Kim Stanley Robinson

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: Kim Stanley Robinson, welcome to The Book Show.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Thanks Ramona, good to be here.

Ramona Koval: Good to talk to you after years and years ago I spoke to you about the Mars trilogy.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, I think it's 15 or 16 years nearly.

Ramona Koval: Yes, but I still remember it though, which is something, isn't it, after all the books I've read.

Kim Stanley Robinson: It's a good sign.

Ramona Koval: Why do you say that dystopian fiction isn't necessary at the moment?

Kim Stanley Robinson: I think it's just too obvious, it's easy to imagine, it's dramatic, it makes for good plots, but on the other hand we don't learn any lessons from it, it's been done before, done to death really. It's a little bit not just complacent but dodging the issue of how do we create a better society rather than contemplate the damage that we are daily inflicting on the planet and on each other.

Ramona Koval: So you're saying it doesn't show where the exit door is.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, and we don't need this warning anymore, we've had it, there have been good ones, and the world itself is taking a dystopian turn in climate and in population problems and resource issues. The fact that it would take maybe three or four earths to support everybody alive today at Western standards of living, well, this is a serious problem and you can easily tell a story of it leading to disaster.

Ramona Koval: That's the news, isn't it?

Kim Stanley Robinson: That's the road we're on, yes, and the news of the day. So what becomes interesting in literary terms and in story terms is can you imagine an alternative.

Ramona Koval: You've said that writing your Mars trilogy made you think of climate change on Earth, and the trilogy covered 200 years of human settlement on Mars, and the idea that Mars was made habitable for earthlings through the idea of terraforming...this is a term from a long time ago. Tell us about terraforming and what led you to imagine the Mars trilogy.

Kim Stanley Robinson: It is a science-fiction term. The American science-fiction writer Jack Williamson who wrote from 1928 to 2008 very intelligently coined it in the '30s, the idea being that you go to a planet that is simply a bare rock with no life on it and change it into an Earth-like place where humans could walk around in their shirt sleeves and breathe the air. And the time when the scientific community began to get interested in terraforming as a process and something to be discussed and quantified with numbers and calculations as to how much it would take in energy and fusion and the like, it is exactly when our investigations of Mars brought back all the data that we got from the Mariner and Viking missions in '65 and '76, and at that point the two came together because it turned out that Mars was a perfect candidate for terraforming.

If you will accept that there is no life there right now, which is really still an up-in-the-air question in terms of underground bacteria, then you've got a candidate...it has water, it has all the necessary gases, it has everything but life itself, and a bit more warmth. So we could apply the warmth mechanically and we could introduce life, just Terran lifeforms, maybe slightly engineered genetically but maybe just bacteria that are good at extreme environments, and let it go.

And I just read today a news article that I hope it is going around the world in the way that news articles do, that Ascension Island in the South Atlantic was an absolutely bare volcanic rock until Darwin went by in The Beagle and colleagues of his went by in the 1840s, and the Kew Gardens simply supplied plants from all over the world and Ascension Island today is green and has a cloud forest on top. So in about 160 years we have in fact terraformed an island successfully, without even really doing much more than throwing some seeds out there. And they call it terraforming in the article, and I read this a half-hour ago and I was quite amazed.

Ramona Koval: You say that the question of life on Mars is up in the air at the moment, is there a moral question about going and dumping life from this planet on that planet?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, there is. It's almost an ethical decision tree, an either/or.

Ramona Koval: It's them or us?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, well, if it's a dead rock then I think it's perfectly ethically all right and super interesting in fact to try terraforming. If there were native bacteria there already, well, it's one of the biggest scientific discoveries in the history of the world, and secondly those bacteria, they are either a different start of life in the universe, which is spectacularly interesting, or else they're simply our cousins, they were bounced there on meteorites or we were bounced from Mars on meteorites and that will have to be sorted out. So they're getting methane signals in the atmosphere and there doesn't seem to be good abiological reasons for these little puffs of methane that come out seasonally. So some scientists are saying that's a sign that there is underground bacteria still alive there. Other scientists, including my main man Chris McKay of NASA, is saying no, I don't believe the signals are there at all in the first place. So as an English major and an outsider I have to just wait and see what they say. But there is no doubt in my mind that if we found life there that the whole terraforming Mars project is off and my novel goes from being science-fiction to being fantasy, which would make me sad but there are bigger considerations than the genre status of my old trilogy.

Ramona Koval: When you wrote the Mars trilogy, did you think about its application to Earth?

Kim Stanley Robinson: I certainly did. For one thing, as a project I can press the timescales, and this is really a project for us to consider seriously when we've got our civilisation in line with the Earth's natural biosphere here. So in many ways it's a deferrable project, and so it was always a metaphor, I am saying. We're terraforming the Earth, we've changed the composition of the atmosphere, we've gone from 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide to 380, and we're hoping to stop at 450. It would be good if we managed to do that but we need to terraform like crazy to keep ourselves alive on this planet. So always the Mars books, I think they were read as such even at the time, a way of talking about how humans interact with their planet, and this one is clearly the main story.

Ramona Koval: After writing the Mars trilogy you went to Antarctica. What led you there?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, it was the most Martian place on Earth and indeed it was my Mars books that convinced the US National Science Foundation that I was worth sending down there as part of their artists and writers program. I thought it made a good follow-up to the Mars books, thinking, well, okay, living on Mars is interesting but we are already living on Antarctica and this is an ice planet, it is radically different. You can't survive there without high-tech to take you there and to keep you alive, so it just struck me as the obvious next step in my own progression.

Ramona Koval: So, talking to scientists you came across the idea of abrupt climate change.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, this was a new idea. In the '90s they were talking about climate change and global warming as something that would take...the geologists would tell me it will be really fast and I would say, 'How fast?' and they'd say, 'Well, 1,000 years.' And in novel terms that simply was kind of a stopper. That creeping gradualism is very hard to turn into...

Ramona Koval: It's not dramatic.

Kim Stanley Robinson: No, and it's hard to turn into a story of any kind because you say, well, three generations from now they'll be living two degrees warmer than us...so what? But what they found when they took an ice core out of Greenland, they got about 100,000 years of excellent atmospheric data, so they really can tell you now what has gone on in the paleoclimate. And they noticed that as we came out of the last ice age, we fell back into it, and they got absolutely convincing data that showed that we went from a warm, wet climate to a cold, dry climate in the northern hemisphere in three years. So then they had to say, well, we've been talking about being fast and now we want to say really fast. So that was when the phrase 'abrupt climate change' came into being. The concept only comes from 2002, you can't find it in the literature, the phrase didn't exist until 2002.

And when I saw the phrase I thought now we can tell the story as a science-fiction scenario, we can tell the story of abrupt climate change, and I immediately resolved that that should be my next project, is to tell...if the Gulf Stream stalls then you go over a tipping point, and now I think all of this is relatively common knowledge. You can talk about what a tipping point is because of Malcolm Gladwell's non-fiction books et cetera. So really the whole human community is aware in a way that we weren't even a decade ago, that incremental changes can push us over a cliff into rapid changes and you can't get back. So if we were to fall over into a radically different climate regime, it's not as if we can then...they call it geo-engineering although really they're talking about terraforming again...

Ramona Koval: This is the idea of sending sulphur up into the atmosphere.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Exactly, yes, to imitate volcanoes and put a bunch of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and hope to cool the planet back down, as if we've got a thermostat that we are in control of, it's just simply isn't quite true. None of these methods (and the scientists who are studying it will immediately point it out) will take care of ocean acidification and...if we happen to change the pH of the ocean to the point that we kill the tiniest creatures, then we've got a food pyramid that's just like in your elementary school; the little ones die, the bigger ones die, a third of our food comes out of the ocean. Human civilisation is endangered by a minute change in the pH of the ocean. So we can't be complacent. It really is a matter for as-soon-as-possible action on all fronts, to de-carbonise our civilisation as quickly as possible. So this is the kind of public service message that science fiction can tell the story of in a plausible and detailed fashion, like a scenario that is in such detail that you can believe it and see it.

Ramona Koval: You sound like you want your work to do a job, to do a political job.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, that's right, and I know this is a little bit of a crazy thing to say, I mean, I'm an artist, I'm a novelist, what I really want to do is write good novels. If writing a good novel would be to imply that I go into a closet and ignore the world and express myself or what not, I would do that, because I want good novels. But my belief is that good novels have an inherent political edge to them. Take Proust, you think of him as Parisian high society, decadence, a very insular kind of seven-volume masterpiece, and yet the Dreyfus case is central to it, it had a political purpose. He wanted to show the effects of that anti-Semitism and what corruption could lead to in high society.

So the most artistic and I would say the greatest novel ever written is also intensely political and I use that as a kind of a guide. And then science-fiction, of course setting your stories in the future is an odd thing to do, and in artistic terms I've never been completely comfortable with it because as an artist you want to reflect the real. And then if you say, well, I'm reflecting the real but my novel is set to 200 years in the future, it rocks you back a little on your heels. And many a reader whose judgement I respect and love will say, well, I just can't read science-fiction because I can't get my head around the concept of a story set that far in the future.

Ramona Koval: Would you ever not write science-fiction and write some realist novel?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, and I feel that that is really what I did in my Science in the Capital trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting, and that is really just another Victorian three-decker. It's a single novel and it starts in the now, and what it does...and what I'm saying in my entire career is that our now includes an immense shadow of the future, the future that we can feel coming, but we live every day with the rapid changes in technology and in social methodologies, the future weighs heavy on us, that we live half in the future, so that science fiction is simply the best genre for our time. But I will say that with a strong realist bias. I'm not interested in aliens, I'm not interested in five million years from now, I'm just interested in the now and how heavily the shadow of the future weighs on us.

Ramona Koval: But you're an optimist, and you are filled with concern about the future, about what we're going to do now. How do you get to be an optimist coming out of that? Where does the optimism come from?

Kim Stanley Robinson: It's a matter almost of policy. Personally I can lay claim to a kind of biochemical optimism or cheerfulness or sanguinity...good luck for me. But this is a political optimism, saying that it doesn't do our children or our descendants any good at all to be pessimistic, it's a capitulation or a refusal of our responsibility to try to make a better world. And people who say, well, we're doomed, and a fair number of scientists will objectively and rationally look at the numbers and look at the situation and say, ah well, we're doomed. That defeatism is not responsible enough.

So I would say my optimism is very conditional. I'm defensive about it because we tend to think of optimists as being slightly dimwitted. You know, the situation doesn't justify a whole lot of optimism or complacency, and I would claim that I'm not complacent about that, we have to assume that we can make the civilisation right with the planet if we were to do it and that it is technologically possible, which I believe it is, and then we have to act on that belief as a kind of political action plan and as an artistic program as well.

Ramona Koval: You said you were a literary major, and getting the science right is important to some people, because readers get annoyed if they know that this defies the laws of physics.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, I do too. You can get yourself scientifically literate without being particularly mathematical. You can read New Scientist, you can read Cosmos, you can read Science News in the States. A couple of years reading will get you an education in these fields that is sufficient to be a good citizen. Although sometimes in my novels I put in equations just to be contrary and to be a pain in the arse, nevertheless the math is not what's important, it is the implications of the sciences, and they are all extremely logical, straightforward, clearly set out. So a science-fiction writer wants to do justice to the sciences. It's more a matter of rhetoric and artistic technique, and then just kind of general educational knowledge.

Ramona Koval: So writing a utopian novel in this age where climate change is predicted to have catastrophic consequences, how do you find your way through to where we should all be going politically? Where does that come from?

Kim Stanley Robinson: I speak as an old leftist humanist, and also as an environmentalist, that you simply have to acknowledge the physical environment as our home, as our extended body, as something that cannot be ignored or externalised, as economists used to do, or treated as something that is infinitely manipulatable. We may be maxed out on how much food we can make on this planet et cetera, we've reached a carrying capacity limit and that's clear enough, that you go forward with your political program as a green. I just have to say it flatly given the hung parliament that you are in and the suddenly prominent position of this small party, the Greens. Well, I wish the States had such a party. Because we're stuck in a two-party system, we can't effectively vote for the environment, and yet you can here because of a more intelligent political system.

Ramona Koval: But what do you make of the persistence of climate deniers or 'climate change manipulated by human beings' deniers?

Kim Stanley Robinson: They're funded by the fossil fuel industry, and the fossil fuel industry has taken their techniques out of the tobacco industry, so that the denial that cigarettes cause lung cancer was about a 40-year funded campaign. And Naomi Oreskes is a historian who has documented this in great detail, and I hope she'll be on your show some day, and she has shown and said that in this case the fossil fuel industry was more scientific than the scientists because they did research as to what influences public opinions. They funded studies to see how you can confuse the public on these issues. They found the techniques that worked, they applied the techniques, they paid for them in ways that the scientific community has not been up to because the scientific community goes into this with the kind of naive assumption that truth is truth et cetera...well, in our political context that's just not the case. Public opinion can be manipulated.

And so there are bought people who have gone out there, and they are not peer reviewed. If you actually look at how science works as a community, these climate change deniers are in fact not true scientists, they're not even sceptics because everybody is sceptical, science is sceptical, they are denialists, they are people who are out there to muddy the waters. One of the chief amongst them Bjorn Lomborg, 'the sceptical environmentalist', as his first book was called, a Danish figure of some power in the world because the fossil fuel industry liked his views so much, has just come out calling for a carbon tax and essentially has renounced the last decade of his work, and I'd take it that's because he's always been a serious guy. He's always been talking about the importance of solving poverty, and it's true, solving poverty is actually a good way towards getting better with the environment. The two billion people who live on less than a dollar a day in this world are as bad for the environment as the rich people who are hyper-consuming. So hyper-consumption and poverty are the two demographic units that are hurting our ability to survive the most, and we need them both to close in towards the middle.

Ramona Koval: Writing utopias, we don't often read them these days. There have been great utopias in the past, but we are more interested in dystopias, aren't we?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, they're better stories. The utopias are dead boring really, and you don't really go to literature in order to read architectural blueprints. So there's a thing called the utopian novel which is just a bastard genre, the mixture of the utopia and the novel is like the mixture of architectural blueprints with a soap opera. That doesn't make a coherent artistic genre.

Ramona Koval: There has been some very funny, though, utopias written in the past. There was one by Charles Fourier, who was a precursor of Marx and Freud. His dream was a world of erotic freedom and joyful non-compulsory work, but it was a highly bureaucratic utopia because basically he wanted to make sure that everyone would be assured of a sexual minimum, minimum sexual contacts, so they would joyfully administer to the less attractive by outstandingly beautiful and promiscuous erotic priests and priestesses. This is from The Faber Book of Utopias that I have looked at. But it seems like if you're going to have a utopia, it always seems to be ruled by big rules and very bureaucratic.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, that's right, but HG Wells is a leader in shifting the view of utopia from a static end state that is indeed rule-bound and a-historical, to simply a name for a positive direction in history. That is what I have been following in my utopian work, is to redefine utopia. It's not an end state, because we will never have an end state, history will always continue and so what you want is history with things getting better and better. There is a concept out of the philosophy of science called scaffolding that you and the work of your generation, you build a scaffold on the shoulders of those who came before, so things are a little bit higher, a little bit better. You can't get to heaven in a single generation, but you make things a little bit better and then you are the scaffold for your children to build the next scaffold. And as if we were a coral reef, we just build towards goodness. This is what utopia has always been about, and some people tried to immediately strike to the goodness...there were Fourieristic colonies in the United States immediately because it sounded good, but they would always fall apart in the context of the overall world. This has been a problem for leftists to struggle with.

Ramona Koval: What, falling apart on the borders with the overall world or inside the actual utopia?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, both. If you live in a strongly capitalist world and you attempt to say, well, within our little world the rules are going to be different, everybody is going to cooperate, well, the psychological and financial pressures are just stupendous. And they have always been very small in their little experiments, and like communes in the 1970s, they tend to fall apart under the pressure of reality. But reality is socially constructed, at least human reality is, and so I think it's best to take those lessons and not to throw out the baby with the bathwater and say we shouldn't even try, it's pointless, or human nature is fixed et cetera. None of that is right. We do have some animal constants that need to be acknowledged, just like the biophysical constants, and yet we are heavily influenced by culture. We do what our culture does, we do what appears to and what our generation does, is described as normal. So it's a gradualist thing, a sense of infinite reform, and a utopian way rather than a utopian destination. It's an important distinction because otherwise you do tend to just roll your eyes and think, well, this is never going to happen.

Ramona Koval: So it's a process we have to look at.

Kim Stanley Robinson: It's a process.

Ramona Koval: Kim Stanley Robinson, thank you so much for joining us today on The Book Show.

Kim Stanley Robinson: It's a pleasure.

Ramona Koval: And Kim Stanley Robinson, or Stan as he is known, will be at the science-fiction convention Aussiecon 4 this weekend in Melbourne. The Book Show blog will have reports from the conference too. Stan is the author of many books, including the Orange Country trilogy, the Mars trilogy, and the Science in the Capital trilogy, and most recently Galileo's Dream, published by Voyager.

Publications

US based author of many books including the Orange Country Trilogy, the Mars Trilogy, the Science in the Capital Trilogy and most recently Galileo's Dream, it's published by Voyager.