Kim Stanley Robinson imagines utopia in 2025
Zero: The Climate Race
Bloomberg
4.7 • 219 Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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.
Explore further:
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Past episode with Kim Stanley Robinson about climate utopias and optopias
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Past episode with outgoing White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi about what the next four years will hold
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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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Zero. I am Akshutrati. |
| 0:02.0 | This week, imagining utopia in 2025. |
| 0:06.0 | I love reading science fiction, and one of the sci-fi writers who has had an impact on me in recent years is Kim Stanley Robinson. |
| 0:28.5 | 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 |
| 0:38.1 | climate futures here on Earth might look like. |
| 0:41.2 | Be it the underwater metropolis he imagined in his novel New York 2140 or how a United |
| 0:47.4 | Nations agency and its dark wing of eco-terrorists tackle the climate crisis in his book, |
| 0:54.0 | The Ministry for the Future. |
| 0:56.8 | Stan has been a guest on Zero before, but I wanted to speak with him again because that book, |
| 1:02.1 | The Ministry for the Future, has been on my mind recently. Although it was published in 2020, |
| 1:08.9 | the story in the book kicks off in the year 2025. |
| 1:12.7 | And well, here we are. |
| 1:14.8 | The book opens just after a fictional COP29 summit as a deadly heat wave hits India. |
| 1:21.8 | The plot follows the choices faced by United Nations officials in a new department called |
| 1:26.9 | the Ministry for the Future, |
| 1:28.5 | as they tried to cope with the spiraling impacts of a warming planet. |
| 1:33.4 | With 2025 upon us, I wanted to see how Stan was feeling about the book's version of this timeline |
| 1:39.0 | and find out what he thought about the unpredictable direction real-life events have taken since he wrote it. |
| 1:46.1 | We talked about the value of science fiction as a way to see into the future, as well as sci-fi's dangers. |
| 1:52.7 | And why a writer, who admires science and technology so much, still remains enamored with the unglamorous work of a body like the Yuan. |
| 2:15.3 | Welcome to the show. |
| 2:16.2 | Thank you, Akshad. It's good to be back. |
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