| Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels envision the dire problems of the future—but also their solutions. It isn’t easy to be an optimist in today’s world. And it certainly “isn’t easy to be a utopian science-fiction writer,” as Joshua Rothman writes, in a striking Profile of Kim Stanley Robinson, in this week’s issue. Yet Robinson is both a utopian and an optimist. His twenty-one sci-fi novels often focus on environmental themes but manage to stand out from stereotypical dystopias through their depictions of joy. Robinson’s work can read like nature writing at times, with the Sierra Nevadas, where he’s been hiking for half a century, recast as Mercury or Mars. His most recent novel, “The Ministry for the Future,” revolves around a fictional U.N. agency charged with solving climate change, and poses a “best-case scenario” for the coming decades. Fittingly, Rothman joins Robinson on a nerve-wracking hike in the Sierras—climbing and later descending shelves of rock, titanic boulders, and treacherous granite slopes. He writes of the hike, and of Robinson’s novels, “Even if the path isn’t set, the job before you is clear: you have to get down the mountain before dark.” As with traversing a mountain, the work of addressing climate change may involve adapting, backtracking, or even changing course. What is coming may be inevitable, but our response isn’t. As Rothman notes, “We can still redraw the plans.” Read “Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Our Climate Reality?” —Jessie Li, newsletter editor | | | |
| P.S. Virginia Woolf was born in London on this day in 1882. She is perhaps best known for her novels, but W. H. Auden argued that it was in her diary that she left behind the most truthful record of a writer’s life and mind. Woolf once observed, “One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regent’s Park, and the soul slips in.” | | | |
Today’s newsletter was written by Jessie Li. | | | |
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