In some ways, Robinson’s path as a science fiction writer has followed a strange trajectory. He made his name writing about humanity’s far-flung future, with visionary works about the colonization of Mars (“The Mars Trilogy”), interstellar, intergenerational voyages into deep space (“Aurora”), and humanity’s expansion into the far reaches of the solar system (“2312”). But recently, he’s been circling closer to earth, and to the current crisis of catastrophic warming.
Futuristic stories about space exploration feel irrelevant to him now, Robinson said. He’s grown skeptical that humanity’s future lies in the stars, and dismissive of tech billionaires’ ambitions to explore space, even as he acknowledged, “I’m partially responsible for that fantasy.”
In his more recent novels — works like “New York 2140,” an oddly uplifting climate change novel that takes place after New York City is partly submerged by rising tides, and “Red Moon,” set in a lunar city in 2047 — he has traveled back in time, toward the present. Two years ago, he published “The Ministry for the Future,” which opens in 2025 and unfolds over the next few decades, as the world reels from floods, heat waves, and mounting ecological disasters, and an international ministry is created to save the planet.
I definitely think this is a general cultural zeitgeist thing. The progressive thing used to be the positivist “science triumphs over all, humanity rises over petty differences, leaves childish things like religions, nations and races behind and achieves its full potential”. But then people have grown sceptical of all grand narratives, seeing them as inherently poisoned because if you worry about grand things you are more inclined to disregard the small ones. Politics built around reclamation of personal identity, community, tradition as forms of resistance against the rising tide of globalising capitalism have taken over the left. Suddenly being an atheist was not cool any more, it was arrogant and possibly somewhat racist. And wanting to colonise space reeked of white man’s burden even if there probably aren’t many indigenous people to displace up there. So everything moved inwards, and the writers followed that trend.
Kim Stanley Robinson seems to fit this too:
I definitely think this is a general cultural zeitgeist thing. The progressive thing used to be the positivist “science triumphs over all, humanity rises over petty differences, leaves childish things like religions, nations and races behind and achieves its full potential”. But then people have grown sceptical of all grand narratives, seeing them as inherently poisoned because if you worry about grand things you are more inclined to disregard the small ones. Politics built around reclamation of personal identity, community, tradition as forms of resistance against the rising tide of globalising capitalism have taken over the left. Suddenly being an atheist was not cool any more, it was arrogant and possibly somewhat racist. And wanting to colonise space reeked of white man’s burden even if there probably aren’t many indigenous people to displace up there. So everything moved inwards, and the writers followed that trend.