Kim Stanley Robinson on “Utopian” Science Fiction
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2021
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
One of the premier writers of thinky sci-fi, Kim Stanley Robinson opened his book “The Ministry for the Future” with an all too plausible scenario: a lethal heat wave descends on India, with vast, horrifying consequences. It’s a sobering read, especially after July, 2021, was declared the hottest month on record. And yet Robinson tells Bill McKibben that his work is not dystopian; his central concern is how the globe could respond to such a disaster and begin to halt the momentum of global warming. “That whole dystopian postapocalyptic strain—it doesn’t serve as a warning, it doesn’t make you change your behavior,” Robinson notes. “I reject all that. I write as a utopian science-fiction writer.” But, “at the moment we’re at right now in world history,” he admits, “I have to set a pretty low bar for ‘utopia.’ If we dodge a mass-extinction event in this century, that’s utopian writing. That’s the best we can expect from where we are right now. Having put that story on the table as being possible, it suggests that we ought to be trying for it.”
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| 1:11.3 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden on On today's Politics and More podcast, New York contributor Bill McKibben |
| 1:17.8 | talks with the author Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson is best known as a science fiction writer, |
| 1:24.9 | but his newest novel, The Ministry for the Future, explores how humanity |
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