Transcript Below:
Chapters/Topics:
Introduction – 00:00
Research and Writing Process for the Mars Trilogy – 02:05
Moving Towards a Dystopian Future? – 10:00
Relationship with Melville/Moby Dick – 19:00
Humanity in spite of Earth vs. Humanity for sake of Earth? – 31:00
Process for the novel: Shaman – 44:20
Have Mars’ Scientists Contacted You For Help?/Thoughts on today’s Mars’ Research and Elon Musk – 55:37
[00:00:00.00] – John Knych – Introduction
Kim Stanley Robinson, a towering figure in the Sci-Fi genre. He has published over 20 novels and won basically every Sci-Fi award there is to win in a career that spans over 40 years. Since AI is prophetically prevalent in all three Mars books, I asked ChatGPT and Deep Seek, who are the greatest living Sci-Fi authors? And Stan appears on both lists. He completed his PhD in English from the University of California in 1982, writing a dissertation on Philip K. Dick under the Marxist scholar, Frederick Jameson. He was also taught by Ursula K. Le Guin. Red Mars was his sixth novel, and the series collectively won the Nebula, BSFA, Hugo Twice, and Locus Award. Published over 30 years ago, this trilogy marked Stan as one of the leading pioneers of the hard sci-fi genre, which has been steadily gaining popularity since he blazed the path. The trilogy has resonated globally and with successive generations. As I just said to some of the people here, I live in Paris, and since I started reading the trilogy last summer, I’ve seen three strangers reading the series in public and encountered enthusiasm for the trilogy amongst this sci-fi reading group.
[00:01:11.19]
I saw in an interview that Stan said that the Mars series was sparked by information obtained by the Viking probe in the late 1970s, along with knowledge of Terraforming, published by Carl Sagan. And Stan took the ideas and, quote, jumped off the diving board. He does all his writing outdoors on his front patio, shaded by a tarp year round. He loves to hike and backpack, and he estimates that he has spent cumulatively two years of his life in the wilderness. And lastly, let’s jump into this roundtable discussion. My first question to you Stan has to do with research, process, and writing. You mentioned in the interview that when you started working on the series, you had every Mars book that was ever written, and it was on two book shelves. I was completely blown away that you wrote this before the Internet. Did you do the majority of your research in the ’80s before writing this series? Were you writing and researching simultaneously? Can you just start with talking about your process for this series?
[00:02:09.14] – Kim Stanley Robinson – Writing and Research Process
Yes, and thank you for this. It’s a pleasure for me to talk about the Mars trilogy, even though it’s now almost 30 years since I finished it. It was long before then when I began thinking about it. It really was the Viking lander and orbiter of ’76 that handed Mars to us on a plate. It’s startling to think how ignorant we were of Mars before the mariner and Viking satellite missions in ’69 and ’76. There was really a dearth of information about the surface and conditions and landscape and everything. But then suddenly it was all there. I said millions of times more information, and I think that’s accurate. I was a young science fiction writer. I had fallen in love with it as an undergraduate at UC San Diego, and I was reading it as an English major in a second track. Ordinary English major, on the one hand, science fiction autodidact, and on the other hand, in writing science fiction short stories, selling them to a great science fiction editor and teacher named Damon Knight. I love Damon and his wife, Kate, he was a superb teacher. He had been in science fiction from the time of Asimov, say the so-called golden age, 1940s, although Damon himself was younger, wrote mostly social science fiction like Philip K. Dick in the 1950s…
[00:03:48.15] – Kim Stanley Robinson
…and then became an editor really prominent in the new wave in America in the 1960s and 1970s. I was by no means I mean, I was one of many of his students whom he bought and published for the first time, and then in a patron system, mentored us through the first 5 or 10 years of our careers. There’s a lot of us like me in that respect. I was already working on science fiction short stories and interested in the solar system. There was also Voyager giving us the Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune on its way out of the solar system. It was exciting times for what became my zone of interest, which was the next couple of centuries in the solar system. So I mean, understand that science fiction is big field, big genre, and it could be far future. It can go out millions of years. It can cross galaxies, et cetera, space opera, or it can be the day after tomorrow, like cyberpunk when I was young. But in between that zone was a zone that I liked, and I wasn’t the only one writing in it. There were older writers like Frederick Poehl or contemporaries of mine like Michael Swannwick, for whom the Solar System was an interesting story space and even seemed like we could go there.
[00:05:22.01] – Kim Stanley Robinson
And then Mars, boom, the obvious space for visiting, being closest to us, and also being most like Earth. At the same time we learned everything about Mars, the idea of terraforming came about. This was, I think, a dual action. Because if you were thinking, oh, a science fiction thought, could we turn a planet somewhat like ours, but desolate? Could we give it life? Could we terraform it and make it Earth-like? Well, the reason people began to think of that was because it was clear there was frozen water on Mars. It had 37% our gravity. It was a candidate for terraforming in an example right from the start. There was a group of people called The Case for Mars. They were undergraduate students at University of Colorado, Boulder, studying planetology. Chris McKay, Penny Boston, Carol Stoker, Bob Zubrin. They were a club, and they ran a conference at Boulder, and they published gigantic casebooks out of these conferences that would include 20 articles per book, giant turquoise trade paperbacks. I read those books. I contacted those people, especially Chris McKay, and I began to think the story of Terraforming Mars would make a great novel. I thought of it as a single novel.
[00:06:46.04] – Kim Stanley Robinson
I still do, but of course, trilogies have… Sometimes they’re just a really long novel. Other times, they’re three novels with gaps in between that are significant and differences, et cetera. You see it all. In my case, I was thinking of a single novel to be called Green Mars. So not to go on too long about it in this one, but I did want to give you the backdrop. From ’76 till I started writing in 1989, so 13 years, I was always reading about Mars. I was talking to scientists like Chris McKay, reading the technical literature from their group, and even writing some short stories, exploring Castle Canyon, the novella called Green Mars, which is a climbing story that doesn’t even appear in the novel. I wanted to grab the title. The title struck me as so obvious that I realized by the time I got to it, to writing my novel because I was writing other novels at the time, and I was still trying to figure out how to do it to tell a story 200 years long. I grabbed the title, and there was maybe a couple other… No, maybe not. Those two stories represented my actual writing got my flag on the ground.
[00:08:04.08] – kim Stanley Robinson
Of course, you can’t copyright titles, but you can be the first one to use them, which is significant. That’s what I did with that story, which came out in, say, 84 or 85. In 1989, I had finished my California trilogy. I was set and ready to go. I conceived of the structure as being these chapter long chapters that were from the third-person point of view of a character in the first group on Mars, roving around. This is a style out of Philip K. Dick. You see it also in William Faulkner. It’s not unique to me by any means. Sometimes called free and direct, sometimes called third person limited, depends on which tradition you’re coming out of. But once I had the in mind, I began to write it in ’89. I finished Blue Mars in October of ’95, so it was six years, and a very, very intense and absorbing six years. I’ll leave it at that, and we can go on from that description.
[00:09:20.07] – John Knych
Thank you, Stan. Fascinating. Josh, we can move to you for your question.
[00:09:25.16] – Josh – Moving Towards a Dystopian Future?
Sure. Hi. I I had a very interesting one looking back at the Red Miles in particular, which was formational for me in terms of politics, environment, and just centering my thoughts. But I was thinking the other day, so in Red Mars, particularly, you have the growing power of big corporations, transnationals, metanats, as the main antagonist.
[00:10:00.00] – Josh
In the 30 years since the books have come out, we’ve now got global companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, with over $2 trillion in worth, which is, I think, just short of the UK’s entire GDP. Are we speed running into the dystopian future that red Mars starts with back on Earth?
[00:10:24.15] – Kim Stanley RObinson
Well, I don’t know, but thank you for asking, and I appreciate this angle on it. I can say this. The ’80s were a shocking time for a young leftist literary person like myself. Recall the ’60s, the time of enormous social upheaval, and then the ’70s were an attempt to consolidate the liberatory impulses the anti-Vietnam War protests, the hippie movement. I was a young hippie and trained by Frederick Jameson, a Marxist, to regard political economy as the most important way of seeing history, what was happening at the economic level. In 1980, you can call this now the beginning of neoliberalism with the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution. Reagan and Thatcher between them was a seizure of government by the right, by business interests, and a dismantling of the Keynesian social state that had been dominant from the Great Depression up through 1980, somewhat falling apart with the leaving of the gold standard and the economic crisis of the gas crisis of 1973, which is maybe partly the war between the Arab States and Israel. All these things happening, and at the time in a feeling of chaos, that anything could happen. That’s a hard feeling to reproduce now, I think, or to remember well, that anything could happen next.
[00:12:12.05] – Kim Stanley Robinson
Nothing was more surprising than the anything being the return of the right and the destruction of the Keynesian social state by way of neoliberalism. By the time I began to write in 1989, that had been going on for 10 years. It was clear that if you regard history as a struggle between the state and finance, between government and business, between public and private, between private money and the public good, these various ways of describing our current moment in history as a struggle. Sometimes you could call this a class struggle, although that’s a complication that I think is confusing at this point. Class, but you still can use it. It still has power. The people who have capital and the people who don’t, they have different interests in this world as to how the world should be run. The people who have capital have definitely dominated the battle since 1980, and I feel like that fell apart only in 2020 with the pandemic, with a heavy duty precursor being the crash of 2008. But also in that time was the of the Soviet Union and the end of state socialism or communist countries, whatever you want to call it, except for in China.
[00:13:40.03] – Kim Stanley Robinson
I know you understand that all this is oversimplifying for the sake of I’m having an answer. But by the time I wrote Red Mars, it didn’t need any predictive powers on my part, which I don’t have. But it did require a good analysis of the present, which I did have that was given to me by Jameson and by other people I was learning from, like Le Guin, like Gary Snyder, the Buddhist poet, putting together out of my education a sense of what was important and then putting it into Red Mars. I can say this, writing about a whole new society on Red Mars allowed me a miniaturization or a mirror a modeling system where I could rehearse all these forces in play in a offshoot story that might illustrate what was going on back on Earth. We have described the transnationals, and then the multinationals as corporations that are more powerful than many nation states, and the states being, in my book, represented by the United Nations, and that now seems quite wrong. But on the other hand, the United Nations is still a player of some sort. On a place like Mars, which was on the Outer Space Treaty, it would have been regarded as a commons, all these things were put into play.
[00:15:16.04] – Kim Stanley Robinson
I could also bring in the role of science and scientists as being a a proto utopian space, not capitalist, not looking for profit, but looking for knowledge or increased safety and comfort for humans. That’s not really what Mars is about. Yet without the scientific world’s achievements, you couldn’t get to Mars nor survive there. Somehow science was in play. Indeed, John soon in his big speech up on Olympus Mons at the end of Chapter 5, right before his assassination. We can talk later about the structure of Red Mars It’s a temporal structure. But in his speech, I think he says, Now it is a case of democracy versus capitalism. Okay, I wrote that in 1989. This is something that people were saying in 1880, so it isn’t like I was any diagnostician, but I was expressing a particular ideological reading of what was going on in world history that was a leftist claim, a leftist diagnosis, and a defense of science, democracy, and environmentalism as being a bundled group of value systems opposed to raw capitalism. So I’ll leave it at that. But I think that gives me another step along the way as to what I was doing in that book.
[00:16:56.03] – Josh
That’s really interesting. I will have to reflect look back, especially what you said about 1880, to see that pattern. It sounds like I haven’t recognized that pattern going a lot further back than the last 50 years.
[00:17:13.23] – Kim Stanley Robinson
It’s true. Actually, Actually, and what you say is important to remember that there are analysis that talk about capitalism and democracy as opposed to autocratic fascist systems that are also collective or communists. In other words, saying a democracy and capitalism are not a match but are opponents, this is not obvious, nor is it generally agreed upon. It’s one analysis amongst others. And very often you’ll see people like, I don’t know, Martin Wolf at the Financial Times that will talk about a democracy and capitalism being a paired enterprise coming out of the the Protestant revolution in the industrial revolution. It’s not at all uncommon to say democracy and capitalism are a paired system. But then what the Marxist analysis would say is that capital rules and democracy is a false front in front of an oligarchy that really runs things. That debate goes on, and I wouldn’t want to… When I talked about 1880, I mean really the second international, that Marxism in general as something beyond Karl Marx, began to say this right from the start and advocate for proletariat control, the worker state, communism, socialism, et cetera. So again, this is all polemical and ideological diagnosis.
[00:18:47.12] – Kim Stanley Robinson
Not something that is settled at all, but just one statement amongst the rest.
[00:18:56.07] – Josh
Thank you.
[00:18:58.09] – John Knych
That’s the thing. Thank you, Stan. Virginie, would you like to ask your question now?
[00:19:01.13] – Virginie Actis – Relationship with Melville/Moby Dick
Yes, I had the first question. For the French reader who I am, reading a Ministry for the Future really made me think, and especially the way you entangle argumentation, philosophical essay and fiction made me think, and it’s not an original question, I assume, but I’m dying to ask you this question, made me feel of Herman Melville’s prose. I’d like to know, for me, if it was a creative response, a remote dialogue with Melveill. I’d like to know what is your relation to Moby Dick or Herman Melville’s work, and your definition of the art of fiction, merci, art of fiction.
[00:19:59.10] – Kim Stanley Robinson
Yeah, Well, thank you for that, Virginie. I love Melville. I noticed the Moby Dick behind John, that’s the Rockwell Kent version with woodblock prints by the great Rockwell Kent. And of course, let me just say immediately that Moby Dick is a strange and bizarre, but a work of transcendent genius and impossible to match. The skill, the sheer gift of his inventiveness in language, I reread the book on a rolling basis in our house in Maine. My wife’s mom came from the Coast of Maine. We have a little cabin there on a lake, on an island in the ocean. Moby Dick just sits there. When I live there, I read it. When I finish, I start over again. Some of those chapters, particularly The Line, they are beautiful philosophical essays sometimes. They’re crazy instructional manuals, like in how to take the blubber off a dead whale. You know Moby Dick. It’s in everything. What he did there was he showed that the novel is a really capacious and powerful genre that you can toss in big chunks, like in a stew, big chunks of non-fiction or those little dramatized passages where it’s presented as a play where the sailors are speaking as in a play.
[00:21:36.19] – Kim Stanley Robinson
All of these things, the plot of Moby Dick could be written on the back of an envelope. But here it is this vast piece of life with the archetypal ending, the spacy fantasy novel ending of Moby Dick, of nailing a Hawk to the mast as the ship goes down. I mean, this is a surrealism, along with everything else. It is highly symbolical and surreal and bold as hell and a beautiful achievement, even though it’s also a hodgepodge and a mess. I flatly disbelived that Melville had a strong sense of what he was doing. He had to just trust the material, and he’s writing in longhand and not revising hugely like we can on computers. It was inspired and beautiful. Of course, I took inspiration from it in a most general way for my whole life as a novelist is, do whatever you can think of and don’t worry. The form is going to be okay. Even if you don’t know how this book will hit readers, you can never know that. So don’t worry about that part of it. You can just do your best, throw it out there like a roll of the dice or a dropping of a bunch of Euro stocks on the floor, like in fortune telling in the Dao De Jing or the Yi Jing, and you throw it on the…
[00:23:15.10] – Kim Stanley Robinson
And then you leave it to the readers to recreate in their own minds by their own creative effort. And this is another beauty of novels. Someone assigns you Moby Dick in a class in high school, and you’re thinking, This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. I hate it. I’m bored. I’m never going to read a novel again. You aren’t ready for it, and you haven’t brought yourself to it. But if you come to it and you realize that the first five chapters of Moby Dick are hilarious, that they are a comedy, a deadpan comedy of accidents before they get on the ship, everything in that port town is played for comedy. Even a a gay a comedy, a comedy of a homo-sociality, you might say, that was entirely transgressive. So that in the 20 years after Moby Dick came out, the main readers of it were British sailors who read through the code and realized this was a book about them and their homosocial and homosexual lives. They would come visit Melville in his old age and say, Oh, will you sign your book? I love your book. At that point, it had out of print and forgotten in America for at least 30 years.
[00:24:33.16] – Kim Stanley RObinson
I suppose Melville probably appreciated these young British men dropping by. But to conclude, it’s been very important to me, as you can tell. I’ve loved it. It’s part of my life. Also what he teaches you is trust the reader, don’t worry, do something crazy, and it’ll either work or it won’t. But he teaches courage for the novel, and he brought it off. He’s a true poet, a true philosopher, and a true novelist. Yet, like Pierre, the book that followed, or the theory books that preceded it, they are not as good. There’s some good Melville that isn’t in Moby Dick, but it sits head and shoulders above all the rest of his production. I say that having read them all hoping for and sometimes just thinking, Okay, he made a roll of dice there, and that came up zero. That is an unreadable mess. Why did Moby Dick work? It was his life’s experiences. He knew this stuff. He put his life into a novel as well as all this philosophy and material. All these were lessons and a permanent support system in my life or a source of joy and also of courage, just like, hey, Melville did it.
[00:26:00.21] – Kim Stanley Robinson
His career crashed. He spent the whole second half of his life as a customs inspector. I actually have a novella in mind that maybe I will write called Hermann Melville, Customs Inspector, that will be about his I think quite dangerous life on the docks of New York as the only honest customs inspector. Surely his life was endangered from both sides. If I write this novella, you’ll learn more about it of my love for Melville. But what an achievement, really. He also taught me, You know what? You’ve got a story that’s going to take 200 years here, and it’s about all kinds of things. Go ahead and be patient. Explain everything. Admit that you’re in a long novel, that it’s going to be a trilogy because of how thick books can be has a limit. And don’t worry about it. It’s going to be long. Trust the material. Don’t stress. Don’t try to compress. Try to expand. So this is also like Proust. Proust is another novelist God to me who, just with his own life, again, the seven volumes, at least in English, it’s seven volumes, the three volumes, In Search of Lost Time, again, gives me courage to think that this neurotic housebound social hangar on could write one of the greatest novels ever, simply by being patient and making characters and trusting the material.
[00:27:45.07] – Kim Stanley Robinson
I bring up Proust, and maybe later we can also talk about Michel, Michel Duval, the French man who is one of the first hundreds, and one of my favorites in many ways. That was a gesture. My foreign language was French when I was an English major. Jamieson was a French professor. I had been tasked to read in particular my favorite Camus, but also Sart and Levie Strauss, and that whole tradition that Jamieson was intensely interested in. He was basically the professor that brought the French theory from start to the present to the American and English reading audiences. So all these things were tied together for me. And I think they show in the Mars trilogy, I couldn’t have written it without Jamieson and Camus and Proust and Melville. Not that I’m claiming any equivalence here because one can never know, but in terms of my own sense of courage and procedure, like what to do These were all really important.
[00:29:04.09] – Virginie Actis
Thank you for this wonderful answer for me. I also read that you were familiar with Jeunet and all this, so Barth Jeunet. Oh, yes.
[00:29:15.24] – Kim Stanley Robinson
Yeah, Gérard Genet has a book that in English is called Narrative Discourse. I think in French, it was Figures, One and Two. What he was was a structuralist of the novel. Maybe the rest of you know this, maybe Virginie already does. But I want to say it. His book is an analysis of the structures of novels that is very good on If you’re an analytical type thinker, on things like chronology and point of view, et cetera. Very technical. His examples for how these things work, every single example is out of Proust’s novel. It’s a a joke. It’s a Proust study, but it’s also, Oh, novels can do this, novels can do that. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s look at page 820 of Proust’s novel, and you’ll see what I mean here. I’ve always loved that book. I have a marked-up copy of it that I lost for a while, and I re-found it, I guess. I hope. But Jeanette was really, in terms of technical criticism, he was, for me, the critical figure and Jameson was always puzzled by this. For him, Jeannette is barely worth a page in his… Say he’s got 500 pages on French theory.
[00:30:40.11] – Kim Stanley Robinson
There’s only one page for Jeannette, but for me, that was the important theorist of all that crowd.
[00:30:49.05] – Virginie Actis
Thank you so much.
[00:30:50.06] – John Knych
Thank you, Virginie. That’s probably the best Melville tribute I’ve ever heard or read in my life. We’ll move on to John. John, for your question.
[00:31:03.06] – John HelkenN – Humanity in spite of Earth vs. Humanity For the Sake of Earth?
First of all, I’m fanboining out really hard right now. I read Red Mars when I was 13, I think it was my first introduction into hard I, a lot of it went over the head at that moment, but I’ve reread the series since, as well as a lot more of your works since then. I noticed a lot of the similarities and the between Ministry of the Future and the Mars trilogy. The Mars trilogy, or at least red Mars being humanity in spite of Earth, whereas the Ministry of the Future has become humanity for the sake of Earth. I’m curious as to the dichotomy, and I see this in a lot of your other works, of going out and exploring the massive system of systems and change that’s needed in creating worlds and societies and functioning ecosystems elsewhere versus coming home and fixing our current system and climate and how do you balance those out in your process and create a plan to tell that human experience through that vehicle?
[00:32:30.13] – Kim Stanley Robinson
Well, thank you for that. It’s been a progression. I explained to you how I got interested in Mars and the Solar System. This is the ’70s and the ’80s. Then when I finished the Mars trilogy, I almost immediately, like the next month, went to Antarctica for the first time and gathered the observations and materials that I turned into the novel Antarctica which when it was published, some people called it White Mars because it was so filled with the Mars ethos of living off the land that you have and of making a new left cooperative political organization and battling the elements. There were similarities for sure because I was still on that trajectory. But what I saw in Antarctica made me think, Mars is going to be like this. It’s not going to be like I portrayed it in my books over the next 200 years. It’s going to be a scientific station where astronauts and scientists go up there. They live for five years. They take on this enormous load of radiation, and they come back to Earth. That seems like a more likely scenario, given everything that I saw in Antarctica, that it’s an amazing place, and yet people in the North barely regard it.
[00:33:57.19] – Kim Stanley Robinson
You don’t have fan clubs for South Pole station in the rest of the world. You don’t have people tracking what people are doing in McMurdo every day as if that’s interesting, even though it is. Mars would probably turn out to be somewhat like that, like the International Space Station, nobody’s deeply tracking what happens there. We only are interested in the place we haven’t got to, not to the places where we are. I was rocked back by that experience and that impression as to what might really happen. Then the little landers landed on… The robot landers landed on Mars around 2000. They came back with the news that the surface sand is stuffed with perchlorates. These are poisonous to humans. They use perchlorates in a solution. If they want to kill your thyroid to slow down on hyperthyroidism, they give you a perchlorate mix where the perchlorates are in the parts per billion, and it does the job on a human being. In the sands of Mars, it’s in the parts per hundred. Mars is poisonous. I did not know that. Nobody knew that when I wrote the book. They didn’t know how poisonous it was.
[00:35:16.15] – Kim Stanley Robinson
Of course, they knew it’s only 7% of our atmosphere or less, 1%, and that it’s CO₂. Essentially, you’d die the moment you were exposed to the surface. We knew that. But we didn’t know that if you If you set up a little space station there, eventually, you’d be exposed to a toxic substance that is right there in the soil that you can’t get rid of. Chris McKay, holding on to the Mars terraforming dream, says, As soon as that sand gets wet, it will transform chemically to something much safer to humans. But how do you wet the whole surface of Mars? It’s a chicken and egg problem. You can’t terraform it until you’ve terraformed it, or you can’t live there until Until you’ve done something quite radical to the entire surface that we require, as the trilogy does point out, stupendous amount of time and physical energy, heat. That rock me back as well. Then everything that was happening on Earth with climate change became equally obvious in those years, end of the ’90s, beginning of the 2000s. That Earth was in trouble is in the Mars trilogy. Notice that the end of green Mars, there’s a volcanic eruption under the West and Arctic ice sheet, and suddenly sea level is 25 feet higher, everyone on Earth, and Earth is devastated and catastrophized.
[00:36:40.09] – Kim Stanley Robinson
It’s all there in the Mars trilogy. And indeed, someone, maybe it’s Anne Clayborn at some point says disgustedly, Oh, my God, they’re terraforming Earth now. They’re trying to get control of the CO₂ problem. So I had a handle on it. I did not have to say, Oh, my God, I was wrong. I just had to keep up with what was happening and adjust my stories to the new information so that it would still be… I mean, you have to understand that from my age bracket, hard science fiction is opposed to soft science fiction or literary science fiction. Hard science fiction is Heinlein and Larry Niven. Soft science fiction is me and Ursula Le Guin. But what I did was I invaded their territory, that it could be science fictional and be leftist that it could be, in other words, hard and based on the physical sciences and no, nothing made up, but still be leftist. This confused him. I believe that in America, the phrase hard science fiction was basically blown up by me because it no longer made any sense ideologically. You couldn’t position it. That’s an older reading of this term, and I realized these terms come back and I have no control over them.
[00:37:56.21] – Kim Stanley Robinson
I hated cyberpunk. I don’t I don’t like punk used as a suffix. I don’t like soler punk. They should call themselves utopians or cooperatives or leftists. But whatever I think about names doesn’t matter because I’m not choosing the names. The names get chosen by the culture and they get stuck on you like labels. They would call me when I was young, Oh, this is literary science fiction. Well, this was a double put down. It was like an oxymoron. What literary means, Oh, God, this guy writes better than everybody else, which was not true, but it was trying to gesture to characters mattered and writing mattered. Well, theater You can’t get more beautiful than the writing of the ’40s if you get away from Heinlein, Clarke, Herbert. Whatever you think of Bradbury, I mean, his fine writing is often Purple prose, and he’s not scientific, But literary science fiction was a an attack term. Feminist science fiction was a an attack term to bracket people like Joanna Russ or Elisabeth Varnerberg from Quebec. These Well, by the name, you put them in a pigeon hole that they can’t escape and you marginalize them. I always have said, it’s not literary science fiction, it’s not soft science fiction.
[00:39:28.07] – Kim Stanley Robinson
It’s definitely not hard science fiction because the hardness was right wing. It was political hardness. I always tried to spike these subcategories. I would say, I am a science fiction writer. That’s already a pigeon hole that’s a little too small. But I’ll accept it in the way that gay people had to take on this notion of being gay or being queer. It’s an insult at first. You take it on as a flag of pride, as a way of spiking opposition to your project. Yeah, I’m a gay person. Yeah, I’m queer. What’s it to you? So I would say to the world, Yeah, I’m a science fiction writer. Science fiction is the best literature of the second half of the 20th century. What are you going to do to me? And so it was a aggressiveness. Yes, of course. And indeed, in America, when I was young, people would say, What do you do? If I said, I’m a writer, and then they would say, What do you write? And then I would say, Oh, I write science fiction. They would look at me like, Oh, but I thought you said you were a writer. As if I had said I was a comic writer or a pornographer.
[00:40:32.09] – Kim Stanley Robinson
So I quickly switched. When people asked me what I did, I’d say, I’m a science fiction writer. So it was to short circuit that bad conversation that would happen I mean, this is to go back into the past. What you asked about, John, was really more productive and future-oriented. I mean, I wrote Aurora to suggests that we can’t get to the stars. It’s technically impossible, and it would be humanly like putting people in prison. I wrote New York 2140 to suggest that we need to take care of the Earth or else it’ll be a sad place. I wrote 2312 to say the solar system is still very cool, very interesting. And in 300 years, if we take care of the Earth, or even if we don’t, the rich people might go off and make little utopias all around the solar system. And I played a game in 2312 that I probably, you noticed if you read it, they never go to Mars, except in the very last chapter. But when they’re passing it by, they say, Oh, I hear that’s an interesting story, that place. But the main Martian in 2312 is a person without gender who is only about two and a half feet tall, who is the detective in the story.
[00:41:54.23] – Kim Stanley Robinson
That person, they say, Oh, I hate that place. I was young there. I hate that place. It’s got a bunch of canals. They ruined it by terraforming it too fast, and they kicked me out. I’m in exile, so I exiled them. They zoom by Mars using it as a gravity swing. It was a way of making a joke to my Mars readers. If you’d read the Mars trilogy, you could see in 2312 that I was dodging that one in order to talk about all the rest of them and make a a joke for people who have stuck with me through all these years. So yes, it has stuck with me. I’ve tried to I’ve tried to stay true to the science. As a science fiction writer, I think one fundamental thing is trust the sciences to give you some great stories and don’t ignore the news stories that they’re telling you. If they’re telling you it’s going to be hard to become immortal, they’re right. If they’re telling you Mars is poisonous, they are right. If you continue to write in the knowledge base that we had 50 years ago, then you become a fantasy writer.
[00:43:00.21] – Kim Stanley Robinson
One thing I’ve always said to people is, I don’t like fantasy because people think science fiction, fantasy, same thing, right? Same part of the bookstore. I just say, I love fantasy. It’s like telling people your dreams. It’s just so free wheeling and bogus. I never get moved by it. I can’t get into it. It was like, wow, these guys are weird. What esthetics are that? What an ideology is that? It’s good for discussion.
[00:43:27.14] – John Knych
Thank you, Stan. Before moving on to Matt’s question, please excuse my label of you as a hard science fiction writer in the introduction. I didn’t know the background that hard was right.
[00:43:40.03] – Kim Stanley Robinson
Yeah, that’s all right. I’m used to it, and I accept everything. I’m also a cli-fi writer of all the things that make me roll my eyes. I don’t care what I’m called. Well, I do, but you see what I mean.
[00:43:51.19] – John Knych
Yes. I think we’re living through a sci-fi renaissance. I love hard sci-fi. In my definition of it, it’s just that you the writer sticks to facts and science, but I didn’t know how the label changed. But I don’t want to take up time. Matt, what’s your question for Stan?
[00:44:12.24] – Matt Bitonti
Hello.
[00:44:13.19] – Matt Bitonti
I am also a huge fan and would like to ask you about one of your early works called Shaman.
[00:44:21.13] – Matt Bitonti – Process for the novel: Shaman
This, I feel, is a beautiful underrated work. I recommend it to everyone. We were talking about categories. It’s technically not science fiction. It’s labeled as historical fiction or prehistorical fiction, if you want to go there. But the matriarchal societies, the lives of these people, for those who haven’t read it, they’re like the French cave painters, I think, from maybe 25 or 30,000 years ago. I just wanted to hear a little bit about your process for that one. That’s the one I always recommend when people ask me about your work. I appreciate that very much.
Kim Stanley Robinson
I love I love Shaman. It’s one of my favorites of my own work. It’s not early. I wrote it in 2011 or so. I guess that’s getting back there now. But it came late on in what I call the Orbit 6. I had finished my Washington DC trilogy, which was a mess and did not turn out nicely like the Mars trilogy did. Using the same format, to describe Washington DC, I lost my bearings and I got I drowned in the swamp of Washington DC, where I’d lived before I wrote that one. I was staggering around and a British editor named Tim Holman said, I’ll publish you next, and I’ll even just buy three books, and we’ll figure out later what they are, past 2312.
[00:45:50.13] – Kim Stanley Robinson
A great gesture of confidence that I totally appreciate. The second book I came to him was, I said, I’ve had this idea for a pre-historical novel, and I must say that pre-history, we don’t know what happened then except for archeology. It’s science that taught us what happened before the written record. Pre-historic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction in in my definition, and even on the bookstore shelves. Most prehistoric novels are stuck in the science fiction section. And science fiction writers like Robert Silverberg or Michael Bishop, several others in the ’50s, would send time travelers back to the Paleolithic times to see what humans were like because we were getting a better sense of it. I mean, the Alaska cave wasn’t discovered until, I forget when, but I think it was early 20th century. Then the Chauvet Cave, which was the one that boggled my mind, was 1991 or so. So 20th century gave us prehistory as a part of Anthepology. Then the question became, why When did we evolve the way we did? When did we get language? When did we get fire? When did we get tools? When did we get hierarchy? When did we get patriarchy?
[00:47:08.23] – Kim Stanley Robinson
So it wasn’t just tools, but systems. And there it gets very science-fictional. You have to guess. And it’s like a detective story. You got a few shattered pieces of clay on the ground and a few stowing points. Oh, that was an egalitarian system. Well, there’s a lot of detective and guesswork going on in these things that I quite love. It shades into science fiction almost naturally because of the nature of the evidence not having written records and yet having at least 50,000 years of pretty clear signs on the ground of what we were doing. And that keeps getting pushed back. I was fascinated. And Tim Holman said, Go for it. I don’t care that it seems out of genre for you. You do what you want, I’ll support it. And truthfully, when Shaman came out in It must have been 2013 or so. My publisher, Hachet, the whole publishing group, one of the big five, Hachet, was in a war with amazon. Com with Jeff Bezos, just over royalty points, just over money. Who gets the most out of ebooks? The seller and distributor of Kindle or the actual publisher? They were fighting over points.
[00:48:24.12] – Kim Stanley Robinson
And in that war, Amazon for Hachet books, they began to stab them all in the back, right on Amazon. So when Shaman came out on Amazon, it said, We can deliver this book in six weeks, but you might prefer Clown of the Cave Bear instead. So this was quite bad. And Shaman had a a strangled birth, you might say, because at that point, even then, Amazon was two-thirds to three-quarters of all sales in the United States for books. So the poor book staggered around, but it has people like you for whom it’s important, for whom it speaks to how we began, about the beginnings of art, about just the adventure of living out in the world with a small band and with powerful technologies, but not that powerful compared to what we have now. I was a snow camper. I had spent a lot of time snow camping in the Sierra Nevada. That’s the only part that I could bring my own knowledge base to it was snowshoes. So naturally, there’s a big strand of snow shoe invention in Shaman, and I believe they had tremendously good gear in terms of footwear, clothing, and snow shoes.
[00:49:40.10] – Kim Stanley Robinson
But all those things rot, and we don’t have them as material traces. Except for the Iceman. The Iceman was very important to me. The guy was discovered in the ice on the border between Austria and Germany. He was called Utsi for a while. But then when the Austrians gave him back to the Italians, because he was on the Italian side of the border by about 100 yards. An amazingly civilized act, by the way, for Austria just to give him back. Now he’s in a museum in Balzano. That guy was frozen in place with all of his gear. All of his gear, except for his copper ax, was probably much like what he had for thousands of years, 50,000 years or so, of gear development and fine-tuning. His kit is about exactly the same as what I backpack with. Everything he has, we have modern equivalents for. Right down to a cigarette lighter. He had a little fire carrier where he could carry a coal through the course of a whole day on his body and then get a better lit fire that night. All this was mind boggling to me, as was the Chauvet Cave and the images inside the Chauvet Cave.
[00:50:53.23] – Kim Stanley Robinson
The French government has a website for the Chauvet Cave that shows the panel of the four horses being painted in the order they were really painted, which is the archeology that they can do, the analysis. I had such a gift of material there between my own experiences and between my interest in these ancient experiences. It struck me as part of the project, what are we and what will we become? You need to add what were we to get us to where we are now. Since our DNA is exactly the same, except for some small variants like lactose tolerance, our DNA is exactly the same as it was 30,000 years ago. You got to imagine them as just like us. The same brain, the same linguistic capacity. If we were born in the Yardesh in France 30,000 years ago, it would be IHH stuff. There would be both rhinoceroses and gigantic cave bears and lions all in Southern France in an ice age. There’s different iterations of these big creatures. But humans would be a small band of primates, like really smart technological monkeys, apes, of course. But think of them We think of ourselves as monkeys doing quite well in this context, but not by any means dominating it.
[00:52:22.10] – Kim Stanley Robinson
The art being animal-directed makes perfect sense because these animals were dominant. It was about a year in my life As I was writing, I was thinking, Okay, I just don’t want to end. I don’t want to finish writing this book. I just want to live in this book. The third wind, the narrator of the book, was just speaking through me as if I wasn’t even there. That is not a typical experience for a novelist. Usually, you’re very aware you’re there. You’re struggling, you’re trying to get out of the way, but it’s hard and it’s effortful. But with Shaman, it wasn’t anywhere near as effortful. It was Somehow I was possessed. I don’t mean to get too mystical about it. I think it’s a perfectly human thing. We often are possessed by a part of your brain or by a part of your culture that you’re not fully aware of. But also, to finish about Shaman, I realized about halfway through this culture did not have writing. They were talking. My narrator has to be talking. This has to be oral narrative. I looked up, I read a lot about the the the oral poets or shaman figures of the of the Paleolithic period that still lived on in the modern times, like in the Balkans, who would take all night to tell a story, and it was supposedly perfectly memorized.
[00:53:47.09] – Kim Stanley Robinson
But of course, it wasn’t perfectly memorized because there was nothing to check. There was no tape recorder. If someone told it different than it had been told the previous year, who was to know? So it was not memorized It was just word for word. It was a matter of technique and then the basis of a story, and then it got creative. At some point, like with the Iliad, someone wrote it down. A Homer figure wrote it down, but people had been talking it for hundreds of years at that point. In fact, the Trojan War, I think, was about a thousand years before it got written down. So these oral poets, I thought I had to go back. I threw out my first draft. I was about a third of the way through the novel when I had this which, of course, I should have had earlier, but something knocked me on the head, and I realized, I can’t write this story. I have to write down somebody talking this story. I have to take a transcript, like on one of these modern AIs that you talk into it and then you see the written record, I have to be like that AI and then just listen.
[00:54:50.05] – Kim Stanley Robinson
Well, if you look… I mean, maybe people don’t notice this like I notice this. But if you read Shaman, it does not read like the Mars trilogy. Which is a written thing or my more written book. Shaman, it seems to me, is spoken by the third wind, and therefore you can’t have expository lumps like in the Mars trilogy. You can’t have 2312. You can’t have things like in Ministry these gigantic essays. You can’t do a Melville. You need to actually go back to the Paleolithic period and talk a story like you might hear it around the fire. That was very fun. That was interesting and fun in terms of a writing process.
[00:55:37.13] – John knych
Thank you, Stan. Grant, are you there to ask a question? I know he’s in and out. I don’t think so. I have a question from someone who couldn’t be here, Sean Callahan. He wanted to ask you, Stan, have you considered that this trilogy could also be something researchers utilize in the real world when considering the challenges of colonizing Mars? I know you just said that Mars is poisonous, but the reality is, as we all, I think, no, humanity is still trying to go to Mars. Have scientists or researchers ever offered to pick your brain on the topic, and if so, what topics?
[00:56:22.09] – Kim Stanley Robinson
Well, yes, for sure, it’s well read in the space community. And I have a copy of the book, I guess it’s Blue Mars with Velcro on it because it was stuck to the wall of the International Space Station. It was read in a no-g space orbiting the Earth. The astronaut involved gave me that copy, which I’m very happy to have. I also have the Mars flag, which is red, green, and blue in vertical stripes in nylon made by the Mars Society back around 1999. For a while there, where I was obviously a luminary, and even on the board of directors for a while or board of advisors, this was not advisable for the Mars Society, which was somewhat of a mess because of the personal characteristics of the founder and leader who made it into too much of a personal club and not enough of an outreach, but also the whole Mars project, because of this, percolates and because of world history, 9/11 and other things. The day after 9/11, the Mars Society was like 100 times as interesting. So world history changed and things were not the same. And since then, Through Chris McKay, who’s always been my Mars guy, a great teacher and a friend, although we seldom have met in person, but he used to invite me down to NASA Ames, where he worked, which is in Mountainview, near Menlo Park, down in the Bay Area, near Stanford.
[00:58:04.13] – Kim Stanley Robinson
A gigantic old naval base was given to NASA, and they have a dirigible airship hangar there that they’ve stripped down to its framing, and now it’s a work of art sitting on the South Bay, and it’s still on the NASA Ames property. Conferences there, yes. Then also lunch sessions, like for Aurora. I needed to know more about orbital mechanics. And I asked Chris, he said, Come on down for lunch. And when I would get down there, there would be Mars scientists like Carol Stoker, like Larry Lemke, and John Cumbers. And they would gather for a lunchtime seminar, and I would have my laptop out, the precursor to this one, and ask them questions, and then type as fast as I could to get answers to help me as tech support. And so Mars, for all of them, is a thing from the ’90s. And And really, Elon Musk, it’s sad to talk about a person who has become crazy and dangerous and a an ugly fascist of the ADF kind in Germany, and even right now, crashing the American government for fun just as a destructo derby ego game to play with no particular plan.
[00:59:22.19] – Kim Stanley Robinson
That wasn’t true. When I met him was at the Mars Society in 1999, and he was just like a puppy with a new toy, which his McLaren car. It’s a good rocket company, SpaceX, and a good car company, Tesla. But this Mars idea of his, which I used to think of as a harmless hobby, was maybe also a symptom of delusional tendencies. He’s not going to end up on Mars. His Starship thing, if you look at the landing plan for his starship, whatever he calls it, the big fucking rocket, he called it, for going to Mars, you You wouldn’t believe how marginally safe it is and how much it has to trust everything going right, not to kill everybody on it. Because Mars is hard. The atmosphere is too thin to slow you down, but it’s thick enough to burn you up. It presents a landing problem that the Russians solved by this giant bouncing ball, which the Americans picked up on acknowledging the Russian the origin of that landing method. But you can’t land humans by dropping them onto the planet in a rubber ball where they bounce up and down 20 times. You have to have a soft landing.
[01:00:41.15] – Kim Stanley Robinson
They are harder than hell. The whole thing is now a fantasy. But now we’re realizing it’s the fantasy of a fantasist, where it’s just one of many fantasies. I thought it was just a harmless hobby, but now I think it was symptomatic of something deeper and worse, a bad I think. Even for dedicated Mars scientists like Chris McKay, the whole notion is, let’s save Earth first and Mars will still be there. It might be a beautiful place to terraform with robots in the year 4,500 AD, and it’ll still be there. If we actually get our act together on Earth, it might be a fun project. But in the meantime, at best, it’s like Antarctica. You got 10 scientists there in a station, maybe even a first hundred scientists there in stations. They won’t be having kids there. They’ll be coming back home. They’ll be radiated. They’ll have had the time of their lives, but they also may have screwed their body up big time being in 30% gravity for any length of time. Our studies of the astronauts who spent a year in near zero gravity, they’re pretty ill and damaged by that. And then they recover.
[01:02:01.18] – Kim Stanley Robinson
What Mars would do at 37%, we have no idea. Same with the moon at 16%. Meanwhile, we got a planet that we’re destroying in terms of the biosphere. Why? What is this even about? I have to say it over and over again. I like the Mars trilogy as a novel. I’m very fond of the characters. I think it’s a good novel, and novels are important. But as a plan, no, it’s not right. The plan came from 1990, and the conditions have changed.
[01:02:37.14] – John Knych
Thank you, Stan. It’s been an hour, and I know I promised you an hour. I know John John. How Ken is leaving.
[01:02:49.18] – Josh
Thank you so much, Kim. I appreciate this. Thanks, Jack. Thank you all.
[01:02:55.01] – JOhn Knych
Yeah, my name is really John, but I go by Jack. Thank you. Thank you, John. Stan, this has It’s been a pleasure. Really enjoyed this conversation. Don’t know if Matt, Josh, do you have any final questions? I don’t want to take up too much of Stan’s time.
[01:03:12.07] – Virginie Actis
No, for me, I must say that it was more It’s been a pleasure. It was an honor, and we learned so much, and it’s amazing. This interview would be in French, subtitled by me. I will do it for our French readers.
[01:03:30.06] – Kim Stanley Robinson
All good. Thank you for that. I must say, I’m not in a complete rush here, but I do want to end briefly. Just to say that in France, the Ministry for the Future came out, I guess, at the end of 2023. I lose track of time. It’s going so fast, but it’s had a wonderful response in French. I’ve always had a good career in French, a French readership that has been responsive. The translations have been mostly good. Not that my reading of French is good enough to judge style, but it’s good enough to know that it’s all there. I have some good French friends now who I keep in contact with that are mostly through the science fiction community. It’s good to hear. I’m glad if this comes out and some French readers read it, what I just said with you in this conversation, that would be great.
[01:04:26.16] – John Knych
So thank you. Yes. This is recorded. It’s going to be shared in my group. There are French readers within the Sci-Fi group as well. Side thing, I love Michel’s description of Provence when he goes home in Blue Mars. I spent some time in Provence. To me, it was perfect describing the buildings and the plazas and having a cassis, all of that was spot on. Josh, man, any other final thoughts? Thank you.
[01:04:56.04] – Josh
I just thank you so much for sharing and for for being here. As I said, I studied science at university and I left very disenfranchised with the state of events in 2013. This was the state of the world at the time and picked up Red Mars, and it really helped put into words what I was trying to say. So it’s one of those things that I’ve gone back to many times when I’m trying to formulate my thoughts. It’s all there. It’s a real honor to be chatting with you. Thank you.
[01:05:34.17] – Kim Stanley Robinson
Thank you for your time. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Have a good evening, you all, if you’re over there. It’s raining hard here, which is a blessing, but I’m going to go back to work. This has been a lovely break.
[01:05:49.24] – John knych
Awesome. Au revoir. Have a good evening. Thank you. Bye..
[01:05:52.17] – Kim Stanley Robinson
Thank you so much. Good night. Bye.
[01:06:00.21] – Josh
Thank you, John. That was really nice.
[01:06:03.04] – John Knych
Thanks, Josh. Thank you for showing up. No, I really enjoyed that. No, it’s… Yeah. Thank you for coming and asking great questions.
