Kim Stanley Robinson: “Science needs to think of itself more as a humanism and as an utopian politics”

(Versión en español)

We meet with Kim Stanley Robinson (Waukegan, 1952) in Barcelona, during the annual literary convention Kosmopolis. Robinson is a respected and popular hard science fiction writer, especially known for his trilogy dealing with martian colonization and terraformation (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). After Mars, he imagined humanity expanding through the whole Solar System (2312) or trying with enormous difficulties to reach for interstellar space (Aurora). In some of his novels climate change issues take a central role, particularly in the Science in the Capital trilogy and the recently published New York 2140. And sometimes he looks into the past instead of the future, describing  life during an Ice Age (Shaman) or imagining how world history would have changed if all Europeans died during the Black Plague (The years of rice and salt). Most of Robinson’s stories, although peppered with revolutions, murders and catastrophes, are utopian and optimistic in their core. He speaks with restraint, correction and seriousness, but sudden flares of contagious enthusiasm light up his speech when discussing the transformative power of science or the urgent necessity of changing the current socio economic regime.

You are known as an utopian novelist. Frequently utopia is seen as something unattainable, a theoretical ideal of perfection, but in your novels it seems something more practical…

I’ve been following the definition of utopia sketched out by H.G. Wells: a dynamic kind of history without an end point; it’s not a perfect state, it’s a continuous process where every advance has to be defended against falling apart or going backwards. Joanna Russ, a great american science fiction writer, used to talk about optopia: given the conditions that you’ve been handed, you get to the optimum best situation politically. This is better for storytelling: you don’t have the “walk to the zoo” feel of standard utopia: even Thomas More’s Utopia has a little bit of story, but it’s really the description of an achieved society. Since Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and even before, the story of dynamic utopias has been told one way or another.

The character Arkady Bogdanov of The Martian Trilogy is a descendant of Alexander Bogdanov, the author of the utopian novel Red Star. How did Red Star help to shape your Red Mars, and what do you find appealing about Alexander Bogdanov?

I love Bogdanov. When Percival Lowell made his reports on what he had seen of Mars through his telescope and talked about the possibility of canals and martians, there was an international response. For Wells it was War of the Worlds and the idea of an aggressive ancient civilization, for Kurd Lasswitz in Auf Zwei Planeten Mars is an advanced technological utopia; for Bogdanov Mars was a space used to discuss the future of a communist utopia where the martians were red in the sense of being political leftists, ahead of us, advanced. Red Star is a really good utopian novel, and it  anticipates many of the problems the Soviet Union had, a socialist country surrounded by capitalist countries. Bogdanov was a really interesting thinker in systems theory, and his writing is being remembered in different contexts because of his Tektology and his web of life studies. I wanted to make sure that my Mars trilogy picked up all the strands of all the previous Mars novels.