The New Yorker - USA (2022-01-31)

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30 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022


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BEST-CASE SCENARIO


He wrote the great climate-change novel. What does Kim Stanley Robinson know?

BYJOSHUAROTHMAN


L


ast summer, the science-fiction
writer Kim Stanley Robinson
went on a backpacking trip with
some friends. They headed into the
High Sierra, hiking toward Deadman
Canyon—a fifty-mile walk through
challenging terrain. Now sixty-nine,
Robinson has been hiking and camp-
ing in the Sierras for half a century. At
home, in Davis, California, he tracks
his explorations on a wall-mounted map,
its topography thick with ink. He is a
devotee of the “ultralight” approach to
backpacking and prefers to travel with-
out water, instead gathering it along the
way, from lakes and streams. Arriving
at the canyon, with its broad, verdant
floor cradled in smooth slopes of gran-
ite, he planned to fill his bottles with
meltwater from the seven glaciers bur-
ied in its headwall.
But as the group hiked they found
no water. Streams that had once carved
elegant oxbows in the canyon floor were
now dusty lacerations. Perhaps because
of the altitude, one of Robinson’s friends
was feeling ill, and the others worried
about how he would fare if they had to
make a dry camp that night. Eventu-
ally, they found a rivulet of water. After
his companions replenished their sup-
ply, Robinson hiked ahead, tracing the
water uphill. He discovered that six
of the seven glaciers had melted away
completely. This was a new develop-
ment, not recorded on any map. Only
one corner of one glacier remained—
a canted block of ice the size of two
Olympic swimming pools. “It was the
smallest living glacier that you could
possibly imagine,” Robinson told me.
He broke off a tiny chunk and carried
it back to camp for the hikers to use in
their Scotch. “It was like a goodbye,”
he said. “Like going to a hospice visit.”
Recalling the moment, he shivered.
Many of Robinson’s twenty-one
science-fiction novels are ecological in
theme, and this coming summer he

will publish “The High Sierra: A Love
Story,” a memoir that is also a rich geo-
logical and cultural history of the range.
After returning from Deadman, he up-
dated the manuscript to include the
vanished glaciers. He told me about
them a couple of weeks later, while we
were driving through California, toward
our own backpacking trip in the Sier-
ras. Tan and trim, with silver hair and
wire-rim eyeglasses, Robinson rode in
the back seat of the car, looking out at
wildfire smoke. The night before, he’d
outfitted me with some of his own min-
imalist backpacking gear; while he’d
assembled it, I’d wandered around his
house, inspecting his library. Walls of
shelves contained British literature,
American literature, and science fiction.
Other areas were organized by subject
(Antarctica, Mars, economics, prehis-
tory, Thoreau). Shelves were dedicated
to volumes about Galileo, which Rob-
inson had read while writing “Galileo’s
Dream,” a highly detailed historical
novel, published in 2009. Mario Bia-
gioli, a historian of science and a Gali-
leo expert who’d helped Robinson with
the research, was the third member of
our backpacking party; an accomplished
giant-slalom skier, endurance cyclist,
and transatlantic sailor, he drove us ex-
pertly, hugging the curves.
Robinson is often called one of the
best living science-fiction writers. He
is unique in the degree to which his
books envision moral, not merely tech-
nological, progress. Their protagonists
are often diplomats, scholars, and sci-
entists who fight to keep their future
societies from repeating our mistakes.
Robinson’s plots turn on international
treaties or postcapitalist financial sys-
tems. His now classic “Mars” trilogy,
published in the nineteen-nineties, de-
scribes the terraforming of the Red
Planet by scientists seeking to create a
“permaculture,” or truly sustainable way
of life. A typical Robinson novel ends

with an academic conference at which
researchers propose ideas for improv-
ing civilization. He believes that schol-
arly and diplomatic meetings are among
our species’s highest achievements.
Climate change has long figured in
Robinson’s plots. “Antarctica,” a novel
from 1997, revolves around glaciologists
at a fictional version of McMurdo Sta-
tion, the principal U.S. outpost in Ant-
arctica. (Robinson researched the book
there, exploring ice cathedrals and help-
ing to take the first G.P.S. reading of the
South Pole.) In the two-thousands, cli-
mate started to become his central sub-
ject; his wonky brand of sci-fi turned out
to be well suited to a reality in which the
future depends on fast, unlikely, and co-
ördinated global reform. “Science in the
Capital,” a trilogy of novels published be-
tween 2004 and 2007, follows adminis-
trators at the National Science Founda-
tion as they fight climate change through
grants; “New York 2140,” from 2017, is
set in a Venice-like Big Apple and ex-
plores efforts to reform the financial sys-
tem on ecological grounds. With each
book, Robinson has revised his deeply
researched climate-change scenario, fo-
cussing not just on environmental havoc
but on solutions that might stop it.
His most recent novel, “The Minis-
try for the Future,”published in Octo-
ber, 2020, during the second wave of the
pandemic, centers on the work of a fic-
tional U.N. agency charged with solving
climate change. The book combines sci-
ence, politics, and economics to present
a credible best-case scenario for the next
few decades. It’s simultaneously heart-
ening and harrowing. By the end of the
story, it’s 2053, and carbon levels in the
atmosphere have begun to decline. Yet
hundreds of millions of people have died
or been displaced. Coastlines have been
drowned and landscapes have burned.
Economies have been disrupted, refu-
gees have flooded the temperate latitudes,
and ecoterrorists from stricken countries
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