Kim Stanley Robinson is regarded as one the greatest living writers of science fiction with more than 20 novels and many awards to his name. In this interview with Anna D’Alton (LSE Review of Books), he discusses the climate crisis, his political commitment to utopian fiction and art’s capacity for imagining alternative ways of living.

On Monday 10 June, Kim Stanley Robinson gave a talk at an LSE Festival event, The ministry for the future: navigating the politics of the climate crisis. You can watch it back on YouTube.

Q: What about science fiction as a genre drew you in and has held your interest over the decades?
I regard science fiction as the realism of our time. Science is an overdetermining factor in modern human life, and if you don’t include the sciences in your fiction, then you’re writing historical fiction. Nostalgic work of the psychologised individual of modernism is not the whole story – it never was.

Science fiction, by definition, is set in the future, so at that point you get the shadow of the future on us. Things are changing incredibly fast, and every five years or so the whole situation seems to have changed, including what the cultural critic Raymond Williams termed our structures of feeling: the spirit or atmosphere active in a time period that shapes its cultural patterns. Novels are about structures of feeling, and about the individual, their society and, in science fiction (this is one of the things I love about it), the planet.

History is now planetary, the biosphere is a character in our lives, in our actor network. Science fiction allows you to write about that as a natural part of the narrative.

History is now planetary, the biosphere is a character in our lives, in our actor network. Science fiction allows you to write about that as a natural part of the narrative. The fact that I made this choice 50 years ago is the remarkable thing. It seemed right at the time. And I have a back story that helps to explain it. I grew up in an agrarian background, in orange groves that got ripped out in front of my eyes when I was a child and turned into the city of Los Angeles. It was a shocking thing to witness, and science fiction revealed itself as the literature that expressed what I actually saw and felt.

Q: In 2017 you were awarded an Arthur C. Clarke award for “Imagination in Service to Society”. What role can art, including climate fiction like yours, play in bringing about societal change?

Art is an ancient way of trying to make and reflect our structure of feeling, our social life and existence with each other, as well as our psychological state. Literature is particularly good at telling these stories. If you read enough novels, you have an abundance of stories that are trajectories forward. As you march through your life, they provide you with cognitive maps in your head that make it less confusing and help you to navigate and make choices. If you’re asking yourself, ”what should I do with my life?”, and you’ve read enough literature, you’ve already lived 10,000 lives. It’s an incredible gift, and at that point you can feel a little steadier on your feet in terms of what to do yourself.

If you read enough novels, you have an abundance of stories that are trajectories forward.

Q: A recurring theme in your work is the struggle to achieve balance between technological advancement and sustainable living. Do you see modernity’s obsession with technological development as a driver of climate change? Can it help to mitigate climate change?

We are a technological species. We were just primates out in the Savannah, then we had stones and fire. We had technology before we were even Homo Sapiens. Medicine is a technology; when you push it hard enough, language is a technology, and so is law and justice. They are a kind of software that we have used to shape societies as well as the hardware or machinery.

In terms of the climate crisis, it wasn’t fully understood for a long time that the discovery and burning of fossil fuels – which are solar energy that has been compacted over millions of years – would release enough gas into the atmosphere to heat the planet. It’s been known since the 1890s, but no one quite believed it until the adverse effects of it became too obvious to ignore. Fossil fuel extraction and consumption was a technology, and it was an immense expansion of human potential and population. So yes, we got into this fix by ignorant use of dirty technologies, and now we have to undo the damage to the extent that we can through cleaner and smarter technologies.

Q: The fictional worlds you create are grounded in scientific evidence. Why is this important to your writing, particularly in your novels that address the climate crisis?

There is no real realism in literature. Roland Barthes talks about the effect of the real as a literary technique. All writers are selecting, using symbols, projecting a model of what reality is. If I set a story in the future, in the year 2050, there’s reason to doubt me. I might want to compensate by making sure that everything in it seems real, and then the things that aren’t real yet, that are futuristic or trajectories or symbolic, it’s harder to separate them from the things that are quite evidently real. The more I can embed my fiction in what seems like a familiar setting, especially for climate fiction, the stronger the impact on the reader. At a certain point they abandon trying to sort what’s real now from what’s speculative and instead accept it at face value to see what it says.

Q: In your most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, you describe a subsidiary body that has been established to advocate on behalf of future generations. Do you think something similar could be formed in reality, or how otherwise can we meaningfully centre future generations in trying to address the impacts of climate change?

In my novel it stands as a kind of symbol that urges us to think about the people of the future as being real in their time. We have a responsibility to our descendants, to take care of them or at least pass on a planet that isn’t devastated. There are all kinds of new laws, movements and norms that are future orientated. There are new types of economic accounting like the discount rate (the rate of return used to discount future cash flows back to their present value) used to calculate expenses when you’re buying infrastructure for the future. All those things are emerging. Raymond Williams talks about the residual and the emergent, how our present moment has residual features from the recent and deep past on one hand, and emergent things that are not yet fully formed and may or may not materialise on the other.

In my novel [the ministry for the future] stands as a kind of symbol that urges us to think about the people of the future as being real in their time

These two aspects of culture do not amount to a “good versus bad” rubric, as there are good and bad things in both. But if there are things emerging that would be good, it’s possible that we can point to them and maybe pull them along into being. This is what I’ve been trying to do with this notion of the ministry for the future. If there were an agency that was calling itself by that name (and the UN is holding a Summit of the Future in September), it would be stepping on everybody’s toes.

If we survive as a species, there are going to be trillions of humans in the future. And so, a ministry acting in their interests could stop everybody living now and say, your interests are fractional – we supersede. But if you’re coming from a profit-orientated perspective, like with the discount rate, you try to blunt the immense power of all the generations to come and assert that we still need to act for the benefit of people living now.

I am a utopian science fiction writer deliberately and explicitly as a leftist political project. I’m writing futures that are better than the present, and trying to explain how they could happen

Q: Your body of work leans more towards utopia than dystopia. What does this reflect about your views on humanity and our capacity for change?

I am a utopian science fiction writer deliberately and explicitly as a leftist political project. I’m writing futures that are better than the present, and trying to explain how they could happen in realistic ways as my contribution to the political project of leftism in general. By left, I mean public over private, government over business, the state over finance and peace over the military industrial complex. It’s a broad brush and old-fashioned cut on political positions – I purposefully keep it vague. People have called me as a subscriber to all kinds of political parties, which is fine, because as a novelist, they’re really talking about the books, not me. For myself personally, I just want to say I’m an American leftist, and my novels are part of my political project. They’re also my aesthetic project, and that is not a contradiction. Aesthetics is not a free-floating sense of beauty; aesthetics is entirely tied up with a political position. I’ve had to insist on that also.

When you write utopian literature, you put yourself up to be shot from every possible direction. You’re like Saint Sebastian, filled with arrows because you’re writing utopia. I don’t care about that: I do it on purpose to irritate people who think that there is really art for art’s sake. I want to say, that’s wrong, and my novels can prove it – or at least, my project is to try to live up to that with the books. I just keep trying.

Note: This interview gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image credit: Berliner Art on Shutterstock.