With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson 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, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by RTB’s JP, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asked him to reflect on the book’s impact in this conversation with our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue.
KSR, Stan to his friends, 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 this 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)

Listen and Read.

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