In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set out to find the Venn diagram intersection of tech and fiction—only to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson had staked his claim on the territory decades ago. With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, KSR has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California.

All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020), his vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. In only five years, it may have become the most influential work of climate fiction ever—perhaps right up there with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its thoroughly shocking ability to jump into the political fray.

Flanked by Novel Dialogue’s John Plotz, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asks him to reflect on the book’s impact. He brushes aside the doom and gloom of tech bros forecasting the death of our planet and hence the necessity of a flight to Mars: humans are not one of the species doomed to extinction by our reckless combustion of the biosphere. However, survival is not the same as thriving. The way we are headed now, “the crash of civilization is very bad. And ignoring it…is not going to work.”

Mentioned in the Episode:

--Pact for the Future

--COP 26 (2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference)

--COP 30 (where KSR will be a UN rep….)

--Planetary boundaries J. Rockstrom (et. al.)

--Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

--Paris Agreement

--Don’t Look Up

--Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice

--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

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