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

(Antfer) #1

36 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022


its soil. “What’s funny is anyone think-
ing it would work in the first place,”
one settler says.


I mean it’s obvious any new place is going
to be either alive or dead. If it’s alive it’s
going to be poisonous. If it’s dead you’re
going to have to work it up from scratch....
Even if you put machines to work, it would
take thousands of years. So what’s the point?
Why do it at all? Why not be content with
what you’ve got?


Later, back on an environmentally
damaged Earth, another settler listens
to a space-exploration advocate argue
that settling other planets is “an evolu-
tionary urge”—the human equivalent of
“a dandelion or a thistle releasing its
seeds to the winds.” Enraged, she punches
him in the face. “Aurora” affronted some
readers and sci-fi writers, as it was meant
to; its goal was to shift the structure of
feeling in science fiction, making it less
escapist and more certain that Earth is
our only home. “As soon as I read it, I
thought, Of course, he’s right,” the
science-fiction writer Ted Chiang told
me. (The novel, he added, suggests that
interstellar settlement is not just “im-
practical” but “immoral,” since it involves
“condemning generations of one’s de-


scendants to lifelong hardship when you
cannot possibly get their consent.”) It
was all part of the larger shift that Rob-
inson believes will take place in our
broader structure of feeling, as more
people experience for themselves the
symptoms of a warming climate—from
off-kilter seasons to wildfires, flooding,
and storms.
“When I wrote ‘Aurora,’ I felt like
I was taking a model of the Starship En-
terprise and smashing it with a hammer,”
he said, laughing. We were cresting a rise,
coming onto a flat saddle of land, fuzzed
with alpine grass, that connected two
lakes. Robinson lay down on the ground,
stretching his arms to see if there was
room for a sleeping pad, or three.
“Maybe this is a good spot,” he said.
The sun was moving behind the
mountains, casting long shadows in
which it was suddenly cold. We un-
packed what we had in the remaining
light. Robinson unfolded a lime-green
tarp and began staking it into the
ground, in order to provide a windbreak
for the “rock stove” over which we would
boil water for our dinner. He had stum-
bled upon this retro innovation many
years before, when he’d grown tired of

lugging a typical camping stove into
the mountains.
“What kind of rocks do we need?”
I asked.
“You want a rock that’s squared off,
and about as big as that stone Mario’s next
to,” Robinson said. Biagioli was standing
near a shingle-like rock perhaps six inches
square. “We want four of ’em.”
We collected the rocks while Rob-
inson finished the windbreak. He used
one of his trekking poles to prop up
the tarp, then took a small white cube
of fuel from his pack and placed it on
one of the rocks. He carefully balanced
the others to create a small platform
that could support a pot of water. Using
a Zippo, he tried to light the fuel. But
the wind kept evading his windbreak.
Biagioli came over to help, pulling
the tarp tight and blocking the wind
until the flame caught. Their efforts re-
minded me of Robinson’s 2013 novel,
“Shaman,” set in Neolithic Europe,
which opens with the problem of start-
ing a fire using duff, roots, moss, and
soft wood scraped from inside a tree
trunk. (The research for the book in-
volved a wintertime Sierra trip, which
Robinson made alone.)
I was cold that night. The wind slipped
under my tarp; my water bottle froze. In
the morning, beside the jewel-like lake,
I ate a protein bar and watched Robin-
son watch the sunrise. The sun’s prog-
ress was visible in the shadow that the
mountains to the east of us threw over
the mountains to the west. In “The High
Sierra,” Robinson writes that the move-
ment of such shadows reveals “the speed
of the planet rolling under your feet.”
The movement is “slow, but not so slow
that you can’t see it. If you watch a boul-
der near the sun, but still in shadow, and
keep watching it, then the sunlight will
hit the top of the boulder, then move
down the boulder—also the whole
slope—slowly, slowly, but not impercep-
tibly, not quite.” He calls the sight “beau-
tiful but disturbing”:
This particular morning is passing at this
very speed, it won’t come back. The rocks will
be here for millions of years, but not this mo-
ment, which creeps down and down at you,
even if you hold your breath, even if you sus-
pend your usual busy stream of consciousness
and just look at it, be with it. Time passes.

I had read this description before the
trip, but being there was different. I felt

“Buy! Sell! Fetch!”

• •

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