fields of rock sculpted into dolmens
and cross deserts sifted into vast, pat
terned mandalas. Mars, they find,
speaks “the visible language of na
ture’s mineral existence”; it is “beau
tiful, or harsher than that: spare, aus
tere, stripped down, silent, stoic, rocky,
changeless. Sublime.”
I saw movement to my left. It was
the two hikers, looking pleased with
themselves. There had been some hairy
sections, they said. Now they had a
question for Robinson, whom they
recognized as being experienced in the
mountains. Their camp was back in
Dusy Basin. Did he think they could
take a circular route, traversing to Pot
luck Pass, then climbing over and de
scending back to their campsite be
fore nightfall?
Robinson mulled this over. He
seemed reluctant to make promises.
Then he outlined a complex itiner
ary that would get them back before
dark, if they moved fast, if nothing
went wrong.
“It’s possible it could work,” he said.
“Worst case, you have to descend with
headlamps.”
They conferred with each other, and
Robinson turned to Biagioli, resuming
the conversation about Galileo. A little
while later, I saw the hikers waving to
us from a distance. They had started
their traverse.W
hat I wanted was reassurance. As
we picked our way through the
Sierras, I asked Robinson lots of ques
tions; one loomed behind them: Will it
be all right? Of course, Robinson has
no idea how the future will really go.
He does believe that there is a future—
an unknown place yet to be explored.
He thinks that attitudes shift, that prog
ress exists, that necessity drives inven
tion; but also that progress is slow and
easily reversed, that money talks, and
that disorder is the norm. In 2002, he
published “The Years of Rice and Salt,”
a novel imagining what might have hap
pened if the Black Death had killed all
the Europeans instead of a third of them.
( Jameson has taught it to his students
in a class on historiography.) In a fan
ciful conceit, the same characters take
us from the fourteenth century to the
present by means of reincarnation. Dur
ing every epoch, they engage in the cease
less work of improving civilization. To
ward the end of the book, a feminist
scholar attends an archeological confer
ence in Iran. As she listens to the pre
sentations, she’s struck by an “impressionof people’s endless struggle and effort.”
A sense of “endless experimentation, of
humans thrashing about trying to find
a way to live together,” deepens in her.
In a subsequent incarnation, she works
for the international Agency for Har
mony with Nature—her world’s version
of the Ministry for the Future.
Climate work will be the main busi
ness of this century. Its basic outlines
are already clear. Build wind farms, solar
farms, and other sources of clean energy.
Start an Operation Warp Speed for clean
power: improve energy storage, and make
small, cheap power systems for rural
places. Tax carbon, reform agriculture,
and eat less meat. Rethink construction,
transportation, and manufacturing. Study
the glaciers, the permafrost, the atmo
sphere, the oceans. Pilot some geoengi
neering schemes, in case we need them.
Rewild large parts of the Earth. And so
on, and so on, and so on. How will all
this happen? In “The Ministry for the
Future,” societies start to make good
choices, in part because citizens revolt
against the monied interests that pre
serve the status quo. But people also
thrash about. They grow frustrated,
angry, and violent. Some survivors of
the Indian heat wave become ecoterror
ists and use swarms of drones to crash
passenger planes; no one can figure out
how to stop the drones, and everyone
gets scared. People fly less. They tele
conference, or take long distance trains,
or even sail. They work remotely on
transatlantic crossings. It’s not how we
want change to happen. But, in the end,
the jet age turns out to have been just
that—an age.
We made our camp near a shallow,
glassy lake in a hollow, where a single
shelf of granite tilted into the water, like
a hard beach. While we built our rock
stove, Robinson and Biagioli talked
about sailing. Biagioli had crossed the
Atlantic twice, once with his wife and
once with friends; Robinson was an am
ateur freshwater sailor of long standing.
Robinson said that when he was in
vited to COP26, the climatechange con
ference, he thought, “Well, I gotta do it
like Greta Thunberg.” (The summer be
fore, Thunberg had sailed across the At
lantic instead of flying.) He’d been sur
prised to learn that there was no way of
signing up in New York to sail, as a pas
senger, to the U.K. “My books have con