Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here are your hosts. John Joseph Adams and David Barr

Kirtley.

Hi this is Dave and this is Dave. And this is John.

And welcome to episode 62 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson.

He's best known for his novel Red Mars and its sequels

which deal with the Terraforming of Mars. Other works include the Science in the

Capital series about the future of humanity's attempts to deal with climate change, and the years of rice and salt,

an alternate history novel in which Europe is so ravaged by the Black Plague that it never rises to

global prominence.

His latest novel, 2312, looks ahead 300 years to a future in which mankind is spread throughout the solar system.

Then stick around after the interview as guest geek Tobias Pekyll joins us to discuss ecological themes in fantasy and science fiction.

All right, so let's get to our interview.

All right, so we're here with Kim Stanley Robinson.

Welcome to the show.

Well, thanks. Good to be here, dude. Okay, so first of all, your new novel was called 2312. So what's that about?

Well, we're in the year 2012, and I decided I wanted to go out a long way, at least for me.

The two things I postulated that I think make it workable as a realistic kind of fantasia is space elevators on Earth and self-replicating

machinery and these are two supposedly possible

that are discussed in the literature so they're not physically

impossible they might be hard engineering feats but seems like they could be

done and there are even companies working on at least the space elevator.

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