Best of: Kim Stanley Robinson imagines utopia in 2025

Zero: The Climate Race

Bloomberg

Technology, Business, Science

4.7 • 219 Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson imagines the future for a living. And the future is very much upon us. Robinson’s seminal 2020 novel Ministry for the Future opens in the year 2025. Robinson tells Akshat Rathi about how our real-life climate politics stack up against what he imagined for this era. They also discuss the dangers of science-fiction thinking in politics and why, for all his admiration of science and technology, Robinson remains so enamored with the unglamorous workings of a body like the United Nations.

This episode was originally broadcast in January 2025.

Explore further:

Past episode with Kim Stanley Robinson about climate utopias and optopias
Past episode with outgoing White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi about what the next four years will hold
Past episode with Colombia’s environment minister Susana Muhamad about the country’s commitment to fossil fuel nonproliferation

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Sharon Chen, Siobhan Wagner, Ethan Steinberg, and Jessica Beck. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:33.0	Hi, it's Akshut. I'm off for a summer break.
0:36.1	And so we're bringing you one of my favorite conversations from the archive.
0:40.0	It's with science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote the Mars trilogy and the climate thriller, Ministry for the Future.
0:46.8	We talked early in the year about how 2025 might play out. Stan didn't get everything right, but he got a lot more right than wrong, and our conversation
0:55.8	remains as relevant today as it was then, perhaps even more so. I hope you're having a great
1:00.9	summer, and we'll be back with new episodes soon. Welcome to Zero, I am Akshutrati. This week,
1:08.6	imagining utopia in 2025. I love reading science fiction.
1:26.8	And one of the sci-fi writers who has had an impact on me in recent years is Kim Stanley Robinson.
1:32.3	Stan is perhaps best known for his Mars trilogy published in the 1990s, but zero listeners are likely to know him for his writings over the past decade on what climate futures here on Earth might look like.
1:46.0	Be it the underwater metropolis he imagined in his novel New York 2140,
1:51.0	or how a United Nations agency and its dark wing of eco-terrorists
1:56.0	tackle the climate crisis in his book, The Ministry for the Future.
2:06.4	Stan has been a guest on zero before, but I wanted to speak with him again because that book,
	...

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