The New Yorker Radio Hour - Kim Stanley Robinson on “Utopian” Science Fiction

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

One of the premier writers of thinky sci-fi, Kim Stanley Robinson opened his book “The Ministry for the Future” with an all too plausible scenario: a lethal heat wave descends on India, with vast, horrifying consequences. It’s a sobering read, especially after July, 2021, was declared the hottest month on record. And yet Robinson tells Bill McKibben that his work is not dystopian; his central concern is how the globe could respond to such a disaster and begin to halt the momentum of global warming. “That whole dystopian postapocalyptic strain—it doesn’t serve as a warning, it doesn’t make you change your behavior,” Robinson notes. “I reject all that. I write as a utopian science-fiction writer.” But, “at the moment we’re at right now in world history,” he admits, “I have to set a pretty low bar for ‘utopia.’ If we dodge a mass-extinction event in this century, that’s utopian writing. That’s the best we can expect from where we are right now. Having put that story on the table as being possible, it suggests that we ought to be trying for it.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Vincent Cunningham, sitting in today for David Remnick. I don't tend to go to the beach, I got to say. I live out in the woods all year around. So I think, if anything, I may be the exception of the rule. I read a little bit less in the summer because as the light lingers in the day, I tend to be out enjoying the woods. woods. My reading gets done most in the winter because when it gets dark at 4.30 in the afternoon, you just curl up by the stove and there you are. Bill McKibbin here is a New Yorker contributor and also the founder of the Environmental Organization 350.org. And he is himself one of the great living writers on the natural world. So he's really immersed in that literature. So Bill, a book you told

us really grabbed you was a book called The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Who is Kim Stanley Robinson? Tell me about him. I've been reading his work for a very long time. He's usually defined as a science fiction writer and indeed his first important books, trilogy that won every award that science fiction has to offer took place on Mars. But even then, truthfully, Vincent, they were less science fiction than kind of political science. they're about how humans would settle a place and what the politics of that would be like and how it would be negotiated. And I've admired his work for so many years because he's a humanist in the deepest sense. And he's also just great fun to read.

In many ways, reminds me of Mark Twain in terms of being both in terms of being funny and in terms of being funny and in terms of being. very much about what the psychology of our country and our world is about right now. So the new book is about climate change, but maybe not the straight-up apocalyptic version. What drew you to it? Well, I think what drew me most of all was not the thing that most people have noted, which is the very scary opening scene where an enormous heat wave smacks India, but more the long, long, long list of ingredients. in the recipe for our salvation, a kind of drawing from every possible source, science, economics,

nonviolent movement building, maybe a little bit of dark arts thrown in there, all of which combined to offer, if not salvation, then at least a plausible route out, which seems to me as much as one could possibly ask for at the moment. You got the chance to sit down with Kim Stanley Robinson last week. Indeed, I did, and what a pleasure. Let's start with a little reading. Your newest book, Ministry for the Future, starts with the heatwave in Uttar Pradesh in India.

And let's hear a bit of your description of that event, which we see through the eyes of an American aid worker named Frank. Okay, I'll start. This is very near the first pages. of the book. Everything was tan and beige and a brilliant, unbearable white. Ordinary town in Uttar Pradesh, 6 a.m. He looked at his phone, 38 degrees. In Fahrenheit, that was, he tapped, 103 degrees. Humidity, about 35%. The combination was the thing. A few years ago, it would have been among the hottest wet bulb temperatures ever recorded. Now, just a Wednesday morning.

Whales of dismay cut the air coming from the rooftop across the street. Cries of distress, a pair of young women leaning over the wall calling down to the street. Someone on that roof was not waking up. Frank tapped at his phone and called the police. No answer. He couldn't tell if the call had gone through or not.

Sirens now cut the air, sounding distant as if somehow submerged. With the dawn, people were discovering sleepers in distress, finding those who would never wake up from that long hot night, calling for help. The siren seemed to indicate some of the calls had worked. Frank checked his phone again. It was charged, showed a connection, but no reply at the police station he had had occasion to call a few times in his four months here. Two months to go. 58 days, way too long. July 12th, monsoon not yet arrived. Focus on getting through today,

one day at a time. Then home to Jacksonville, comically cool after this. He would have a story to tell, but the poor people on the rooftop across the way. Stan, it feels like you're barely a beat ahead of the news here. This book's a year old now, and in the meantime, we've seen the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe, the highest temperature we think in Canada since the Pleistocene. We've had the hottest year on record across the globe. Does it feel like you're just barely out in the world of science fiction? Yeah, it sure does.

But, you know, I wasn't really, I mean, I am a science fiction writer, and the near future is an interesting zone to try to write. It always is. But this one was really an easy call to make. There was an argument between mitigation and adaptation, and some people were saying, look, we can't possibly stop climate change. So we just have to adapt to it, and humans are adaptable. But they're wrong about this one thing.

We can't adapt to high heat and heat. humidity and combination. It simply kills humans from hyperthermia. The course that we're on now in the rise of temperature and the latest IPCC report indicates where we're at is such that big swathes of the earth's surface could become uninhabitable for weeks at a time. It'll come and go. The weather is so variable. And so when I wrote, I was writing about a present danger. It was not like 50 years out. It could have, it could happen now. In Pakistan and United Arab Emirates, there had been brief moments of wet bulb 35. And if that lasted for 24 hours, it would have been a catastrophe. So we're right there, yes. Well, part of the, what's interesting about that,

and you just referenced this most recent IPCC report, which was, you know, in many ways, a kind of medical readout of the planet's future as if we were a patient. And yet, it passed within a few hours in the news stream that we were in. And pretty soon we were on to a dozen other things. One of the things that happens in ministry future is that the heat wave in India seems to be a large enough event that it finally starts to shake the system a little bit by the neck. Is that how it's going to be, do you think, will there be finally some trigger that really does that? Or is it going to be a slow accretion of these events one after another? I would reckon a slow accretion.

But the danger of a really big catastrophe is there and could happen. And that will not change the world. The rest of the world will say, ah, well, India's hot or Indonesia's hot or Alabama's hot. And they'll say, it can't happen to me. This is a very common human response. So even in my novel, I wanted to portray a best-case scenario for the next 30 years of how if we did things right, we might come to a place that the people who living then liked. So after my postulated weather extreme heat disaster, I had the Paris Agreement meet at a cop meeting

and decide that they were not keeping up with the pace of catastrophes. and set up a standing committee to study it, and it gets the informal name of the Ministry for the Future, which is to represent the people of the future in current legal situations and political situations. And what they do from that ministry is try all over the world to cooperate and coordinate with any project that's doing good things and forward the good.

And, of course, there's resistance, and there I have my plot. I don't think there's any one trigger that'll make us respond well. We're going to have to educate ourselves and fight for it every little step of the way, I think. Even after 20 million people die in a heat wave in India, people are still taking vacations, having governments, you know, making a living,

having festivals, making music. There's something about that that seems to me to inform this book and many of your books, that sense of people figuring out how to cope in one way, another with the world that we're sliding into. Yes, I think that's right. I mean, I do that, and that's a good story to tell because of the post-apocalyptic zombie imaginary in our culture that after us, the deluge, and those poor people are being

their pets and eating each other, and oh, gosh, we're better off than they are, that whole dystopian post-apocalyptic strain, it doesn't serve as a warning. It doesn't make you change your behavior. You don't worry that the dead are going to come charging out of the graves in the real world. So I reject all that. And I write as a utopian science fiction writer, which at the moment we're at right now in world history, means that I have to set a pretty low bar for utopia. If we dodge a mass extinction event in this century, that's utopian writing.

That's the best we can expect from where we are right now. And having put that story on the table as being possible, it suggests that we ought to be trying for it. So this is the purpose of taking that tack of talking about, okay, life goes on. So let's make it better rather than letting it get worse. Kim Stanley Robinson talking with New Yorker contributor Bill McKibbin. More in a moment. One of the things that marks ministry for the future is this willingness to, throw everything and the kitchen sink at this problem without much regard for ideology or anything

else. You clearly have always identified as leftist. You're openly critical of capitalism. On the other hand, you know, the central banks and their manipulation of currency plays a huge role in the outcome here. Yeah. This is not my own idea. I found it in the literature. There's a paper by Delton Chen, but this is also kind of becoming widespread, quantitative easing. There's a new phrase, carbon quantitative easing. Quantitative easing we saw in 2008, and the economy was crashing. The Fed pumped a whole bunch of money into the economy. We didn't get inflation and the wheels of our economic life were greased and everything went on. It's worked. Now, the trick of the carbon quantitative easing is the central banks simply make up that money and give it first to decarbonization

projects of all kinds from individuals to cities to regions to nation states but always for decarbonization well what i found out after ministry for the future came out is that there is an organization called the network for greening the financial system it's 89 of the biggest central banks on earth. This network, they have all gotten together to discuss carbon quantitative easing. They are in effect inventing the carbon coin that is in my novel. And it's one of several things that's happened since my novel came out that made me realize that in some ways I was behind the curve in ministry for the future, that things are going faster than you can keep up with in your mental space. And I found it very encouraging because

We need these things, and there's a general tendency over social media to doom and despair, and we cannot give in to doom. We have to actually look at all of the good work that's already being done. It strikes me that you've been throughout your career writing about the ways that groups of people try to solve their problems. We've come through this long period in your lifetime and mine, and where we went through what strikes me as a kind of hyper individualism. Do you think that circumstances

are kind of dragging us out of that now and back towards some era where solidarity is more of a possibility? Well, maybe. I would say this. The solidarity is not going to be a kumbaya all people's getting on board with this. We're not constituted that way.

It'll be a political battle of enormous proportion. I'd say we're on a fence, a slippery, a dangerous moment where the possibility of gathering a working political majority that can steamroll the regressive reactionary forces that would drag us down to destruction is there to be had. If it fell apart into nationalism, tribalism, and everybody out for themselves, then it really could fall apart quite badly. but the potential for coming together and saying, look, we're all on this one planet, and we don't have any other planets, as one of the principal living Martians of this time, I will say Mars is just about as important as Antarctica, which is to say not much. Antarctica may be pretty important if it melts, I've got to say.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. There's no doubt about that. We need to keep that ice up there on that ice cap or else the coasts of the world are in terrible trouble. Let's end this close to your home and close to your heart. If I'm correct, you've been spending a lot of time up in the high Sierra and writing about hiking and that incredible terrain. But it must be, there's a little bit of a busman's holiday aspect to it because too often now when we wander the backcountry of Tuolumny or whatever it is, we're looking up in the sky and seeing the smoke from wildfires.

How are you thinking about the range of light, as Muir called events these days? Well, it's very hard. I just got back. So I'm a little overwhelmed. I haven't yet taken it on. It was hazy. That happens in the summer. It's right next to the Central Valley.

It wasn't exceptionally smoky. I've hiked in that too. But the glaciers are gone. The Sierra had 100 glaciers. And I was in Dead Man Canyon. And in the Sequoia National Park this last week, and the head wall of Dead Man Canyon is a perfect amphitheater, like a half bowl dropping into a slot of a funnel.

It's north-facing. So at the very top of this bowl, there are eight glaciers on the map. And the eight on the map are all gone except for the final fragment of a middle one, which was the biggest and also had the most shade during the day. I hiked up to it. I hacked off some ice for my scotch. I kissed it goodbye. It's going to be gone in three years or less.

All night long it was running. Like when your toilet flap hasn't gone down, that sound ran all night long because it didn't get even close to freezing. It was probably 45 degrees at night. But all the stream beds were dry. They were utterly dry. And I mean rivers that you would have had to go knee-deep to cross or meadow oxbows that were 20 free to cross and 10 feet deep. Dry as a bone everywhere.

Only the lakes had water. This is just one winter of drought, a bad snow, and it was the driest part of the Sierra typically. I'm going to go up again and see what it's like further north next week. but I tell you it was shocking and devastating. Well, I completely hear you. And I think all of us who love particular places in the natural world and are watching them change have a lot of that.

And let me just say in the deepest sense, thank you enormously for being willing to look all that square in the face and bring us the story over and over and over again. We're very, very much in your dead in all sorts of ways for that. And thank you enormously, Stan. Thank you. Kim Stanley Robinson's book, The Ministry for the Future, came out last year. You can read Bill McKibben's writing on climate and the environment at New Yorker.com.

I'm Vincent Cunningham. I've been sitting in for David Remnick today. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC, studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of tune yards. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.