KSR discusses 2312 and Aurora and his recent Robert A. Heinlein Award.

Some video excerpts of KSR's presentation at the Long Now Foundation in May 2016: how to use banks in the revolution, and looking back on his Mars trilogy.

A short video on KSR's reading habits and his library, and another one where he talks about audiobooks, in particular Shaman.

And, finally, speaking of readings:

David Hance reads KSR's short story "The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942" (from The Best Of KSR ) at Stories on Stage in KSR's home town in Davis, from this January.
Kate Baker reads KSR's short story "Venice Drowned" (from The Planet on the Table ) for Clarkesworld Magazine #131.

Even more NY2140 interviews & reviews

First, a tease: in his recent interviews, KSR has made no secret that he is hard at work on his next novel! -- and that it will involve the colonization of the moon and China's role in our larger human civilisation.

 

What does KSR's writing quarters look like? Since around the time of writing the Science in the Capital trilogy and Galileo's Dream, he has been writing exclusively outdoors, from his back yard, winter or summer, witnessing the passing of the seasons. The Sacramento Bee provides us a short insight in the writer's own home.

 

KSR's latest novel, New York 2140, is a novel both full of KSR's usual themes and a novel like no other in his previous work. It is a work of everyday life and utopian hope in the midst of what many would consider a dystopian future, a work of climate-fiction and finance-fiction. Given the current state of the world and the discussion around climate change and the economic system, it feels very topical.

In this important interview for New Scientist, "The power of good", KSR talks utopia, the need to imagine post-capitalism, the financial crisis, and a blueprint for moving forward:

Here’s the dilemma. Capitalism is the system we have agreed to live by. Its rules, while being legal and not involving anyone being evil or cheating, are nevertheless destroying the world. So we need to change the rules.

It’s important what story you tell about the future. Stories that say the future can be better because people are smart, because they want democracy, because, ultimately, people rule and banks don’t, can be self-fulfilling. They give people actions to help break the story that says they are screwed because international finance is way more powerful.

Most of my novels, I think, are actually fun because I’m doing realism in a way the world needs. As for anyone picking up the mantle, there’s a group of young writers who call themselves solarpunk, and what they’re trying is all about adaptation.

 

Some interesting excerpts from this interview for Space.com:

The way it came about is I did want to write a book about global finances that exist now, and how we might seize it, take it over and make it work for people. [...] The book is making the case that climate change is basically a financial disaster, or has been caused by bad economics rather than bad technology or pure number of people. [...] We are in an economic-slash-political system that is actually causing the problem, and so it's very hard to make it into a solution for the problem. And that's the story I wanted to tell.

120 years on, materials science has given them what they call a kind of diamond spray, and also graphenated composites. Right now, these are both more ideas than realities, but they're not far off. Both of those would be incredibly useful materials to have if you were coping with a drowned New York. 

The interesting thing is that since I've finished the book, people have sent me articles that apparently Singapore is contemplating doing this very thing [floating islands that are tethered], because Singapore is another city that is at sea level, and they have a problem.

I don't want to suggest that it won't be a gigantic disaster, because it will. But what I do want to suggest is that after the disaster, people are going to be coping. They will not give up. They won't sit on the ground and weep and throw ashes on their heads and say, "Oh, woe is us. Our ancestors were idiots." They will cope. So the coping is an interesting story to try to tell. It's a science fiction story. It's a combination of technical and political and all the other elements of the human story. It will be an interesting moment in history, and the main thing that I tried to say in this novel is that in the coping process, there's going to be some positives, there's going to be some comedy.

 

Also, KSR's event with fantasy author George R.R. Martin at UC San Diego to support the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop got plenty of coverage! See reports by the San Diego Union Tribune, La Jolla Light and the UCSD Guardian (see also our previous update for more on that). Fun bit frpm La Jolla Light: Stan "was also sporting his brown hiking shoes that still had a little mud on them from The Sierras"!

 

New editions:

The solar system-wide interplanetary Grand Tour of Johannes Wright's Orchestra of The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance, an early and wild KSR novel (1985), got a new paperback edition by Tor. Featuring a cover with a space and Saturn montage, and praise by Greg Bear.

Aurora has been translated in German (Heyne) and Spanish (Minotauro). The German translation of New York 2140 is scheduled for January 2018.

Italians finally got a translation of Green Mars and, since March, of Blue Mars as well, along with a reedition of Red Mars (Fanucci Editore). 20 years after the first translation of Red Mars, the trilogy is complete!

2312 has been translated in Japanese (Tokyo Sogensha, in two volumes, with some crazy visuals, as usual!), in Chinese (Congqing Publishing Group; see also KSR's visit to Beijing last year), and also in Turkish! On that last one, see an article written by translator M. Ihsan Tatari on the tough 8-month work of translating 2312 into Turkish.

 

Reviews:

Some New York 2140 reviews:

Abigail Nussbaum for New Scientist
Rjurik Davidson for the Syndey Morning Herald
Michael Berry for the San Francisco Chronicle

Dominc DeAngelo for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

While we are at it, several reviews for Aurora as well -- especially since it has been translated in other languages as well:

The Weirdsphere podcast
Thank The Maker
Business Insider Australia
Postcards from a Dying World
Bookthump
Scifi Addicts
Adactio
(German) Weltenfluestern podcast
(German/Austrian) Der Standard
(Spanish) La jungla de las letras
(Spanish) Chronicle & Cover
(Italian) Prismo Magazine (with discussion of Timothy Morton and Jeff VanderMeer)

And also:

Green Earth : Weighting a pig doesn't fatten it
2312: Best Science Fiction Books
2312 (Turkish) Yaprakonur
2312 (Turkish) Kitap gibi

 

Top illustration by Vicent Mahé for a New Yorker article on New York 2140.

More NY2140 interviews & reviews

KSR's latest, New York 2140, has been out for over a month now, and has been gathering quite a few readers!

 

To promote the book, KSR was on tour in Europe, with events in Barcelona, in Germany and in London. Top photo from an event at Klimahaus in Bremerhaven, Germany -- photo by Fritz Heidorn/Oldenburg, Germany. More photos from KSR's stay in Bremerhaven and Berlin as well as a couple of short videos can be found here.

 

In London, an event united 3 excellent writers, KSR, Adam "Yellow Blue Tibia" Roberts and Francis "Red Plenty" Spufford (whose latest novel Golden Hill also takes place in Manhattan, but in the 18th century!). A report on that discussion over here.

 

This interview for NYMag covers many NYC topics as one would expect, especially the detailed research on-site, i.e. walking around the city and getting to know its history.

I thought of the book eventually as a comedy of coping, and to do that I picked a time, or perhaps 40 years after the disaster itself. [...] science fiction has to imagine the people who come after, when the situation will be natural, whatever it is. [...] I was invoking a somewhat nostalgic, more romantic New York of the imagination that’s more human scale, more neighborhood-focused, more localized, and more kind of hand-crafted, you might call it. 

I wanted a finance novel that was heavily based on what lessons we learned — or did not learn — from the crash of 2008 and 2009. All science-fiction novels are about the future and about the present at the same time.

[On Franklin the trader being a sympathetic character] I did that on purpose. People who succeed by using the currently shifting rules of capitalism are not villainous, nor have they broken the law or cheated. [...] That point needed to be raised because, as Orson Welles once pointed out, everybody has their reasons. [...] I must admit, in the first draft he was more of a jerk, but he began to step on the toes of the citizens. So with the changing of frighteningly few sentences I made him more of a geek. Not that different than my scientist characters who are funny because they try to evaluate social life as if we’re nothing but a theoretical problem in physics or sociobiology. I like my finance guy.

Can you legislate fundamental change? Essentially we need fundamental change, we have to hope the answer is yes. Because the alternatives to legislation are all terrible. Legislation is by far the best method for big social change. Get the right congress in and the right World Trade Organization technocrats in and you change.

 

In this interview with Inverse, "The Man who put Science in Science Fiction", KSR talks about his writing, his method for world-building, these "infodumps" he's well known for (and criticized (and praised) for), his characters in NY2140, his impressive use of epigraphs and quotes in this novel.

Beyond the depiction of the future, what is this novel about?

It’s about finance, and climate change, and New York as a place, and those particular characters, and what we could do now to influence events to make a better future for the people yet to come. Utopian climate change fiction: the obvious next hot genre.

 

In the Science Friday podcast, KSR describes daily life in his future drowned New York. A "citizen" chapter of the novel can also be read at Science Friday.

 

 

NY2140 as well as climate science, urban planning, urban agriculture and environmental humanities were discussed in a panel discussion at Rutgers University with KSR and Rutgers researchers. Here's a report from that with quotes from faculty members.

 

A surprising pairing took place in an event hosted by the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD -- although not so surprising when one considers they are both fan favorites of the SF&F genre: George "A Song of Ice and Fire" R. R. "Game of Thrones" Martin and Kim Stanley Robinson! Here's a summary of what was uttered at the event, along with some tease from both authors on what's next: 

Robinson teased the audience early on with the prospect of a film or television adaptation of his Mars Trilogy at some point in the future. [...] As to whom [Martin] would like to see assume the Iron Throne, Martin left the audience with a message that could perhaps serve both to sum up the entirety of the event and to annoy any avid fans in attendance: “Keep reading.”

 

 

Also: plenty of reviews of NY2140 are out!

John Clute for Strange Horizons: "New York 2140 reads almost like a game. It is a scherzo, something happening all the time [...] astonishingly full of joy: the joy of telling; the joy of sharing the reasoning behind events; the joy of inducing good people to cohabit."

Niall Alexander for Tor.com: "At six hundred plus pages, New York 2140 is somewhat short on plot for such a long novel, but it’s absolutely, positively packed with characters rife with life [...] characters little and large cross paths, and as the narrative threads we’d thought independent—inconsequential, even—gather into something greater because they’re suddenly something shared."

Cory Doctorow for BoingBoing: "with New York 2140, Robinson starts to connect the dots between these different futures [2312, Aurora] with a bold, exhilarating story of life in a permanent climate crisis, where most people come together in adversity, but where a small rump of greedy, powerful people get in their way."

Gary K. Wolfe for Locus: "As such colorful and eccentric characters might suggest, a good portion of New York 2140 has an oddly Dickensian feel to it [...] there have been more than a few environmental catastrophe tales set in a future New York, but possibly none of them have been this interesting." (also for the Chicago Tribune)

And some others:

Joshua Rothman for The New Yorker ('along with a nice NY2140 illustration by Vincent Mahé)
Alan Scherstuhl for The Village Voice (along with a nice photo of KSR in front of the present-day MetLife tower)
Andrew Liptak for The Verge
Nisi Shawl for the Seattle Review of Books
James Wallace Harris for Auxiliary Memory
Mat Coward for Morning Star
Alex Good for The Star
Kev McVeigh for Performative Utterance
Schicksalgemeinschaft
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro for the InterGalactic Medicine Show
James Bradley for The Australian

The usual linkstorm ends here. More will follow. In the meantime, you can start your own petition for a Mutt and Jeff vignette spinoff!

New York 2140 is out: interviews & reviews

New York 2140 , Kim Stanley Robinson's latest, his 18th novel, just came out!
 
Pictured above: KSR in Antarctica, from his second NSF-sponsored trip in 2016 (the first one in 1995 gave birth to the novel Antarctica ). This is him reaching the Wilson rock hut on Igloo Spur, at Cape Crozier on Ross Island. It was built in 1911 to shelter Wilson, Cherry-Garrard and Bowers during the so-called "Worst Journey in the World", one painful episode that is part of the ultimately failed British expedition led by Scott to reach the South Pole. KSR's own account of his journey and reflections on the 1911 journey are upcoming.
 
 
First, KSR interviews on and around NY2140. Some generic setting and characters spoilers.
 
In this very quotable interview for Scientific American, KSR summarizes what the new novel is about thusly:

It’s about climate change and sea level rise, but it’s also about the way that our economic system doesn’t allow us to afford a decent future. As one of the characters says early in the book, “We’ve got good tech, we’ve got a nice planet, but we’re fucking it up by way of stupid laws.”
 
Finance, globalization—this current moment of capitalism—has a stranglehold on the world by way of all our treaties and laws, but it adds up to a multigenerational Ponzi scheme, an agreement on the part of everybody to screw the future generations for the sake of present profits. By the logic of our current system we have to mess up the Earth, and that is crazy. My new novel explores this problem and how we might get out of it.

 
KSR goes on about the climate science, the fact that he hasn't actually lived in New York, about post-2008 leftist thinking and the meetings he's had that have shaped his thinking on economics and political economics.

Life is robust. Everything is robust—except the current economic system. So let’s reform that, revise it to something more intelligent and generous. That’s my hope—and it doesn’t hurt that it lets me tell a lot of fun and interesting stories.

 
KSR reminisces on his two Antarctica trips, tells us how he sank Manhattan and muses on life in Davis, California, in this profile and interview for Sacramento Town Magazine: "The Man Who Feel For Earth" -- complete with drawn portraits! (Also included an interview with Mario Biagioli, advisor on this novel but also in Galileo's Dream ; Karen Joy Fowler, fellow SF writer, they were writing sitting in the same café for years; and novelist Jonathan Lethem) One gets a very good sense of how Robinson plans and executes his writing and who he is as a thinker and human being, an excellent resource. Picked bits:

“It’s the same structure that Dickens uses in Bleak House,”
 
“I spent a night in the old MetLife building,” he says, speaking of what is now the Edition hotel, “and one of the customer relations people showed me everything from the very top of the steeple to the bottom of the basement. I felt like I knew the building.”
 
he has only engaged in politics actively once. “I tried to [fight] UC Davis when they were trying to turn some of their agricultural research fields into their own private faculty suburb [in 2004],” he recounts. “That was painful and made me late on my books. I’ve decided that really I’m best off writing my books and making them be political activism.”
 
The apocalyptic vibe in the climate change movement is because people are so scared by what looks pretty damn bad, but so many good things are happening, too. I have been fighting this fight as a public intellectual, as a novelist and someone giving talk after talk after talk, since about 2002. I’ve seen huge changes in public acceptance. The speed at which clean technologies are being taken up is doubling, and that quickly makes huge differences.

 
Given the financial and Wall Street connections of New York 2140, Bloomberg took an interest in KSR (!) and published this article on him, a mix of career profile, interview, novel presentation and a nice illustrated visualisation of the novel's setting.
 
More NY2140 (read: Terra2017) musings in this interview for the Chicago Review of Books:

I think it is a hopeful novel. The future we’re headed into will include climate change to one degree or another (ha ha), and it’s also going to include finance, which in a complex society is just one aspect of everyone getting along. Finance is never truly unfettered, in that it’s always regulated, but the regulations can and do privilege certain stakeholders over others. The other stakeholders include other living creatures on the planet. They keep us alive, but can’t exactly speak for themselves in our legal decisions and law-making. We have to figure out how to create justice and sustainability for them as well as us, as they’re part of us. We all together need sustainable justice.
 
I often start with ideas that are global or historical or scientific that don’t have any characters in them at first, and then as I write, the characters appear and become more distinct, and do things—it’s a strange process, and I don’t feel in control of it. So that’s very interesting. It keeps me writing.

 
In this interview for Singularity Hub, KSR talks about his trip in Antarctica and writing NY2140 as a novel of realism:

“Optimism is a political position, to be wielded like a club. It’s not naïve and it’s not innocent. … [O]ptimism is a moral and political position. It’s a choice made to insist that things could be better if we worked at it. [Italian neo-Marxist theorist Antonio] Gramsci suggested this with his motto, ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’ “This is just one moment in a long battle between science and capitalism. That’s the story of our time, and the story won’t end in our lifetime, but we can pitch in and make a contribution toward the good, and I trust many people will. Is that optimism? I think it’s just a description of the project at hand.”

 

Another interview for iDigitalTimes on NY2140. Some quotes:

Capitalism and the profit motive are in some kind of competition with science and utopian thinking, in determining what happens to us both technologically and socially. So there again it’s an interaction, maybe a struggle for control. Ultimately we decide what we want in a big amorphous process we call history.
 
[Wealthy industrialists] want to perpetuate their power, and as a class they’re therefore dangerous and need to be legislated into harmlessness. I’d like to see individual income taxed as progressively as in the Eisenhower administration, and then also see corporate assets taxed in a similar fashion, as suggested by Thomas Piketty. Then the wealthy would have enough to be comfortable, but not enough to try to buy the political system.
 
My feeling is that evolution is more likely than revolution, so what we need to conceptualize is very rapid evolution. [...] I think it’s better to go immediately to work on all possible reforms and evolutionary changes, than it would be to declare the situation so bad that we need a revolution if we’re going to succeed.
 
The book was mostly written in 2015 and the first three months of 2016, so for the most part its thinking predates the current situation.
 
New York pizza is like the shark or the cockroach, and having achieved perfection in its ecological niche it will persist in its current form for the next 350 million years.

 
Also of interest: IDT fellow site International Business Times also published a separate interview with KSR on Aurora.
 
Further details on how NY2140 came about in this interview for the Sierra Club:

I went to my editor, Tim Holman, and said, “I want to write about global finance.” He said, “Oh God, never say that again. Horrible idea.” And I said, “But I want to do it.” So he thought for a while and said, “Well, remember that drowned Manhattan from your [science fiction novel] 2312? If you want to do finance, New York is the logical place to do it. Could you put the book in that drowned Manhattan?” In terms of picking the time, it was just a matter of making it far enough off that the sea level rise could be justified but close enough that we still have the current set of problems. You will the optimism as a political weapon to keep yourself active. It’s not easy, and it’s definitely not automatic. It’s more like, “Goddammit! I’m gonna stay optimistic!”

 
 
Reviews for NY2140 have started pouring in. Again, mild spoilers warning.
 
Gerry Canavan for the Los Angeles Review of Books, with the bold title "Utopia in the Time of Trump". A heartfelt review from somebody very knowledgeable in Robinson's entire body of work.

It is undeniably clear that Robinson’s project has become the construction of a huge metatextual history of the future [...] each new Robinson book comments on and complicates the vision of the future espoused by earlier ones, typically by refocusing our attention on some heretofore overlooked component of the problem. [...] New York 2140 remixes many of Robinson’s key futurological themes, once again with a significantly more pessimistic orientation. [...] I felt for a bit reading New York 2140 that perhaps it was no longer right to call Robinson our last great utopian visionary, as he is so often described; maybe even Stan has finally wised up and realized we’re all doomed.

 
Adam Roberts for The Guardian:

This is a large-scale novel, not only in terms of its 624 pages, but also the number of characters and storylines Robinson deploys, the sheer range of themes and topics. [...] This range and variety make summarising the plot a tricky business. Lots goes on. Robinson is not a writer who does villains; none of his characters here is evil, although some are grubbier and more compromised than others. The villain in this novel is capitalism itself. [...] New York 2140 is a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation. Impressively ambitious, it bears comparison with other visionaries’ attempts to squeeze the sprawl and energy of the US between two covers: John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy and Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

 
Others:
Climate scientist Robert Kopp for The Conversation talks about the novel and the science of predicting sea level rise.
Everdeen Mason for The Washington Post
 
More interviews and reviews are coming, as could be expected!

Utopia Against Finance And Other Stories

Some interviews to get you warmed up for the new novel coming out next week. 

Utopia Against Finance, Cli-Fi, Green Earth and New York 2140 
This will be the focus of NY2140. The theme: a socialist realist history of a potential transition to post-capitalism.
 
This keynote for "Climate Futures: This Changes Everything" for the Environmental Humanities Center in UC Santa Barbara, recorded in his house, sums it up:
 



 
Another very interesting discussion is that of the future of cities and ways of living when the sea level rises due to climate change. Kim Stanley Robinson and architect Usman Haque get us to Rising Sea Levels: London in 2080 in this transatlantic videoconference / thought experiment! -- organized by the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination and The Bartlett School of Architecture and moderated by Sheldon Brown and David Kirsch (May 2016). The video of the event is online (don't get discouraged by the bad audio quality in the first minutes). La Jolla Light reports:
 

Robinson warned those gathered that sea levels are rising even faster than scientists thought they would. “This is one of the greatest problems that humanity faces,” he said, noting America might end up with some of its major cities — like New York and Miami — halfway under water, becoming a “Super Venice, Italy.” Robinson explained that the problem stems from melting ice in western Antarctica and Greenland, an unstoppable process once it gets going [...] Robinson mentioned one possible solution; building 60 huge pumping stations that would pump the melting ice water back up onto the Antarctic bedrock for refreezing.
 
By necessity, people will be changing their definition of personal space and will be living in closer proximity, in what [Haque] calls a “Liquid Democracy.” Things will get done, not by the government, but by liquid groups of people who form their own organizations as needed. The Internet will no longer exist, Haque reasons. Instead, people will communicate by posting messages on giant electronic billboards, which he calls “light walls.” The main food staple will be algae that people grow at home. There will be no live pets, but instead people will have virtual pets, like holographic cats and dogs. They will sleep in converted, driver-less cars from the company Uber, which they will drive into their homes.;

 
Also of interest:


A similar keynote to the one above and Q&A: "Power and the Space of the Planet", at the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture (April 2015), with response by Phillip Wegner and discussion moderated by Reinhold Martin, Director, Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture


"Toward A Plausible Utopia", a discussion between KSR and Bjarke Ingels, architect, at the New York City Museum (May 2015)

 


Mars , the solar system, 2312 & Aurora
KSR spoke to "Voices from Lagrange 5", a podcast examining the social, political and anthropological aspects of space settlements. A very interesting discussion on the (lack of) profit-making opportunities of space exploration, Space X and space socialism.
 
In this interview for Public Books, "Earth First, Then Mars", KSR talks about how his ideas have evolved and matured over his career.
 

Earth is the only place we can really thrive. Terraforming Mars, if possible at all, might take thousands of years rather than hundreds; this is the explicit commentary that Aurora makes on my Mars Trilogy’s timeline. I still think terraforming Mars is a great long-term project, just very long. So it will not serve to help us as any kind of “second home” while we get through the long emergency we are facing with the ecological problems here on Earth.
 
Health, broadly regarded, means keeping the whole biosphere healthy, because we’re so interpenetrated with it. Something like the Leopoldian land ethic seems to emerge: what’s good is what’s good for the land. You’re happy when you’re healthy, and you’re only healthy when the biosphere is healthy.
 
I sense that in asserting that humanity can’t inhabit the galaxy, much less the universe, and may only ever be healthy here on Earth, I’ve suggested a limitation that rubs some people the wrong way. They like to think of humans as transcendent, and once a religious afterlife is removed from consideration, the species going cosmic is the secular replacement for that religious yearning.

 
As a comparison, here is a two-part interview with KSR from 2012 for John Tibbetts' AboutSF podcast, on writing the Mars trilogy and writing science fiction in general: Part 1, Part 2.
 
In this article for Scientific American, "What Will It Take for Humans to Colonize the Milky Way?" (which reads like a condensed version of his seminal essay for BoingBoing), KSR argues about thedifficulties of manned interstellar travel.
 
And in this interview in Spanish for El Confidencial, conducted to coincide with the release of the translation of Aurora in Spanish, KSR discusses the ideas behind Aurora, the Singularity and the Mondragón cooperatives.
 

La secuencia debería ser la siguiente: antiausteridad, keynesianismo, social democracia (tal vez aquí se encuentre Mondragón), socialismo democrático y poscapitalismo. Las necesidades deberían ser socializadas, los riesgos deberían ser socializados y no privatizados (considerando que muchos de estos riesgos no son voluntarios, como la vejez y la enfermedad).

 
Climate One hosted the event "Remaking the Planet" on the issue of climate change and geoengineering, with Oliver Morton (The Economist), Ken Caldeira (climate scientist at Stanford University) and KSR (January 2016). The audio recording and transcript are online (also at PRX). Some KSR bits:
 

If we change if we plant a lot of forests, if we give all the women on the planet their full legal rights, we've changed the climate of the earth in a radical way so that's geoengineering too. [...] we’re talking about humanity's relationship to the biosphere and the planet as a complex system that we can't hack, that’s not the right word, but we might be able to finesse it in ways that will keep us from causing a mass extinction event.
 
If you didn't subsidize the carbon industry massively by taxpayer money, you already have the crossover power where clean energy could be quickly put in by government supported projects and it would be full employment, it would be a thing to do and you could have clean energy so much faster than we thought even 10 years ago.
 
Ten years ago we couldn’t have had this conversation but the 10 hottest years that we have on record took place in this century. So global warming is happening and everybody knows it.
 
Space science is an earth science and the solar system is our neighborhood. And when we talk about Mars, we are thinking about planets, and when we think about planets we’re realizing we’re on a planet and so it's all good in that regard. And we, this is the only planet we can live on and stay healthy and I think that will be true for tens of thousands of years. So there is no Planet B and that moral hazard is taken away as soon as you understand that.

 
Shaman  and odds & ends
Two podcast interviews on Shaman and related themes:
For Skiffy and Fanty -- KSR a.k.a. "The Ethnographer"
For To The Best of Our Knowledge in their series about "The First People"
...and KSR reading from Shaman at the San Antonio LoneStarCon3 in 2013.
 
Here are also two videos:
From Future in Review 2012 (FiRe 2012) "Looking Ahead: The World in 20 Years" where KSR and David Brin exchange ideas on science fiction and writing.
A panel from last year's Balticon (May 2016), "Frontiers of Science and Science Fiction", where Larry Niven, Kim Stanley Robinson, Connie Willis, Charlie Stross, Joe Haldeman and Harry Turtledove and a panel of the scientists and engineers of the Hubble and Webb space telescopes as they explore the places where their worlds collide.
Finally, in an interview for Islam and Science Fiction, KSR talks about writing The Years of Rice and Salt and the role of SF in imagining the future.
 

The Dalai Lama has declared that if science ever shows something in Buddhism is wrong, then Buddhism should change.  I don’t see the Middle Eastern monotheisms making that kind of declaration.  We are now in a scientific civilization, but it’s been coming for centuries and during those centuries, some religions have regarded science as a particular form of worship or devotion.  I think that might be the best angle for them to take, to make a reconciliation of fact and value, etc.
 
[...] there needs to be a lot of Muslim science fiction of all kinds, exploring and displaying all kinds of futures.  It would be helpful to the imaginations of everyone alive, and a real service to humanity.  We all need futures in our heads to work toward or against, and the more there are, and the thicker their texture (to add to their believability and impact) the better.  It’s a huge opportunity for young writers.

 
Now that we are caught up, we are ready for the release of New York 2140 on March 14!

The Hard Problem: An Audio Voyage

As we await for the release of New York 2140 in barely one week -- here are some other KSR-related bits:

In 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson makes references to performance artist Marina Abramovic several times, through the activities of the main character, Swan. After 2312's release, in 2015 Robinson and Abramovic got together and created a collaborative work, along with the help of composer/sound mixer Adam Tinkle and the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Human Imagination.

Today, the end result is the audio performance "The Hard Problem: An Audio Voyage", and you can download it here!

An introductory video, "3015 Prologue" was also produced:

The Center for Human Imagination describes the process like this:

In winter of 2015, the Clarke Center produced a collaborative project with the performance artist Marina Abramović and the science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The multi-day workshop cultivated a series of interactions between a story that Stan was writing about a multi-generational spaceship heading to another star, and the performance art gestures of Marina’s that are a journey into our inner self. We improvised readings and performance actions to find the ways in which these seemingly diametric experiences touched on the common idea of how we extend our sense of time and space from the moment to the eternal. Out of this, we created an installation with multiple audio tracks, which was then further developed for the Venice Biennale. We also made a short film, which you can find a link to on the podcast webpage, and the audio tracks were mixed and choreographed by Adam Tinkle into the podcast we are featuring today: The Hard Problem: An Audio Voyage, by Kim Stanley Robinson, Adam Tinkle, Marina Abramović and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination.

Additional photos from the workshop that served as a basis for the final work can be found at Boing Boing:

The audio elements were produced during a day-long workshop with Abramović and Robinson at the Clarke Center, which subsequently appeared at the Venice Bienalle. The audioscape is rich and haunting, and has moments of goosepimple-raising eeriness as the narration invites us to put ourselves in the mind of an AI plying the spaces between the stars.

See also this La Jolla Light article from 2015. Back then the work was called "3015: Work In Progress".

Also available at the Marina Abramovic Institute.

The whole audio voyage was performed by Robinson alone during his visit to Iceland in September 2015. The full video is online, and you can experience it with dim lights here:

In that same link from the Reykjavik International Literary Festival there is also a recording of a panel on "The Environment, the Future and the Future of Writing", with Robinson and Andri Snær Magnason (both Friday September 11).

Utopia in the long run + Next next novel tease

Earlier in December, Kim Stanley Robinson recently was in China to discuss the theme of utopia and to promote a new edition of Red Mars in Chinese by Beijing Alpha (Chongqing Publishing Group)! KSR celebrated the 400th anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia in Beijing Normal University -- see this clip, where he talks of the Chinese/Uygur chapter of The Years of Rice and Salt, Widow Kang. With Beijing Alpha he also appeared with Chinese SF author Liu Cixin (famous for his Three Body Problem trilogy, which KSR has called "the best kind of science fiction" on the English translations), with simultaneous aural and written (!) translation of their live Q&A and a live internet stream followed by tens of thousands. Both are pictured here, from this report from the event. Perhaps Chinese speakers can share more content? The internet spheres are not very well connected yet...

Anyone following long history trends can perceive that the future of humanity will be more and more defined by Asian affairs (estimates of "the West"'s share in world GDP looks more and more like a 500 year parenthesis fuelled by it being the first in the technological revolution, but that gap is closing). So it will come as no surprise that, after New York 2140 in 2017, KSR's next novel will focus on China and close space (moon) colonization!

 

 

In the meantime: No matter what, climate change is happening. It's all a matter of us accepting reality, and adapt and change as a consequence.

This is Kim Stanley Robinson's keynote speech for the 2015 Bioneers Annual Conference (from October 2015). Climate change, science and politics, social organization and laws, history and utopia: in 20 minutes, you have a powerful, convincing, and -- also judging by the cheers and applause from the crowd -- very energizing condensation of everything KSR!

The coming century requires that we rethink and restructure our relationship with our planet to avoid endangering the integrity of the biosphere and risking the end of human civilization. This means reforming our economic system, which uses a market and trade system that systemically under-prices and degrades both people and the natural world. How can we change that, and what would it look like if we did? One of the great visionary science fiction writers of our era will draw from his decades of work and thinking on this question to sketch a utopian but deeply informed and cogent scenario of a new economy for the coming decades. Introduction by J. P. Harpignies, National Bioneers Conference Associate Producer.

Another essential KSR resource is this one-hour conversation with him for The Conversation podcast. The discussion is very wide-ranging, tackling economic, scientific, ecological, social, cognitive, anthropological, and more, themes.

 

 

Some additional links to panels and interviews:

An extended version of the Bioneers speech above can be found here, at Utopian Dreaming: 50 Years of Imagined Futures in California and at UCSC (from November 2015). KSR talks about utopian novels, and how they tried to envision the transition from the world of today into a utopian future, for example his own Pacific Edge, or Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (which saw the Pacific coast states seceding from the United States and forming their own ecological utopia), which celebrated its 40th anniversary. He goes on to imagine an updated close-future history involving student debt, banking assets, private/public ownership and social movements!

Here's a short interview around the event.

"It's been 35 years since the Reagan and Thatcher conservative regimes and the effect has been bad environmentally and socially. But I think there are good things too." Grim dystopian visions make for more dramatic movies, he said, and utopian ones are more low-key. "There's always going to be hope," he said. "It's always stubborn and persistent, even if it's more subtle."

And a blog post about another event around the same time.

Another podcast with KSR tackling environmental and sustainability issues comes from Generation Anthropocene, from the Smithsonian magazine.

Climate One hosted an event on the emerging genre of Cli-Fi, discussing with KSR and Jason Mark, editor of the Earth Island Journal. The audio recording of the event and transcript are online.

There used to be bumper stickers that said keep the U.S. out of Ecotopia. And there are things were just being done in an environmentally conscious way with the best technology of the 1970’s and it was a very inspirational book.  It changed people's lives, it changed their thinking.  I think what it was, was the ‘60s generation was growing up in thinking how do I live my ideals how do I take care of my kids? So you get these Ecotopian thinking.  But then the ‘80s came and Ecotopia didn't know about the ‘80s.  It didn't know about the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution and the incredible amount of the growth of globalization and late capitalism. So now Ecotopia looks a little bit quaint.  But on the other hand the ideas are still very strong and the book should have a nice 40th anniversary.

[Interstellar] I really disliked it.  [...] it was as if the filmmakers were saying if -- since this is a science fiction movie we can be stupid and get away with it because it's just science fiction.  And so I was offended by it because science fiction is actually a very intellectually powerful genre and it doesn't have a whole lot of patience for stupidity.  So this is like a kind of 1930’s power fantasy movie and we’re well past that now, we’re 80 years past that kind of thinking. [...]  I thought WALL-E was a masterpiece.

[Writing and reading books] For a while there you're living other people's lives, you're paying attention to it with an empathy.  [..] People are very sophisticated that and they even are pretty good at giving the political orientation of the work of art that you can unpack all that stuff you can decode it very quickly.  But it's also put into everything else that you experienced, and then it becomes one more datum you've lived one more life.  That's the magic of art.  You’ve managed to pack in one more of your 10,000 lives by reading another book, by seeing another film.

[Science of climate change] I've had this impression that the scientific community has been shocked.  That around 2002 they raised their hand, they said folks, world, the biosphere is burning down something needs to be done.  And they were ignored.  And capitalism just rolled on saying we need profits, we need shareholder value [...] And now I think in the last five years or so you’ve see more and more scientists and more and more scientific organizations trying to make something more vigorous than raising their hand at the back of the room and saying we've got a problem.  It's an ongoing situation and it would be interesting to see what happens.

[GMOs] I think when people are objecting to against GMO foods is not that the foods have been manipulated, the plants have been manipulated, but that the seeds and the genes are then owned by a company.  So what you're objecting to is not science but capitalism.  And this happens a lot.  A lot of anti-science, especially from the left, in America is an objection to ownership of the public good and so it’s an objection to capitalism not an objection to science. And if you de-strand those two you begin to see this big cosmic battle, at least I do, in which the science is a force for trying to understand the world and make it more comfortable and better balanced with nature and capitalism is strip mining for private profit of the one percent as it’s practiced now and it's basically been its historical role all along.

[The world since 2008] Anybody making more than $100,000 a year is actually going into unhappy land rather than happy land according to scientific studies, so nobody needs to complain about this.  It's a perfect plan, it’s something we can all do.  It’s a political program right?  And it’s now within the window of acceptable discourse.  If I said this 10 years ago you would say, oh my god these hippie science-fiction writers, you know, they’re just so crazy and it is true, but now it's within the window of acceptable discourse.

Another of KSR's novels trying to imagine the transition from today to a near-future environmentally-friendly tomorrow is Green Earth (the omnibus of the Science in the Capital trilogy). Written during the Bush Jr. years and envisioning who would come next, it has suddenly become relevant again. In this letter to readers (written before the elections...), KSR talks about the process of updating his trilogy into one volume:

Looking back at this novel ten years later, I am pleased at how it holds up.  Of course with the passage of time it has become a very weird mix of historical novel, contemporary realist fiction, and near-future science fiction, plus a healthy dose of political fantasy.  I hope this melange of temporalities adds to its interest as a reading experience now, as readers play the game of seeing what was wrong and what was right, what has already happened and what is happening now, and what may still come.  That’s always part of the entertainment with near-future science fiction; as with certain wines, there’s an aftermath when the taste of the vintage can improve.

I’m hoping that the passage of a decade has made this novel interesting in new ways.  I think it still catches some of how Washington works, and how it feels to live an ordinary American life in our era.

With the advantage of hindsight I could see better what it  needed, and as we have learned so much more about climate change, quite a few passages that once brought the news, didn’t any more.   Also, in trying to be true to the way we live now, I wrote a lot of indoor scenes.  As I condensed it I noticed that the outdoor scenes could be left untouched, but many indoor scenes could be squished with happy results.  Same with our lives!  Ultimately I cut about fifteen percent; the exercise was good for me, and for the book.  Many, many thanks to Jane Johnson and Anne Groell for giving the chance to do it.

In this interview for Slate.com, KSR talks about geoengineering and how it was featured in his fiction

 “It’s so new,” he told me, that we feel “we’re sure to fuck it up.”  The aura of fatalism that hovers around climate change more generally further illuminates this popular skepticism. While we are, as Robinson put it, “just now coming to grips with the climate change problem more generally,” those who have long paid attention often fear that we’ve already gone too far to pull back from the brink. In this regard, the very plausibility of geoengineering may be its undoing. We need a miracle if we want to make a real difference, the thinking goes, but there’s nothing especially miraculous about most geoengineering proposals. To the contrary, most of them comprise large-scale applications of basic scientific principles and processes, meaning that for many they tend to feel inadequate at best. In this regard, Robinson noted, geoengineering proposals may also pose a moral hazard, since they potentially pull focus from more difficult endeavors like promoting universal decarbonization.

KSR and NASA scientist Chris McKay were featured in the documentary " BLUESPACE " by director Ian Cheney, which premiered in November 2015. See the trailer here.

Kim Stanley Robinson was the judge in the New Scientist's 2014 Pitch Us a Movie Competition. The winner was Matt Wilkinson -- but no news since then.

He’ll be working on The Sky Runner, his science fiction story set on, or rather under Europa, with help from a room full of writers and industry professionals including Christopher Priest, Liz Jensen and Louis Savy.

KSR supported the crowdfunding campaing for Mars Trac by donating autographed copies of his books.

Building on Mars with Mars Trac, the Open Source Construction Rover
A multi-disciplinary group at Arizona State University adapting Open Source Ecology's LifeTrac vehicle for Mars.
 
"Thanks for supporting open hardware on the space frontier! Stan 2013"

In 2014, KSR discussed the life and writings of John Muir at a lecture series on Environments in Motion: Understanding and Protecting Our Planet, at Muir College (UCSD). Muir's writings about Sierra glaciers, which changed the prevailing scientific notion, were characterized by a rare combination of technical precision and spiritual passion. Muir founded the Sierra Club and and was one of the world’s first environmentalists. He undoubtedly influenced Roosevelt’s decision to create a system of national parks. Stan:

“I love the Sierras and spend a lot of time hiking there. Many of the descriptions in the books of my Mars Trilogy are taken directly from my experience in the Sierras.”

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop is held annually (six weeks, summer) at the University of California San Diego since 1968; KSR has been both a student and an instructor. KSR is the Clarion Foundation Vice President. The workshop became an affiliate program within UCSD's Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, created in 2013, an integrated research center where engineering, medicine, and the arts, sciences, and humanities explore the basis of imagination. The workshop almost closed shop because of lack of funding but it continues to exist via fundraising; most recently thanks to a large donation.

KSR lists his 10 favourite science fiction novels for Barnes & Noble (in order):

Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon
Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Female Man, by Joanna Russ
Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany
Sarah Canary, by Karen Fowler
The Bridge, by Iain Banks
The Book of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe (Nightside of the Long Sun, Lake of the Long Sun, Calde of the Long Sun, Exodus from the Long Sun)
The Mount, by Carol Emshwiller

But because these top 10 lists are impossible, he offers 10 more!

And two interviews behind paywalls:

"Science fiction’s warnings for the present" for High Country News
Interview in SF & #cyberpunkNOW issue of the London Reader

 

 
That's all for now! As a suprising 2016 wraps up, we look forward to a 2017 that promises to be filled with reasons to stand up for building a utopian future. KSR's New York 2140 comes out on March 21st.

An Antarctican passage

No matter what, climate change is happening. It's all a matter of us accepting reality, and adapt and change as a consequence.

Climate change is happening. This knowledge is a result of a multitude of findings from countless researchers, each correcting and conjecturing and confirming and building on top of the previous one. In short, science.

Recently, more findings have lent more support towards one theory concerning the past of Antarctica and its ice sheets. Readers of KSR's novel Antarctica will be interested to read about the argument and find echoes of arguments in the novel: dynamicists vs stabilists. Science in the making.

From a Washington Post article on these findings:

So began a storied debate over this rock formation, dubbed the “Sirius Group” after Mount Sirius, one of the range’s many peaks. It was between the “dynamicists,” on the one hand, and the “stabilists” on the other. The dynamicists argued that the enormous ice sheet of East Antarctica had dramatically collapsed in the Pliocene, bringing the ocean far closer in to the Transantarctic range, and that subsequent upthrusts of the Earth and re-advances of glaciers had then transported the diatoms from the seafloor to great heights. No way, countered the stabilists: The ice sheet had stayed intact, but powerful winds had swept the diatoms all the way from the distant sea surface and into the mountains.

New computer simulation [...] suggests that large parts of East Antarctica can indeed collapse, and moreover, can do so in conditions not too dissimilar from those we’re creating today with all of our greenhouse gas emissions.

[...] Scherer notes that this new scenario doesn’t really proclaim either the dynamicists or the stabilists the victors. Rather, it merges their perspectives. His view is clearly reliant on a substantial amount of dynamics, but it also doesn’t suggest that the East Antarctica ice retreated nearly as far back as earlier proposals did. Nor does it use glacial processes to move the deposited diatoms. Rather, it borrows the stabilist idea of windblown transport, albeit only after ice has retreated and land has risen in its wake.

[...] “The paper is a great example of how much (paleo)climate modeling has improved in the last decade(s), particularly in the last few years,” said Simone Galeotti, an Antarctic researcher at the Università degli Studi di Urbino in Italy, by email.

The original Nature Communications article: "Windblown Pliocene diatoms and East Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat". Image on top from the article, simulated Warm Pliocene Antarctic ice-sheet configuration during warm austral summer.

So, things went smoother than what the novel Antarctica had quipped about! From Chapter 5:

"And so the stabilists were convinced, and they recanted, " Wade said, to more hoots of laughter.

"Of course not, " Misha said, grinning and refilling their mugs with Drambuie. "That isn't how it works, of course. No one is ever convinced of anything. "

"So how do new ideas take hold?"

"The old scientists die, " Misha said, kicking Michelson as an example.

Some other Antarctica news of interest:

Volcano discovered under Antarctic ice - hopefully it won't result in what happens in Green Mars !
Antarctica and geopolitics: China develops its presence in Antarctica - with an eye at the Antarctica Treaty renewal
Photos! Antarctica yesterday's habitat: 8 Abandoned Antarctic Whaling Stations and Bases that are Still Amazing, including the historical Shackleton and Russ huts
More photos! Antarctica modern habitat: The World's First 'Moveable City' Now Operational
Hand stitched cotton maps of Antarctica!

Finally, below is a pin-up drawing of Val from Antarctica in the secret underwater lake. It was done by Lee Moyer for the 2014 Clarion Calendar, which raised money through crowdfunding two years ago! In an interview with Clarion, KSR explained the scene:

The permanent station at the South Pole supplies its water by drilling down into the ice under the station (which is two miles deep) and then putting a heating element down the hole and melting an area into a spherical lake of water that they then pump up as needed. They have also melted shafts up to a kilometer deep in order to drop lines of sensors down into the ice to help them detect neutrinos; they use the Earth and the Antarctica ice cap as their neutrino creation and capture device (they are measuring neutrinos coming through the Earth from the north).

So there is good ice melting technology at Pole, and also a very active and rambunctious local culture among the service personnel who keep the station running for the scientists. I put these two facts together to imagine an unauthorized and secret icy water slide combined with a subglacial cave heated to hot tub status, known only to an inner circle of Antarcticans. This is without a doubt the science fiction invention in my books that I am most often asked the question, "Is it really there?  Does it really exist?" I can only say, I don't know.

All this is interesting since this November, Kim Stanley Robinson was again in Antarctica, twenty years after first exploring that continent with the NSF Artists & Writers Program!

There Is No Planet B!

"Our Generation Ships Will Sink" is the title of the essay Kim Stanley Robinson wrote to accompany the release of Aurora, at Boing Boing, his "defense" that interstellar travel is much more difficult than popular culture and most science fiction makes it out to be.

Should we stop telling the story?

Maybe not. One of the best novels in the history of world literature, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun, a seven-volume saga telling the story of a starship voyage and the inhabitation of a new planetary system, finesses all these problems in ways that allow huge enjoyment of the story it tells. The novel justifies the entertaining of the idea, no doubt about it.

But when we consider how we should behave now, we should keep in mind that the idea that if we wreck Earth we will have somewhere else to go, is simply false. That needs to be kept in mind, to set a proper value on our one and only planet, so that a moral hazard is not created that allows us to get sloppy with our caretaking of it.

There is no Planet B! Earth is our only possible home!

He goes on detailing the many serious physical, biological, ecological, sociological, and psychological problems that might force us to focus on Earth instead, or as well.

There has been a lot of buzz around Elon Musk's recent announcement of Space X's space transportation plans that would turn humanity into an interplanetary species -- and all in a timeline very close to our present, actually close to the colonization timeline of the Mars trilogy! (the First Hundred land in 2027) There have been previous announcements, and it remains to be seen whether Space X's plans will really make a difference in the same speed that they have been innovating recently.

As could be expected, KSR was reached for comment. In an interview with Bloomberg, he tries to explain why he thinks the SpaceX Mars colonization plans -- as opposed to a model more closely resembling public-funded scientific outposts like the ones found in Antartica -- might be too ambitious.

It’s 2024. Musk figures everything out and gets funding. He builds his rocket, and 100 people take off. Several months later, they land (somehow) and have to get to work remaking a planet.

I have to note, first, that this scenario is not believable, which makes it a hard exercise to think about further. Mars will never be a single-person or single-company effort. It will be multi-national and take lots of money and lots of years.

Musk’s plan is sort of the 1920s science-fiction cliché of the boy who builds a rocket to the moon in his backyard, combined with the Wernher von Braun plan, as described in the Disney TV programs of the 1950s. A fun, new story.

What is the optimal distribution of skills among 100 people who could each afford $200,000 to $500,000 a seat for such a high-risk endeavor?

They would not pay to get in but would be selected and trained, as any astronauts are and need to be.

Has SpaceX vested authority in someone—or a group—to run Mars?

It wouldn’t be SpaceX deciding these things. 

Who’s in charge?

This would be an uneasy mix of legal rule from earth, following the Outer Space Treaty and the regulations of the organizing bodies involved (NASA, the UN, and whoever else) and local decisions made ad hoc by direct democracy.

Everyone wants sustainability and sustainable development. But it’s hard to define on earth.

Sustainability is quite definable and rests on bio-physical parameters and balances that can be measured and described. It’s an ecological equation of sorts, big but not impossibly complex. It tends to be messed up by what is often called economics.

What needs to happen for the Mars colony to live sustainably and give humanity the lifeboat Musk envisions?

It’s important to say that the idea of Mars as a lifeboat is wrong, in both a practical and a moral sense.

There is no Planet B, and it’s very likely that we require the conditions here on earth for our long-term health. When you don’t take these new biological discoveries into your imagined future, you are doing bad science fiction.

In a culture so rife with scientism and wish fulfillment, a culture that's still coming to grips with the massive crisis of climate change, a culture that's inflicting a sixth mass-extinction event on earth and itself, it’s important to try to pull your science fiction into the present, to make it a useful tool of human thought, a matter of serious planning as well as thrilling entertainment.

This is why Musk’s science fiction story needs some updating, some real imagination using current findings from biology and ecology.

He is not the only one with reservations. It's about funding, and new science. Indeed, new information on the lack of nitrogen, the presence of poisonous perchlorates (and the tough-to-disprove possibility that there's microbial life there) certainly brake the pace with which Mars could be colonized or terraformed -- which is a completely different task compared to just landing there. Further thoughts on the timeline of Mars colonization in the "Are We Alone?" podcast from 2015: "Mars-struck", from Astrobiology Magazine (direct mp3 link). Mars One was another Mars colonization project, and Robinson had also commented on it when interviewed about it in 2015.

...And colonizing Mars is nothing compared to the complexity of interstellar colonization! The feasibility or infeasibility of interstellar space travel for our mortal biological coils, the uniqueness of spaceship Earth and the necessity to make sure our civilizational development will become compatible with the life and climate that birthed it: these are some of the themes developed in Aurora-related interviews.

Aurora does incite debate. From this discussion between KSR and Paolo Bacigalupi (The Water Knife) and from an article/podcast in NPR -- tied interview with Andy Weir (The Martian) and Neal Stephenson (Seveneves).

"Aurora," has received a wide variety of responses "including some really, really angry ones."

my working principle was, 'What would it really be like?' So no hyperspace. No warp drive. No magical thing that isn't going to really happen to get us there

From an interview with Space.com:

The solar system is our neighborhood, and going into space itself, exploring the solar system, is actually part of planetary maintenance, you might say. I have a huge enthusiasm for the space program when it comes down to the solar system and exploring it for the health of Terran [Earth] civilization. It's all part of a larger argument to try and figure out what we should be doing right now, what's important.

There are a lot of people, even powerful, influential people, who seem to think that the goal of humanity is to spread itself. I want this book to make people think really hard about — maybe there's only one planet where humanity can do well, and we're already on it.

Much more in this online chat at io9 (reporting here), on interstellar civilization, Jackie's starship, the Singularity, Ship the Narrator:

If we could go, I think it would be a good thing to do. I’m just thinking that the distances are too great, the times are too long, we are looking more and more like planetary expressions, life as a planetary expression. I’m still very interested in inhabiting Mars, but this may take thousands of years, because of perchlorates and nitrogen lack, things we didn’t know when I wrote my Mars books. The stars, meanwhile, are much much farther away, we couldn’t go back to Earth for a sabbatical and get what we need there (assuming we need anything, which I admit is an assumption). So I wanted to make that point, which I do think returns our focus to Earth. Whatever becomes possible to later generations, it won’t happen without a healthy and sustainable civilization on Earth. Space offers no bolt hole or escape hatch, that just won’t work. Not even Mars!

I don’t think that going to the stars is absolutely impossible. It’s not in the category of time travel or faster-than-light travel. It just strikes me as much more difficult than we’ve usually been thinking. Possibly a project for the year 5000 when we’ve got everything on Earth and in the solar system well in hand. All the problems I’ve brought up in AURORA might be solvable over the long, long haul.

Possibly it would be best to send a terrarium, but it would go even slower, and the added length of time might overwhelm the benefits of the greater size. It would be a cost-benefit analysis, and possibly a solution for the year 5000 or something.

This interview with Public Books on Aurora goes further into the education system and sustainability:

Health, broadly regarded, means keeping the whole biosphere healthy, because we’re so interpenetrated with it. Something like the Leopoldian land ethic seems to emerge: what’s good is what’s good for the land. You’re happy when you’re healthy, and you’re only healthy when the biosphere is healthy (meaning all the other humans as part of that). That’s a kind of ethics, and then you have a politics and a guide to action. You have a project, and people need a project.

I sense that in asserting that humanity can’t inhabit the galaxy, much less the universe, and may only ever be healthy here on Earth, I’ve suggested a limitation that rubs some people the wrong way. They like to think of humans as transcendent, and once a religious afterlife is removed from consideration, the species going cosmic is the secular replacement for that religious yearning.

Some more audio interviews on the themes touched upon by Aurora:

The Planetary Society's radio show here (direct mp3 link)
The Verge's ESP here
ABC (Australia)'s Books and Arts here
Also from ABC, Outward Bound on humanity and staying sane in space! Podcast here (direct mp3 link) and article version here
Bonus: KSR describes his "top shelf" in music, as soundtrack to his writing: Clifford Brown, Astor Piazzolla, Steve Howe, Ludwig van Beethoven, Van Morrison!
Also, a short video recording from an Aurora reading and Q&A at the Sacramento Public Library, on Facebook.

Finally: This science fiction author's qualifications were sufficient that he was a reviewer for a Nature article on exoplanets! The paper/article, "Temperate Earth-sized planets transiting a nearby ultracool dwarf star", discusses findings of planets barely 40 light-years away (further than Aurora's 12 light-years, but still close in the grander scheme of things).

You can read the opening chapter of Aurora, along with some appropriate stock photos, on The Verge.

Next: Antarctica, China and Ecotopia.

Photo: SpaceX; not the Ares.

NY2140 details, new editions, and more

The cover for Kim Stanley Robinson's next novel, New York 2140, has been revealed! With art by Stephan Martiniere.

"NY2140" will be published on March 21 2017 (hardcover, ebook, audiobook), for the USA -- March 23 for UK and Australia. The paperback is already scheduled for February 13 2018. 480 pages.

A new vision of the future from Kim Stanley Robinson, the New York Times bestselling author of science fiction masterworks such as the Mars trilogy, 2312, and Aurora.

The waters rose, submerging New York City.

But the residents adapted and it remained the bustling, vibrant metropolis it had always been. Though changed forever.

Every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island.
Through the eyes of the varied inhabitants of one building Kim Stanley Robinson shows us how one of our great cities will change with the rising tides.

And how we too will change.

 

In more news:

Editions:

" Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction " is the result of the short story contest organized by the Imagination and Climate Futures Institute of the Arizona State University, from 2015/2016. It features twelve stories along with a foreword by the contest judge, Kim Stanley Robinson, and an interview with fellow climate fiction author Paolo Bacigalupi. It is entirely available for download for free at their website!
KSR wrote the introduction to " Stories for Chip: A tribute to Samuel R. Delany ", a short story collection tribute to one of his favorite writers (Dhalgren, among others)
In conjunction with WisCon 39 in 2015 (the Society for the Furtherance & Study of Fantasy & Science Fiction's annual conference in Madison, Wisconsin), " Metamorphosis " was published, with stories by Guests of Honor Alaya Dawn Johnson and Kim Stanley Robinson (The Lunatics and Zürich), as well as interviews with the authors
Anti-Oedipus Press has published a new edition of the long novella A Short, Sharp Shock . A beautiful edition for a wild fantasy unique in KSR's work, with a beautiful cover representing the spine of land in the middle of the endless sea! (see below)

Originally published in 1990, A Short, Sharp Shock remains a singular work in his canon that engages his interests in the evironment and plumbs the absurdities of the human condition while charting unique narrative terrain. This anti-oedipal edition includes an insightful introduction by esteemed science fiction scholar and critic Robert Crossley as well as a study guide, both of which encourage readers to explore the literary prowess that makes this novel a rare gem of twentieth century American literature. 

 

Translations:

Heyne has published translations of KSR's recent novels into German:  2312 , "Schamane" (Shaman) and  Aurora  (out November 14 2016)
Minotauro has published translations into Spanish (Spain):  2312 ,  Aurora

Audiobooks:

Blackstone Audio has released  The Years of Rice and Salt
Skyboat Media has released the Three Californias trilogy from the 1980s! The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge -- and it looks like we have Cory Doctorow to thank
KSR's latest novels come out as audiobooks directly by Hachette

Also, audio adaptations of KSR's short stories:

Discovering Life from StarShipSofa
Mercurial from Clarke's World Magazine

Awards: Aurora was a finalist for the 2016 Locus Award for Best novel -- however, it lost to Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy.

Reviews:

For Aurora:

Sunshine Coast Daily: Science is sexy again, by John Grey
IEET: Nitpicking, by David Brin
Public Books: Searching for Purpose, by N. Katherine Hayles
Ancient Logic, by Morgan Crooks
Boing Boing: Space is bigger than you think, by Cory Doctorow
James Nicoll reviews
Tech Insider: The best sci-fi novel of 2015 completely changed the way I think about humanity's future, by Rafi Letzter
The Westmorland Gazette, by Andrew Thomas
Science Fiction Book Review Podcast (audio), by Luke Burrage
The Coode Street Podcast (audio), by Jonathan Strahan

And a review in comics form! Comic Crits, by John -- he also did 2312 and Galileo's Dream.

Also a review for Green Earth: Los Angeles Review of Books: Weather Permitting, by Rebecca Evans