Shaman interviews & reviews

Kim Stanley Robinsons' SHAMAN has now been out for a bit over two months. As the winter approaches, you might consider taking a step outside of your current life as an urban-dweller, with food available any time of the day any day, with buildings heated or cooled at will, and delve into our ancestor's minds -- a world challenging and stimulating, in an environment that actually still exists "out there" if you bother to seek it out. If you're not convinced yet, here are some recent interviews with the writer and some reviews on his work and most recent novel.

Above: Drawing of the Chauvet cave paintings by Eric Le Brun.

In an interview for the Library Journal, Stan explained many details in the thinking that went in writing Shaman.

More important for this book were certain other adventures in the
Sierra, especially winter trips on snowshoes, in steep terrain,
sometimes in storms, once or twice injured. These were crucial
experiences for when I wrote about my characters’ escape from the
northers.

In this novel, I looked to Anglo-Saxon for the feel of old words; to
proto-Indo-European, a lost language recovered by historical
linguistics; and to Basque, a very ancient language. Sometimes I used
these older words to replace sexual terms in our language that have too
much modern baggage.

And for those who were bothered by the fact that no map accompanied the book (but keep in mind that Loon's pack had no print maps or writing to begin with!), here is some context:

Yes, the story takes place mostly in the area around the Chauvet Cave,
near Vallon Pont d’Arc. The stone bridge that crosses the Ardèche River
there overlooks the home camp of my characters. During their seasonal
trek to the caribou steppes, they walk to north of the Massif Centrale,
and then some of them continue as far north as the southern edge of the
Ice Age’s great ice cap, in Cornwall. They can walk there because there
was no English Channel at that time, sea level being so much lower.

In this interview for Amazing Stories, Stan goes through his entire career, from his early Three Californias to Shaman:

I think of my novel Shaman as
a particular kind of science fiction, which examines what we are as
human beings by looking at how we became what we are now.  Also, it took
the sciences of archeology and anthropology to provide the information
necessary to write the book, because prehistory is literally
prehistorical, in that we have no texts from the time, and have to infer
what life was like by what was left behind, and by analogy to first
peoples still around when industrial society colonized the planet.  So,
this is partly a scientific process, and I have made use of all those
findings, some of them very new, to write my book.

In particular, the 1991 finding of the ice man on the glacier between
Italy and Austria, with all his gear frozen and intact, was a big
inspiration to me; his gear kit was very sophisticated and resembled my
backpacking gear in design, and I wanted to write about that.   Then the
discovery of the Chauvet cave in 1994 gave me my particular story; it
was painted 32,000 years ago, the paintings are beautiful, and they
suggest an animal-focused culture with mysterious beliefs.  So I tried
to tell the story of the people who painted the cave.

[...] Dystopias are all basically the same, and easy:  oppression,
resistance, conflict, blah blah.  Like car crashes in thriller movies. 
But utopian novels are interesting (I know this is backwards to the
common wisdom) because they force us to think about what we are, what we
could become, and if we were to make a decent civilization, what would
endanger it, or keep it from spreading, etc.  One point I’ve been making
all along is that even in a utopian situation, there will still be
death and lost love, so there will be no shortage of tragedy in utopia. 
It will just be the necessary or unavoidable tragedies; which perhaps
makes them even worse, or more tragic.  They won’t be just brutal
stupidities, in other words, but reality itself.  This is what
literature should explore.

Also, thinking of utopia, I’ve always felt this:  since we could do
it, we should.  And that will take some planning, some vision.

[...] sf looks at the present and imagines the various futures that could come
to pass, given where we are now.  It’s not prediction of one future,
but consideration of a multitude of possible futures, and that gives sf
readers their particular flexibility of mind, their ability to react to
history without huge surprise and disorientation.  In effect, they saw
it coming.  So sf reading is a kind of cognitive mapping that orients
people in time.  It’s not just great fun, but useful too.

Please give us a glimpse of your writing process from conception to award-winning novel.

It usually
starts with an idea, fairly simple and basic.  Inhabit Mars and
terraform it.  What would the world be like if all the Europeans had
died in the Black Death?  What if Galileo were taken by time travelers
to the moons of Jupiter?   What if a mercurial personality and a
saturnine personality fell in love?

Then I build from there.  Often it takes many years, and eventually I
have a sense of the story’s basic outline, with some events, and the
climax or ending, but a lot of vagueness.  Eventually I need to figure
out a form, and then a narrator.  The story tends to create the
characters necessary to live the story.  And so on it goes.  Much is
never decided until I am faced with writing particular scenes.  That’s
when it gets really hard.

Talking to the North Adams Transcript before appearing at the David G. Hartwell ‘63 Science Fiction Symposium at Williams College as part of a panel on climate change, Robinson commented on science fiction, climate change and our attitude towards it, as well as the relationship between being human and our technology. Some food for thought:

"I often talk about
what young people can do in terms of their careers and in terms of how
they're going to live, what it means for them," said Robinson. "What I
try to do is counter the idea that it means renunciation and suffering
and that they're going to have to live like saints. This is a false
image of how they have to live in the future. The future becomes a
project for them, in the existential sense. They've built their lives
around something that has an actual meaning. Life has meaning again and
climate change, rather than just being disastrous, is actually being
given a meaning to our civilization's existence."

[...] The reaction to climate
change is just part of Robinson's wider concerns -- the human
relationship with science and technology and how we negotiate a balance
so that it does less harm than good. It's something that Robinson thinks
is one of the most ingrained issues of our existence on this planet.

"My most recent novel, which was set in the Ice Age with
Paleolithic people, makes the point in a different way that we are a
high tech species," he said. "Technology is actually one of the first
things we did as homo sapiens that really made homo sapiens. In other
words, we really started using tools and that's what co-evolved us into
being who we are, so we have to admit that. It does become an ecological
matter of can you use your technology to stay in a healthy balance with
the biosphere at large now that we're a global civilization and have
immense powers compared to any times in the past."

[...] "I often think that
bad category errors are being made," Robinson said. "By that I mean
that often -- and GMOs are a great example -- people are scared and
angry at the idea, but it turns out that the operation itself is very
little different between that and hybridization and the stuff that we've
been doing to plants our entire lifetime as a species, so that the
anger has been misplaced. It's not genetic engineering, it's capitalism.
Ownership of the natural world, people are very angry at that, and then
they get angry at science instead of the business system, the economic
system, that we live in. This slippage, this is where the left is so
messed up, liberal sentiment in the United States -- and I'm totally
onboard with that, that's what I am myself -- but when they get angry at
science when it's actually capitalism that they're angry at, they're
making a terrible error."

[...] "You've got to
properly assess the risks, then you've got to do a true cost/benefit
analysis of how much we're willing to pay socially and economically to
manage the risks that we're creating. These are complicated things that
aren't fully understood. And we have to start make distinctions between
science and capitalism, and supporting the one and attacking the other,
because I think of science as a public project for the public good and I
think of capitalism as just privatization and an oligarchy and
injustice. This is my own political ax to grind. It's something that
drives a lot of my stories."

In an interview for LiveScience, Robinson talked about science fiction and went through the different kinds of SF: near-future, future history, space opera, utopia, political/economic:

"All sci-fi put together gives you a feel for the future that is fuzzy" [...]
The futures are not always compatible, but "taken together, they give
you a kind of weather forecast," Robinson said.

Of course, reviews for Shaman abound!

Alan Cheuse's review for NPR also aired on the radio.

Fellow writer Cecilia Holland reviewed Shaman for Locus:

Writing historical fiction is a rite of memory, of recovery – to imagine
what the few surviving data can no longer tell us: how it was to live
in another time. Stan Robinson has always been a writer of huge ambition
– he owns Mars, after all – and in taking on this theme, he has another
huge purpose: not to tell us what this most ancient of human worlds
was, but somehow, through the act of fiction, to make us remember. This
is what we were once. This is our true nature, indivisible from all
nature; what it means to be human, then, and now.

Tor.com. Niall Alexander:

On the whole, I suppose the story’s on the slight side, but what narrative drive Shaman perhaps
lacks, the author more than makes up for with his masterful handling of
its central character, whose coming of age from boy to man and from man
to shaman the novel cumulatively chronicles. This is in addition to
Robinson’s carefully layered characterisation of the others Loon looks
to, like Heather and Elga and Click, whom I loved. To a one, they are
wonderfully done.

But if Shaman is about any single thing, it’s about legacies
lost and left. Of particular significance, then, is Thorn, the
long-suffering so-and-so in charge of painting the caves and preserving
the memories of the tribe he tends. [...] we arrive, at the last, at the heart of the matter, for it is he who asks the question Shaman answers: what do we leave behind, and why?

Adam Roberts, massively readable, for Arcfinity:

The overwhelming sense of paleolithic life one gets from reading this
novel is what it is like subsisting on little or no food for long
stretches. What it feels like when your belly button is a fingers-width
away from your spine. How Elga’s substantial breasts simply melt away
from the withering lack of calories. One thing the novel does rather
brilliantly is have you empathising with an aesthetic of female beauty
that inspired the maker of the celebrated Venus of Willendorf figurine.

(Also, this had to happen.)

Val's Random Comments (a frequent Robinson reviewer):

While many of Robinson's characters can opt for a (temporarily) more
primitive lifestyle, Loon doesn't have a choice. He simply know any
better. What keeps him busy are the most primal concerns of all: food,
shelter and sex. What struck me about this novel was the sharp contrast
with what is probably the most famous series of novels set in
prehistory; Jean Auel's Earth Children
series. Where she presents life during the ice age as utopian, where a
human being can make a decent living with a bit of planning and a good
set of survival skills, and where paradise is lost after the discovery
of the link between sex and procreation, Robinson's reality is much
harsher and probably closer to the truth. Loon suffers periods of
starvation followed by a summer of plenty. His weight fluctuates
considerably over the course of the seasons and he is always aware of
the upcoming lean season. All things considered it is a miracle he still
has time for his more spiritual pursuits.

Forbidden Planet, Malachy Coney:

The learned experiences of the tribe ,the hard won history of survival ,
is passed on through the wisdom and songs of the shaman. More spoken
word than musical theatre. Mostly stories about staying alive, the
acquisition and quest for food. The pursuit of the next meal is all. The
tribe, the clans, pursue the next meal with the greatest of intents and
respect. They revere everything they kill to eat, before and after
death. [...] Thorn the shaman is a grumpy cantankerous and unpleasant old sod who
seems to take delight in tormenting his only pupil, Loon. [...] Thorn knows that even if he manages to pass on his accumulated knowledge
there is the certainty that so much will still be lost. Without a
written record even the spoken and learned wisdom will acquire cadences
of its own, changing in turn the full message passed, little by little
over generations. The Druidic past when guessed at became invested with
romantic ideals it most likely never possessed. Wisely Robinson puts at
the heart of the shaman’s lore a savage logic that could in actuality
serve the needs of the clan. He creates very complex and personal
conflicts within the clan.

Irish Examiner, Val Nolan:

Though the plot is straightforward bildungsroman material, Shaman
brims over with some of the finest writing Robinson has yet produced. It
immerses us in a vivid world of flickering lamplight and intricate
ritual, a life of “smoke and mushrooms and dancing and flagellation”.

[...] Of course, this is not to say that the novel is a dry recitation
of anthropological facts. Far from it. The pack’s sexual politics are,
for example, as developed and intricate as any contemporary society. [...] Meanwhile, its members transcend their somewhat stock origins and
achieve a credible life of their own. In particular, Robinson’s shamans
are a colourful lot who consume heroic quantities of “berry mash” to
“launch their spirits out of their bodies”. They are part-medicine men,
part-counsellors, and deeply immersed in oral literature. Through them the author rejects the so-called Great Leap Forward,
eschewing any notion of a sudden cognitive revolution in favour of the
slow accumulation of human knowledge over generations. “It’s fragile
what I know,” Thorn tells Loon. He must pass on his wisdom the
same way embers from an old fire are preserved to light a new one. In
fact, this is exactly the lesson which Loon and the reader learn on the
first night of the boy’s wander: the difficulty of kindling a fresh
spark, a symbolic new idea.

[...] For Robinson, stories are about optimism and the belief that life
will always go on. Shaman is no different. It is an intelligent, and at
times mesmerising novel. The perfect book for archaeology buffs, those
who love the outdoors, or readers who prize an unusual perspective in
their fiction.

More interviews & reviews soon!