Thread by @doctorow

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of sf's most important utopians, and his utopianism is a model for what we can aspire to. With climate collapse novels like New York 2140, Robinson reveals a utopian vision that is about resiliency in the face of disaster:

boingboing.net/2017/03/18/new…

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While his novel Aurora presents an important rebuttal to the fundamentally dystopian idea that we cannot save the Earth and so must colonize space to ensure the continuance of our species:

boingboing.net/2015/11/02/kim…

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This so infuriated the reactionary wing of "hard sf" that Robinson also wrote a nonfiction piece explaining both the science and philosophy behind that vision:

boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our…

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But my love affair with Robinson's utopianism began with "Pacific Edge," which remains my go-to novel to brighten my spirits in my darkest hour:

boingboing.net/2015/01/15/aud…

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It's the book that's uppermost in my mind as I work on my own next novel, a utopian, post-Green New Deal book called "The Lost Cause."

pluralistic.net/2020/04/28/for…

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Robinson's nonfiction is every bit as good as his fiction, and, more importantly, every bit as visionary. Some of us may find it "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," but not Robinson.

lab.cccb.org/en/angry-optim…

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Importantly, his vision of a sustainable future is both "deep green" and "bright green," grounded in the use of technology to contain and ameliorate the human footprint on our planet.

theguardian.com/cities/2018/ma…

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Robinson is a high-tech pastoralist, a guy who disappears into the Sierras with nothing but a backpack for months at a time (he recently told me that he's not writing fiction for a while so he can concentrate on his definitive history of the Sierras).

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Robinson was offline in the Grand Canyon when the pandemic struck, rafting down the Colorado River. When he emerged, "it was into a different world. I’ve spent my life writing sf...But I was still shocked by how much had changed, and how quickly."

newyorker.com/culture/annals…

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Robinson says the pandemic is "rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era."

(This is what I love about his work!)

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Robinson talks about the pandemic as a kind of training-wheels practice run for the climate emergencies in our near future - a chance to realize how unprepared we are, and how urgent it will all be, and how much we need to do.

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"When disaster strikes, we grasp the complexity of our civilization—we feel the reality, which is that the whole system is a technical improvisation that science keeps from crashing down."

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Coronavirus slays the science denialism that is the ideological basis for climate inaction. "Do we believe in science? Go outside and you’ll see the proof that we do everywhere you look. We’re learning to trust our science as a society."

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Science fiction does crucial work here: "Science fiction traces the ramifications of a single postulated change; readers co-create, judging the writers’ plausibility and ingenuity, interrogating their theories of history. Doing this repeatedly is a kind of training."

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"We’re now confronting a miniature version of the [climate] tragedy of the time horizon. We’ve decided to sacrifice over these months so that, in future, people won’t suffer as much as they would otherwise... the time horizon is so short that we're the future people."

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"To my mind, this new sense of solidarity is one of the few reassuring things to have happened in this century. If we can find it in this crisis, to save ourselves, then maybe we can find it in the big crisis, to save our children and theirs."

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"This knowledge that, although we are practicing social distancing as we need to, we want to be social—we not only want to be social, we’ve got to be social, if we are to survive. It’s a new feeling, this alienation and solidarity at once."

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"We’re hearing two statements. One, from the President: we have to save money even if it costs lives. The other, from the CDC: we have to save lives even if it costs money. Which is more important? Money, of course! says capital. Really? people reply, uncertainly."

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He's got something really important here, it's what's given me hope in my darkest hours.

Before the crisis, I worried that by the time the climate emergency was so manifest that it annihilated denialism, it would be so far gone that nihilism would spring up to replace it.

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As in, "OK, fine, you were right, we should have done something about the rhinos. But since there's only one left, why don't we find out what he tastes like?"

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The crisis feels like, as a civilization, we were that asshole who refused to wear a seatbelt, but then had a car-wreck that put him in a coma -- from which he miraculously recovered, and now he wears his seatbelt every time.

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And like that asshole, we (unforgivably) had to kill a bunch of innocent bystanders to learn a lesson we should have taken to heart a long time ago.

But the only thing worse than our world paying that ghastly price would be to pay it and learn nothing from it.

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This isn't the worst crisis of our lifetime. Probably not even the worst pandemic. We've got more coming, in the form of waves of climate emergencies. This was a wake up call -- it's time to get our asses in gear.

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BTW, that Pacific Edge book that I read every time I get low? It's just been reissued with the other books in the Three Californias trilogy as a "Tor Essential" with an intro by the amazing Francis "Red Plenty" Spufford.

us.macmillan.com/books/97812503…

Image: Rob Beschizza/@beschizza