What does the future hold? In our new series Imagining the Next Future, Polygon explores the new era of science fiction in movies, books, TV, games, and beyond to see how storytellers and innovators are imagining the next 10, 20, 50, or 100 years during a moment of extreme uncertainty. Follow along as we deep dive into the great unknown.
We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us?can map a positive future in an unrelentingly negative era, we naturally started thinking about Kim Stanley Robinson. The novelist the L.A. Times Review of Books called our last great utopian visionary and the New Yorker called one of the most important political writers working in America today, Robinson is known specifically for dense, thoughtful novels about where Earth might go based on science and culture today. The trilogy hes best known for Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars uses terraforming in space as a way to raise the issue of reclaiming our own Earthly environment, and to consider how we interact with it. His 2017 novel New York 2140 is set in a future New York thats flooded due to climate change, and like many of his other books, it presents utopian alternatives to capitalism.
And his latest book, The Ministry for the Future, again models a series of attempts to contain and control climate change, in a sprawling story that acknowledges personal and public problems with systemic change, but still comes across as more hopeful than pessimistic. Polygon spoke with Robinson by phone to discuss the problems with science fiction utopias, how theyre sparked real change in the past, and how we use science fiction in everyday thinking.
Can science fiction save us in our present political and cultural circumstances? Is it a useful teaching tool to help us think about how to solve our present problems, or model better ways of living?
Well, its the latter, for sure. Whether its the former depends on whether we pay attention. But let me answer a little more at length.
If you think of science fiction as just a kind of modeling exercise, everybody is a science fiction writer in their own lives. You make plans based on modeling in your mind. When youre feeling hopeful, you have a kind of utopian plan: if you do these things, youll get to a good place. And then when youre afraid, you have these worries that if you do these things, youll get to a bad place. So the fundamental exercise of science fiction is a very natural human thing. And then when it gets written down in long narrative forms, like science fiction novels, everybody recognizes the exercises involved there. Although when I say that, I realize that, actually, lots of people dont like to read science fiction, so theyre not recognizing the way books are the same as what they do for their own lives. Thats surprising to me, but it happens a lot.
Anyway, science fiction is a modeling exercise where all the science fiction put together, especially all the near-future visions, they range from totally horrible to perhaps quite nice. Its heavier-weighted at the disaster end than at the utopian end, maybe because its easier, or maybe because its more shockingly interesting to read. Its not like going to town meetings and reading blueprints for plumbing facilities. The utopian end of science fiction has a reputation for being a dull, eat-your-greens type fiction, so theres less of it compared to the disaster stuff. But there is both. And if you read a lot of it, one hopes youre prepared for anything.
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That isnt 100% true, but youre maybe better prepared than if you hadnt read it. In that sense, I think science fiction could be a great teaching tool for people. You cant read all science fiction, and if youre reading nothing but space opera, none of this would obtain. Because the problems of spaceships flying faster than light across the galaxy are not always immediately applicable to the situation were in here on Earth. So its a specific wing of science fiction Im talking about that could be helpful if people read it.
With a book like New York 2140, are you actively out to teach people? To model a positivist future where people can make real individual change?
Yeah, I am! I consider my novels, amongst many other things, to be my political activism. Im interested in portraying futures where there are more cooperative, altruistic, post-capitalist systems that are working well. I try to model them on things already going on in this world that seem to be better to me than the dominant global neoliberal order. And then pretend that those small communal efforts around the world intensify and take over, so their emergence signals an emerging world order that would work better with reconciling humanity and the biosphere. Because we have to come into a balance with our biosphere, or else were in terrible trouble.
I do that on purpose in the New York novel, very explicitly so. I was trying to work on how to make people think about how finance works, how it can be made to work for us, rather than for extracting our money for the 1%. So yeah, for sure.
Youre celebrated for a level of research and realism in your novels, regardless of whether theyre near-future or set in space. Is part of the urge for that level of realism just that you cant model a real and inspiring future if youre not working from real facts?
Thats one way of putting it, and I would agree with that. But what Id also say is that, along with thinking of my novels as my political activism, Im just an art-for-arts-sake kind of English-major guy. I would like to write good novels. And thats my overriding consideration. And its a kind of life-quest thing, or a religious quest. What makes a good novel? When I think about them as a reader, what I like in a novel is that kind of dense feeling of reality, where you read it and go, Yeah, thats the way life really is.
If you set novels in the future, like I seem compelled to do, and you want your readers to say, Yeah, thats the way life really is, you have to overcompensate a little bit. I used to call it cardboard sets. You know how you look at the TV Star Trek from the 1960s, and you can see that the spaceships bridge was made of cardboard and plywood? Science fiction, to me, has too many cardboard sets and backdrops, and it reduces your ability to take the story in as something serious and moving. So in other words, to make a good novel, and yet also have the story set in the feature, which is a bit of a crazy thing, I had to overcompensate and try to make them even more realistic than your ordinary realist novel.
So then they become a little fact-heavy. Ive had to work against being too ponderous, or overcompensating too far. But yeah, thats the reason Ive gotten caught up, in its almost like Im in a double bind. Im trying to do two things at once that dont match up very well. And it causes the distortions in my books that make them weird. Ive long since reconciled myself to that. Its actually a good thing to be different. And its a good thing to have weird novels, because there are too many novels that arent weird enough. Theyre too easy and too ordinary, and they slip through your mind, and then youve forgotten them and the writer. So to be a little bizarre and obdurate, so its actually a bit of work, and even sometimes irritating? Well, thats part of the experience of reading one of my novels, and afterward, you remember it better. [Laughs]
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At least I hope so. I mean, thats a good way of looking at it. You know, they are very controversial books. Im highly aware that I get a high positive and a high negative. There are a lot of people who think Im just simply inept, because I dont do it like other people do. And Im not very fast-paced, although I would like to be. Id like to show people are wrong. I have fast-paced sections in my book all the time. But the ultimate effect is that my books are these big monsters.
The LA Review of Books referred to you as our last great utopian visionary. What do you think of that title, or at least the utopian visionary part?
I think thats fine. Ive rolled the dice toward doing utopian fiction. There isnt very much of it the canon of utopias could be listed on your fingers and toes. And yet I think theyre very valuable. Occasionally, they have effects in the real world. Edward Bellamys Looking Backward from 1888 was a big part of the progressive movement 120 years ago. H.G. Wells utopian novels had a huge impact on the Bretton Woods agreement and the settlements after World War II. A good utopian novel can, a generation later, or even a few years later, have an impact on how people think the future should go.
I felt a deep kinship and love for Ursula K. Le Guin and Iain Banks, these two great utopian writers. Theyve died, and I do feel a bit lonely for my own generation. But I also see a lot of young writers coming up who call themselves solarpunk, or hopepunk, or the new utopians, and whatnot. Theyre forming schools, theyre trying to get enthusiastic about improvising our way to a green future. I think theyre utopian, but perhaps a little bit outdated or scared by the term utopia, because its so often used as a weapon to mean unrealistic and never going to happen. So they make up different names. Im glad to see these. I dont think utopian fiction will ever go away. Its like a necessary blueprint for thinking our way forward. So it seems like its a good time for utopian fiction. Im sad at losing colleagues I loved, but Im encouraged at the way the genre itself is ratcheting its way back into peoples attention.
Its surprising how many classic novels described as utopian fiction are actually disguised as dystopian novels.
This is worth talking about! In the Greimas rectangle, theres the thing thats not you, and theres the thing thats against you. These are not the same. In that model, the opposite of utopia is dystopia. But the thing against you is anti-utopia. What that model is saying is, if you try to get to utopia, it would necessarily be bad. So its against the idea of utopia itself. Dystopian fiction isnt against the idea of utopia. Its just saying, Oh, we tried, and we lost. But anti-utopian ideas say that trying to make utopias necessarily rebound, and boomerang into disaster.
So for example, 1984 is a dystopia. Big Brother is not trying to make you happy. That government is putting its boot on your neck. But Brave New World is the great anti-utopian novel, where they try to make everybody happy, so they drug them and electroshock them, and then everybodys supposed to be happy, and it doesnt work. Those two very, very famous novels service, the great dystopia, and the great anti-utopia. And the fourth term in the rectangle this comes out of Fredric Jamesons Marxist literary criticism would be anti-anti-utopian. That gets super mysterious, but it just refers to insisting that its possible to make a better world. So thats the mysterious fourth term in that particular rectangle. I am anti-anti-utopian, but Im also utopian, which is a little more obvious.
Yeah! Yeah, it is!
Supposedly utopian fiction cant have a story, because it cant have conflicts or imperfections. How have you approached that problem as youre thinking about all this philosophically?
Yes, sure. I think there are some. One strategy I used in Pacific Edge is, you show that in a utopia, its still possible to be extremely unhappy. In a utopia, theres still A falls in love with B, whos in love with C, whos in love with A, and theyre all miserable. Or A is in love with B, and then he dies. Utopia does not guarantee human happiness. It just takes away unnecessary suffering by way of political oppression.
Another way is to define utopia as not a perfect end-state society. Thats impossible anyway. You define it as a progressive movement in history, with each generation doing better than the generation before, in substantial ways, in terms of equality, justice, and sustainability. Its a process, not a product. So utopia is just a name for one kind of history. I do that a lot. Lastly, Iain Banks was great at this. In his space-opera novels, there was a post-scarcity galactic utopia, but its always under assault by forces that dont like it. He was one of the greatest writers of my generation, in so many ways, but especially in terms of stage business and exciting plots, Iain was the master. His utopian society always had to defend itself, sometimes quite violently. So the defense of utopia becomes like a war zone, and suddenly youre back to war novels. And then the utopia sits there as a kind of a given, but it has to be defended. Thats a great strategy that I havent used as much as Iain.
I learned from him, and I learned from Le Guin. She always went right to the heart of the contradictions: if everybodys free to do what they want, who takes out the trash? What happens when theres a drought? Is there a police force? If there isnt, how do you control a violent person? In The dispossessed, she basically went to every one of the problems utopia would have in terms of contradiction, and dramatized that. I learned a lot from her, too.
What else interests you in science fiction right now? Whats going on that you find intriguing or inspiring or enlightening?
I like a lot of feminist science fiction, from the women who are basically my generation of writers. Theyre still doing good work. I like the new, young solar utopians. I like British science fiction. Im a little hampered here, because theres way more going on than Ive had a chance to see. I read my friends, who tend to be my age, I read interesting new things to try to keep track of stuff. I see utopians like Cory Doctorow, or leftist science fiction thats political and intense. And that and the leftist feminist wing, I think, is strong right now in community.
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People see science fiction as a way to write out your social, political, and personal hopes. I think its at a pretty healthy status right now. Science fiction seems almost central to the culture in a way that wasnt when I was young. Everybodys aware of it. Theres no prejudice against it. Most of thats gone away. So I like the feeling of it being an aspect of the mainstream. Im a public intellectual and a political figure Im really just a novelist and a science fiction writer, but because this culture now takes science fiction seriously, that means theyre taking me seriously.
When you bring up women writers of your age that you particularly admire, who are you thinking of?
Karen Fowler. Molly Gloss. Eleanor Arnason. Kathy Goonan. Pat Murphy. Lisa Goldstein. Gwyneth Jones and Justina Robson in England. The list could go on and on. A thing happened in academia and in culture at large Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree, Jr., [the pseudonym of] Alice Sheldon, they took all the attention. People like to reduce their attention to a few charismatic figures and forget about the rest. Academic critics are like that too, creating their canon. So the Le Guin/Russ/Tiptree combine sort of represented feminist science fiction as if it was the only thing there. And this whole cohort of women my age, who are just a little younger than Le Guin/Russ/Tiptree, they got sidelined by academia, and had a tough time catching readership, even people like Sheri Tepper, or Suzy McKee Charnas. Names will keep coming to me.
They are all great writers, and they havent gotten the academic attention they deserve, because academics tend to flock to what everybody else has already read, so theres a mutual shared understanding of what youre talking about. So theres a natural canonization is a weird increasing-returns situation, where early attention to someone like Le Guin as great a figure as she is, she wasnt writing novels that were any more distinctive than, say, Suzy McKee Charnas.
Ive been a beneficiary of a very much slower, smaller increase in returns. A lot of writers of my generation are very fine writers, so I see it happening all over. Also, cyberpunk came in in the 80s and said, Oh, everything going on in the 70s was junk, and that included all these women science fiction writers who got erased by a publicity-hound machine that wasnt interested in feminism, per se. So the 80s were bad in many ways, politically, and that was one of them.
Where would you like to see science fiction go from here?
Thats a good question, because Im feeling kind of mystified. If science fiction is mainstream, and its the realistic fiction of our time, what now? The future seems to be getting really hard to foresee or predict. The bottom line is, you could you could have a horrific mass extinction event next, or a superb Golden Age. It isnt like were on any obvious trajectory.
Heres what I could say: Theres lots of different kinds of science fiction. Theres the kind that is a disguised version of today. Theres space opera that takes us off into the galaxy, and its millions of years from now, and its basically magic. And then theres that middle time thats talking about various futures about 100 years out, maybe 200 years out at the most. I call it future history, and thats been my zone. And its relatively depopulated, compared to the other two. Ive done a lot of near-future, day-after-tomorrow, science fiction really talking about right now, like the New York novel. I would like to see that zone become really vibrant, so people begin to see how important what we do now is for determining the next couple hundred years, and that huge spread of possibility. So I guess I would just say more future history.
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We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us? - TheWestNews
