Kim Stanley Robinson on “Utopian” Science Fiction

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2021

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:13.5	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:15.8	I'm Vincent Cunningham, sitting in today for David Remnick.
0:20.7	I don't tend to go to the beach, I got to say.
0:24.7	I live out in the woods all year round.
0:27.4	So I think, if anything, I may be the exception of the rule.
0:31.2	I read a little bit less in the summer because as the light lingers in the day, I tend to be out enjoying the woods.
0:40.9	It's, my reading gets done most in the winter because when it gets dark at 4.30 in the afternoon,
0:46.2	you just curl up by the stove and there you are.
0:51.8	Bill McKibbin here is a New Yorker contributor and also the founder of the environmental organization 350.org.
0:59.0	And he is himself one of the great living writers on the natural world.
1:03.3	So he's really immersed in that literature.
1:06.2	So, Bill, a book you told us really grabbed you was a book called The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
1:12.7	Who is Kim Stanley Robinson? Tell me about him.
1:16.9	I've been reading his work for a very long time. He's usually defined as a science fiction
1:22.1	writer and indeed his first important book's trilogy that won every award that science fiction has to offer, took place on Mars.
1:30.6	But even then, truthfully, Vincent, they were less science fiction than kind of political
1:35.8	science fiction.
1:37.7	They're about how humans would settle a place and what the politics of that would be like and how it would be negotiated.
1:47.1	And I've admired his work for so many years because he's a humanist in the deepest sense,
1:54.5	and he's also just great fun to read.
1:58.0	In many ways, reminds me of Mark Twain in terms of being, both in terms of being funny
	...

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