A Sci-Fi Writer Returns to Earth: ‘The Real Story Is the One Facing Us’
Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most acclaimed living science fiction writers, is done with deep space narratives. His focus now is on solving real problems — like climate change.
By Alexandra Alter
New York Times
Published May 11, 2022Updated June 22, 2023
... “Novels are really about what happens when things go wrong,” Robinson said. “If you propose plans for how things go right, it sounds like civics, it sounds like blueprints. A utopia’s architectural blueprints are, let me show you how the sewage 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 they do in “The Ministry for the Future,” which opens as a devastating heat wave in India kills millions of people.
“As a utopia, it’s a very low bar,” Robinson said. “I mean, if we avoid the mass extinction event, we avoid everything dying, great, that’s utopia, given where we are now.”
When Robinson is asked to forecast the future, as he often is, he usually hedges. He has argued that “we live in a big science fiction novel we are all writing together” — but he’s not sure if it’s going to be a utopian or dystopian one.
“Nobody makes a successful prediction of the future,” he said. “Except for maybe by accident.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/books/kim-stanley-robinson-sci-fi.html
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