Kim Stanley Robinson

Abstract

In Kim Stanley Robinson, part of the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series published by the University of Illinois Press, Robert Markley ambitiously sets out to tell the story of Kim Stanley Robinson's oeuvre by offering a “mid-career report that traces the developing concerns in his fiction” (10). The challenge of connecting the wide-ranging concerns of Robinson's fiction necessarily risks eliding or simplifying key elements of that story. Nonetheless, Markley is able to leverage Robinson's characteristic iteration over crucial narrative and critical themes throughout his oeuvre to articulate the trajectory of Robinson's concerns across three decades of writing, making this work an excellent introduction to a writer who is fundamentally engaged with the question of utopia and its relevance for our contemporaneity. This project is especially important in an era struggling with the problem of devising a utopian response to the impasses that obstruct adequate responses to anthropogenic climate change.Markley does not analyze Robinson's work according to a strictly chronological sequence of publication. Instead, Kim Stanley Robinson first compares short fiction and novels from two periods of Robinson's career. Chapter 1, “‘I Saw Through Time’: Falling into Other Histories,” is critical insofar as it frames the discussion throughout the text through Robinson's concern with history, contingency, and the future. This chapter analyzes “The Lucky Strike” (1984), “A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations” (1991), and “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions” (1991) alongside two later novels, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) and Shaman: A Novel of the Ice Age (2013). While Shaman is not an alternate history, Markley argues in the introduction that it “pushes the generic boundaries of alternative history into a speculative past” (11). This characterization risks blurring the reader's understanding of how alternate histories rooted in specific events embody a different kind of speculation compared with the explorations of history conducted in prehistoric fiction. In addition, Shaman's description in the introduction as “pre-Anthropocene literature” (11) invokes a category that includes too much: the term collapses literature published before the contested boundaries of the Anthropocene and works set in those eras but written during the Anthropocene. The inclusion of Shaman in the discussion in chapter 1 does enable Markley to underscore how Shaman positions knowledge as a multilayered dislocation that helps to reactivate the past in the context of a movement toward the future to contextualize the significance of Robinson's use of alternate history (48).Chapters 2 through 4 deal chronologically with Robinson's major trilogies. Chapter 2, “Three Futures for California: The Orange County Trilogy,” explores the three possible futures portrayed in The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast (1988), and Pacific Edge (1990), which proceed from 1980s images of California's Orange County. Chapter 3, “Terraforming and Eco-economics in the Mars Trilogy,” considers how Robinson's acclaimed Mars trilogy, Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996), negotiates a new utopian future through a network of communities and their efforts to cobble together an economic system relevant to the demands of living on another planet. The Mars trilogy is rightly characterized as a “utopian odyssey, a falling into ecotopian theory,” and “a utopian policy statement and a hard-won course” (109–10). Chapter 4, “‘How to Go Forward’: Catastrophe and Comedy in the Science in the Capitol Trilogy,” returns to Earth to explore how this cobbling together of new systems might look were it oriented to respond to the challenges posed by abrupt climate change. These three trilogies expound on Robinson's key concerns: how the past shapes possibilities for the future, how literature itself “becomes a form of action, a moral and socio-political intervention” (68), and how utopian literature might be reconfigured to provide a “‘necessary survival strategy’ for an overheated planet” (114).Markley is attentive to how Robinson's fiction works as a mode of cultural criticism in itself, “an important theoretical intervention in contemporary utopian and Marxist thought” (6). Drawing on McKenzie Wark's notion of the tektology described in Molecular Red, Markley positions Robinson's alternate histories and his work in general as engaging in what Wark has argued is “the invention of a grammar that might come after capitalist realism” (2015, 27). The concept of the tektology is drawn from Alexander Bogdanov—the author of Red Star, the utopian Mars story written in 1908, which is alluded to in the Mars trilogy—and refers to “a practice which generalizes the act of substitution by which one thing is understood metaphorically via another. It is a practice of making worldviews” (Wark 2015, 25). Robinson's use of alternate history, planetary narratives, and stories set throughout the solar system can be conceived of as ways to map fields of experience from one domain to another to devise satisfactory alternatives to discourses of capitalist realism. The multiplication of worldviews and the attention to ways of living are both aspects of Robinson's utopian project and modes of engaging in the formation of a post-anthropocentric tektology. Drawing on his own research into the imagination of Mars in Dying Planet, Markley builds on Wark's analysis of the Mars trilogy to show how “terraforming Mars … evokes entangled forms of stochastic self-organization that cut across disciplinary divisions of knowledge” (2005, 91). It does this through the development of an eco-economics that functions as a “revisionist tektology” that “explores the involutions of fictional and scientific simulations of terraforming” while “encouraging readers to question the values on which scientific speculations about planetary engineering rest” (Markley 2005, 91).Chapter 5 extends the investigation into Robinson's strategies for charting new historical possibilities but shifts focus to consider those novels set, unlike his earlier trilogies, in the far future and in multiple locations in the solar system. Although narratives set in the wider solar system were anticipated in the later parts of Blue Mars, chapter 5 chooses to focus on three novels: The Memory of Whiteness (1985), Galileo's Dream (2009), and 2312 (2012). These novels “focus our thinking about humankind's responses to a future of unsustainable economies, ecological crises, and the persistence of hierarchical politics and social justice” (136), and all three rework classic science-fiction tropes in distinctive ways. Robinson's tendency to revisit and transform earlier narrative experiments is highlighted in this chapter: The Memory of Whiteness, for example, constructs a theory and image of music that Markley positions as a precursor to Robinson's utopian experiments in his three trilogies. Galileo's Dream adapts the alternate history to explore the development, role, and legacy of science in the future. Galileo's Dream pairs usefully with 2312 because it contrasts the spatialization of historical possibility developed in the Mars trilogy and extended in 2312 by characterizing that history as a series of experimental possibilities: 2312 spatializes the historical possibilities that are presented as mutually exclusive in Galileo's Dream (156). It thus provides a useful comparator to draw out the formal strategies of each text. Markley notes that 2312 does extend the project set out in Blue Mars but refocuses attention on the posthuman, polysexualities, and memory to establish a series of intersections between these tropes and Robinson's commitment to exploring concerns relevant to the Anthropocene. This enables Robinson to examine “radically new perceptions of time engendered by biotechnology” (160). Another key intersection that Markley examines is the ubiquity of quantum artificial intelligences in 2312, a science-fiction staple that Robinson had not explored extensively in his earlier work. 2312, then, represents a shift in Robinson's concerns insofar as it brings these tropes into the orbit of his project.The final chapter extends Robinson's exploration of artificial intelligence and quantum computing in two distinct ways. By focusing on Aurora (2015) and New York 2140 (2017), the two most recent novels addressed in this book, Markley accentuates Robinson's interest in the implications of computing for the utopian futures that he writes. Both Aurora and New York 2140 take up Robinson's interest in the legacies of computing and the emergence of “post-anthropocentric intelligences” (173). Indeed, Robinson's concern about the implications of advanced computing for politics and the utopian struggle in the Anthropocene is anticipated in the vote-rigging sequence in the Science in the Capitol trilogy. As such it connects New York 2140 to this earlier narrative experiment with climate change politics. Markley suggests that New York 2140's narrative of a collapse of the intertidal housing bubble “leads to a kind of alternative history (admittedly set in 2142) of the 2008 housing crash” (185). New York 2140 thus echoes earlier explorations in collectivist utopianism as a response to climate change.The two works addressed in chapter 6 are linked by their insistence on developing utopian responses to climate change on Earth, not by turning away from these issues—as Aurora radically figures through the trope of the generation starship—but by confronting the problem and by building alliances between groups that are capable of action at planetary scales. In this regard Aurora represents a radical critique that “inscribes a skepticisim about planetary exploration and terraforming that emphasises, in resonant ways, the starship as a stunted parody of earthly ecologies” (178), thus revisiting earlier assumptions about terraforming that were dealt with in the Mars trilogy. New York 2140, on the other hand, explores how speculative finance adapts to the effects of climate change by reorienting its focus to other areas of the planet while retaining the structure of its typical investment profile. Robinson experiments with possibilities for co-opting finance capital for the purposes of addressing climate change by considering how speculative finance could be reoriented in support of projects that move toward a collective utopianism.The six chapters of this book analyze Robinson's fiction according to themes that tell a story about Robinson's developing concerns and accentuate the consistency with which Robinson turns a critical eye to his key preoccupations. Thus the final two chapters consider works published primarily from 2009 to 2017—the most recent phase of Robinson's career—but also The Memory of Whiteness, a work published in 1985. Markley is thus able to draw attention to the transformation of Robinson's concerns across his oeuvre and how later works revise the positions of earlier texts, for example, with Aurora's rethinking of terraforming explored in the Mars trilogy. This is less successful in earlier chapters where references to texts yet to be discussed are made, which for readers new to Robinson's work could well prove disorienting. An example of this can be seen in the first chapter, where references to Galileo's Dream, which is discussed in chapter 5, appear. This example raises the question as to why this unique approach to the alternate history is not addressed in the first chapter, where works published in the mid-1980s–early 1990s and after 2000 are discussed. Robinson's interest in science and its utopian potential could be related back to his concern with history in a manner similar to how Robinson's interest in the future primitive—“a technologically sophisticated civilization living within the bounds of socioeconomic justice and ecological responsibility” (4)—is framed through the first chapter's discussion of Shaman. Perhaps the critique of science conducted in Galileo's Dream could be usefully contrasted to that of Shaman's, which Markley argues “provides an alternative to a world of science and science fiction” (52). Shaman can thus be conceived of as engaging in a similar project to the alternate histories dealt with in the rest of chapter 1. However, Shaman is not in itself an alternate history and so could have been discussed in relation to New York 2140 instead of Galileo's Dream, since Shaman was published after the latter novel. Doing so would obscure how Shaman is used to contextualize instances of the future primitive discussed in later chapters, but it would provide another example of how Robinson's later work offers a critique of his earlier fiction. These choices highlight how the sequence of fiction discussed throughout Kim Stanley Robinson can subtly emphasize different aspects of the story of Robinson's oeuvre over others.There is no conclusion following chapter 6 but, rather, a coda in the final chapter that reflects on the space of the beach as a liminal site of ecological restoration. A conclusion that discusses the choices made regarding the structure of the discussion would have helped to summarize the key aspects of the trajectory that Markley constructs regarding Robinson's writing. Beaches do appear in earlier works—Markley mentions the presence of this site in the concluding chapter of the Mars trilogy in chapter 3—but this connection is not highlighted in the coda. By ending the discursive portion of the book with a discussion of beaches Markley rightly highlights how this figure is concerned with “different kinds of temporal crossings between past and present ecologies, between our present and the imagined futures of a transformed planet” (186), yet the alternate histories discussed in chapter 1 drop out of view as a consequence. A conclusion that emphasizes how these texts turn over similar concerns would give a better sense of the ramified engagement with ecological futures, science, and history that forms the basis of all of Robinson's work. In addition, it would enable Markley to sketch out possibilities for new directions for Robinson's works to follow, most notably gestured toward in the bibliography of Robinson's work that follows the final chapter. An entry for Red Moon, published in 2019 and thus too late to have been incorporated in this work, is included in the bibliography. Unlike his previous fiction, Red Moon attempts to think through issues of social justice and science, but it focuses this inquiry through perspectives from multiple Chinese characters, while much of the narrative takes place in China and Hong Kong. This international outlook marks a new emphasis in thinking through key issues of our experience of the Anthropocene from non-American perspectives.One way to think about Robinson's oeuvre in the light of Markley's discussion is to explore how each phase of Robinson's writing offers a series of involutions around his major thematic preoccupations. Kim Stanley Robinson offers an accessible and critically aware recapitulation of the work of a writer of key significance for understanding how contemporary literature engages forcefully with the Anthropocene. Critical theory is signposted at relevant stages throughout the discussion, but it never threatens to overwhelm the text's focus on Robinson's writing. Markley's attention to history and utopia alights on the most important interventions Robinson's work makes, and it speaks to the purpose of the text: to introduce to a wider readership, perhaps those who do not typically engage with science fiction, a writer whose cultural significance extends beyond science fiction readerships and scholarships. In this way it is a successful mid-career report and a valuable positioning of a modern science fiction writer in relation to literary and utopian studies. This book shows the vitality of utopian thought for our cultural context, and it highlights the relevance of contemporary utopian criticism to writing that is fascinated with our contemporary context.