Star Trek

Every once in a long wild, the different worlds I inhabit suddenly and unexpectedly intersect. This morning was such a moment when I picked up and read an article entitled The West Coast of Utopia in the June 2012 edition of The American Prospect. Here in a magazine that I suscribe to was an article about a science fiction writer that I had never heard of before. Now this is a magazine that only very rarely mentions science fiction and usually only then in brief passing.

I was not able to locate the article on line, but was able to find an article involving an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson that is really quite extraordinary. The link is provided below.

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intksr.htm

Excerpts that I found of particular interst follow:

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of SF's most acclaimed authors, and with good reason. His novels and stories are passionate, eloquent, deeply intelligent and informed; they have comprehensively expanded SF's capability to understand - and so describe - the relationship between human beings and their physical environment, surely the genre's quintessential thematic territory. In doing this, they have challenged the right-wing technophilic attitudes of traditional American SF, shifting Hard SF's ideological centre sharply and bracingly leftwards. The literary result is an oeuvre of endless depth and fascination, as compellingly argued as it is magnificently described and characterized.

More than two decades into his career as a writer of fiction, Robinson has to date produced nine novels and five story collections. Of the novels, The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast (1988), and Pacific Edge (1990), make up the intersecting miscellany of alternate futures known as the Three Californias trilogy; two early titles, Icehenge (1984) and The Memory of Whiteness (1985) develop the lineaments of a human-colonized Solar System that is rendered in revised and deepened form in the vast, utopian Mars trilogy, consisting of Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996). Antarctica (1997) complements the Mars novels with its examination of near-future environmental and economic options.

Robinson's collections show a great versatility of range. While the connected novellas in Escape from Kathmandu (1989) deal amusingly with Himalayan mountaineers and their encounters with the marvellous, The Martians (1999) illumines and recomplicates the materials of the Mars trilogy. And the volumes that assemble self-contained stories - The Planet on the Table (1986), Remaking History (1991), and Down and Out in the Year 2000(1992), the last two of which substantially overlap - explore subjects including the mathematics of blindness, the convergence of histories, the return of the Ice Ages, and the sinking of Venice. But however varied, they - and the novels - are united by a consistently impassioned, incisive, humane narrative voice, the persuasive reasoning voice of a builder of living and livable utopias.

When I interviewed Stan Robinson by e-mail in September 1999, I was eager to discuss the foundations of his literary vision, and the formidable architecture of ecology, psychology, ideas, and ideals he has erected on them. Very kindly, he obliged my curiosity...

KSR: "We are bubbles of Earth! bubbles of Earth!" (John Crowley quotes someone (a Victorian?) to that effect in Little, Big.)

Yes, I'm very interested in place and its effect on people; how some people have a strong sense of home and place, while others don't, etc. For me it's always mattered intensely where I live. I grew up on a coastline in a Mediterranean climate, and have now lived in several different places, and each one has had a big impact on me. That deserves to be written about. Sf's historical tendency to be set in imaginary spaces, often indoors, in cities or spaceships, has never interested me much; I want to write about what it feels like to live in a particular place, and I think sf can use that. Novels in general need not give up on landscape as a subject, despite photography, because novels can get so deeply into what it feels like, what it means....

NG: From the previous question we move naturally to that of utopia. You are a utopian writer of great consistency and ambition. Starting with background: do you consider SF to be a--perhaps the--naturally utopian genre?

KSR:Darko Suvin has written that utopia is a subgenre of science fiction, which, historical questions aside, seems right to me.

Then in our century we've seen the rise of the utopian novel, a mixed genre which I would characterize as a novel describing characters in some utopian space. This gives the utopia a story and characters, so that it is interesting enough to read, while it gives the novel some very interesting new content, and the chance to make explicit its political program. Morris, Bellamy and Wells began this, Graves and Huxley continued the development, and Le Guin brought it all into focus with The Dispossessed.

NG: Which other contemporary SF writers do you consider to be especially utopian in preoccupation? Would you say that there are opposing utopian schools--say, left-wing and right-wing ones--in the wider SF community?

KSR:I think of Le Guin as the other contemporary sf writer preoccupied with utopia as something to return to more than once. And Mack Reynolds should be recalled.

I don't think there are opposing utopian schools in sf, as your question suggests, because I don't think there's any such thing possible as a "right-wing utopia." Right-wing politics by definition tries to prevent or reverse change; for it the current feudal regime is already "utopia" so there is no need to think utopia as a project. You have to distort the word "utopia" out of all recognition to make it fit any right-wing book; as for instance, "the world would be great if it were run by a junta and had biological communists to fight forever, so Starship Troopers is a right-wing utopian novel." True maybe, but useless. It has to be acknowledged that the expansion of legal rights to more and more people (women, ethnic minorities, children, the disabled, alternative lifestyles)--that is to say, social progress in history, the utopian track of history--has been a left-wing project and a left-wing accomplishment.

NG: What, in summary, is your own basic utopian thesis?

KSR: We have technical means such that everyone on the planet could have adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, health care and education. But we live in a feudal hierarchy that is not concerned with this project, but rather with feathering the nests of the rich and powerful, and be damned to everyone else. A course of history that leads away from this hierarchy toward a state of sustainable adequacy is utopian from its first step. Because of this, utopian courses of history can only be confirmed retroactively, but we can still work on them now....

NG: Alongside your utopian theme, and interacting with it, as in The Martians, is your emphasis on history: historical causation and process, how these work, how they can be guided (in a utopian direction, of course). You've even defined SF by reference to its relationship with history. Can you restate that definition here?

KSR:Maybe. I think science fiction is an historical genre, in that it takes place in our future. That is to say, from the fictional world of the novel you can follow its history back to us (or some moment of our past, in the case of the alternative history). The fictional history is related either explicitly or implicitly. If no history can be traced back, it may be some kind of fantasy novel, or something else, but it isn't science fiction as I recognize it.

This definition is somewhat redundant to the obvious one of "science fiction takes place in the future", but it helps in some cases to clarify the science fiction/fantasy boundary, and explains sub-genres like the alternative history, which otherwise are not obvious in their connection to sf set in the future....

NG: Turning from future to alternate history: some of your most memorable short stories are alternate histories; the Three Californias books occupy alternate futures; you're now busy on a full-blown counterfactual novel, A World Without Europe. How do you regard the wider alternate history subgenre, and how useful do you think its techniques are (for example in your own hands) as instruments for examining the realities of "actual" history?

KSR:Well, it's an interesting question, which I'm only exploring in full now, and in the coming year. It seems to me there might be some value to the alternative history, in reminding us that our own history has never been preordained, and could have come out differently. It's also a way of interrogating the roles individuals might play in history. But there's a danger in the method too, in that readers always know that it didn't happen this way; so it can seem a game. By and large I would say science fiction proper has a stronger stance, which is "this is going to happen to us!" when alternative history can only say "this didn't happen to us, but it would have been interesting," which cannot strike with the same force.

Future tense is more striking than the subjunctive, perhaps. But despite these concerns, it could well be that both forms offer equally great opportunities for a novel as novel.

NG: There is a rather stale but perhaps still pertinent argument concerning the differences between Cyberpunks and Humanists in SF. While the Cyberpunks emphasize the human-machine interface and its resulting (often solipsistic) opportunities and alienations, you maintain a liberating focus on the relationships between the human and the natural, the individual and the social. In your work, humans remain human, governing technology, not governed by it. Is this summary basically accurate? Even if the Humanist/Cyberpunk dichotomy is simplistic and overplayed, do you see yourself as engaged in a continuing debate with the Cyberpunks (or post-Cyberpunks), perhaps over the direction progressive Hard SF should take?

KSR:I like your characterization of the divide between my work and cyberpunk, because we do control technology, in the sense that we are responsible collectively for what we do.

But I do feel the cyberpunk issue is dead now. I mean I would still insist that the outdoors is more interesting than the indoors and the virtual, so that in sheerly novelistic terms I found the right space to work in. But that's just my feeling about it. Others are free to work in other spaces.

The truth is that between writing, research, parenting and life in general, I have no time anymore to read other sf writers, and seldom do. I'm even beginning to feel that it's part of my job to remain ignorant of current sf, and to become increasingly idiosyncratic. That's what novelists are supposed to do. So I read the sf writers I enjoy to the point that I wouldn't want to deny myself the pleasure of their work, but nothing else. I think I get the cream anyway, so it's not a problem. But as a result I don't know what the cyberpunks or post-cyberpunks are writing. I never did. You must remember that whole dichotomy was not serious analysis, but mere mischief-making. There was never any such thing as "humanist sf," and I would reject the label now, and any other content label as well. "Science fiction" is enough, both narrow enough (please, no "progressive hard sf"), and broad enough to be of use. I am a science fiction writer, very happy to be one, and no other adjectives wanted...

NG: The final questions, then: how is work going on A World Without Europe? And are any other projects, for example short stories beyond those in The Martians, in prospect?

KSR: There will be no other short stories besides the ones in The Martians.

Work is going well on the new novel. What I like is being deep into a novel, with no memory of beginning and no expectation of ending. That's where I am now.

Excellent interview, caltrek2!  You asked some penetrating questions and received some insightful answers!

Glad Caltrek has found KSR.  The Mars Trilogy defined science fiction for me in the 90s.  At one point James Cameron optioned the trilogy (or maybe only Red Mars?)  but I believe the option has lapsed.

Ummmm.... I was not the one that conducted the interview. I was citing an interview that was conducted by another individual. Yes, the questions were penetrating and the answers were insightful.