Kim Stanley Robinson is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read and influential science-fiction writers of our era. In dicussing eighteen of his novels published since 1984 and a selection of his short fiction, this study explores the significance of his work in reshaping contemporary literature. Three of the chapters are devoted to Robinson’s major trilogies: the Orange County trilogy (1984-90), the Mars trilogy (1992-96), and the Science in the Capital trilogy (2004-07). Two other chapters consider his groundbreaking alternative histories, including “The Lucky Strike” (1984), The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), and Shaman (2014), and his future histories set among colonies in the solar system, notably Galileo’s Dream (2009) and 2312 (2012). The concluding chapter examines Robinson’s most recent novels Aurora (2015) and New York 2140 (2017). In interviews, Robinson describes his fiction as weaving together, in various combinations, Marxism, ecology, and Buddhist thought, and all of his novels explore how we might imagine forms of utopian political action. His novels—from the Mars trilogy to New York 2140—offer a range of possible futures that chart humankind’s uneven progress, often over centuries, toward the greening of science, technology, economics, and politics. Robinson filters our knowledge of the past and our imagination of possible futures through two superimposed lenses: the ecological fate of the Earth (or other planets) and the far-reaching consequences of moral, political, and socioeconomic decisions of individuals, often scientists and artists, caught up in world or solar-systemic events. In this respect, his fiction charts a collective struggle to think beyond the contradictions of historical existence, and beyond our locations in time, culture, and geography.
Ingo Cornils: Beyond Tomorrow. German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Rochester, New York (Camden House) 2020.