Kim Stanley Robinson

Abstract

Kim Stanley Robinson (b. 1952) was born in Waukegan, Illinois, but moved to California as a small child, where he has since lived most of his life. Robinson attended the University of California, San Diego, and received a BA in literature in 1974. He earned a PhD in English from UC San Diego in 1982 for his dissertation on the novels of Philip K. Dick, for which the famous Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson served as a committee member. The dissertation was published as The Novels of Philip K. Dick by UMI Research Press in 1984, the same year as Robinson’s first novel, The Wild Shore, set in a post-apocalyptic California. Since then Robinson has published many major works in the science fiction genre, most notably the Mars trilogy (1992–1996). Robinson’s science fictions are closely associated with the socialist left, especially with regard to the environment, though the utopian optimism of his work seems to have been tempered somewhat by disheartening developments in global politics since the 1990s. Many of his post-Mars works explicitly “remix” elements of the Mars books; for instance, Aurora (2015) explores the idea of launching an inhabited asteroid out of the solar system to reach another star, as imagined in Blue Mars (1996), while Galileo’s Dream (2009) and 2312 (2012) imagine colonization of the solar system happening with much more destructive speed. Likewise, the Science in the Capital trilogy (2004–2007) and New York 2140 (2017) both explore the climate catastrophe of ice sheet collapse that also occurred in the Mars books, while the title of Red Moon (2018) alone suggests an obvious intertextual relationship with earlier works. Other noteworthy novels explore multiple possible futures for California (the Three Californias trilogy, 1984–1990), life in the scientific colony on Antarctica (Antarctica, 1997), an alternate history in which a much more virulent Black Plague killed nearly every European on the planet (The Years of Rice and Salt, 2002), and the dawn of modern humanity at the end of the Ice Age (Shaman, 2013). In 2020, his novel The Ministry for the Future focalized primarily through a United Nations subgroup charged with advocating on behalf of the unborn and the nonhuman in near-future rocked by climate crisis, brought significant new attention to his work, including an appearance on Barack Obama’s best-of list at the end of the year. While Robinson’s short fiction has not garnered the same critical attention as his novels, he has written a number of important and well-anthologized stories, most notably “The Lucky Strike” (1984), an alternate history in which the bombing of Hiroshima does not occur. Since the 1980s, Robinson has won the Campbell, Locus, Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, among other distinctions, demonstrating his importance as a major figure in the field of contemporary science fiction.