34 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022
relief the strangeness of our outlook.
Whenever we stare directly at the mess
we’re in, the solutions we think of seem
implausible. (A carbon coin? Backed
by the world’s central banks?) And yet,
because the stakes are so high, our skep-
ticism threatens to become nihilism—
an acceptance of the inevitability of
civilizational disaster. Ultimately, this
nihilism is a kind of sin against the fu-
ture—a “betrayal,” as Greta Thunberg
puts it—and so reading “The Minis-
try for the Future” is a charged experi-
ence. It’s normal, when taking in a
science-fiction story, to wonder whether
the future it depicts is plausible. It’s un-
usual for the future we wonder about
to be our own.
After a few hours, we neared the
bottom of the pass. We filled our water
bottles in a large, clear lake set in smooth
granite, crossed a stream using step-
ping stones, and started up a winding
path that rose to a series of switch-
backs. As we climbed, the landscape
changed. Below us, the lake nestled in
grasses and pine trees. Above us was a
gray, craggy world of rocks and dust—a
piece of the moon jutting out of Eden.
We passed a section of the slope where,
years before, dozens of deer had slipped
on ice and fallen to their death. Clav-
icles and spines were hidden among
the stones.
Eventually, we arrived at the switch-
backs—steep, narrow, tightly zigzag-
ging cuts in the rock. Biagioli, who’d
completed a hundred-kilometre bike
race in the Dolomites a few years be-
fore, looked up eagerly at the first real
challenge of the day.
“Mario, you should go ahead,” Rob-
inson said. “I bet you’ll want to go fast.”
“See you at the top!” Biagioli said,
launching himself upward.
Robinson watched, appreciatively.
“He’s got that deep cardio condition-
ing,” he said. Many of Robinson’s nov-
els are essentially love stories in which
friends grow enamored of one another
and of the landscapes they explore; I
could see that the dynamic was taken
from life. (“My friends are my heroes,
and my heroes are my friends,” he told
me later.)
We followed a little more slowly.
Robinson, dressed all in khaki, grinned
from behind his sunglasses as he climbed.
It was fun, fluid work, made easier by
our ultralight packing and the leverage
of our poles. Soon, the pass came into
view—a broad, inclined, rocky field
stretching between two peaks. We
seemed to hike toward the cloudless
sky. Biagioli waited for us, Dusy Basin
opening up behind him.
Robinson believes that the novel
has expanded with time. The first nov-
els typically focussed on domestic life
and its dramas; in the nineteenth cen-
tury, they took cities and nations as
their subjects. Science fiction could go
further: being planetary in scale, it
could show how a civilization lived
within its biosphere—its most funda-
mental home.
Dusy Basin looked like a still-evolv-
ing world. Gray-brown mountains in
the distance could have been captured
by the Curiosity rover; below them, a
granite landscape was spotted with grass
and flowers. Huge angular boulders,
deposited by glaciers, rested on hill-
sides, guarding the landscape.
“This is it,” Robinson said. “Say good-
bye to the trail.”I
n the late nineteen-seventies, when
Robinson began publishing his sto-
ries, the sci-fi subgenre of “cyberpunk”
was ascendant. Its hacker protagonists
plugged in to an online virtual “matrix”
and prowled smoggy cityscapes ruled
by giant corporations. By contrast, Rob-
inson’s first novel, “The Wild Shore,”
from 1984, imagined a future Califor-
nia in which neutron bombs have made
all electronics inoperative. Its early pages
contain elaborate depictions of garden-
ing and fishing. His sci-fi could seem
like nature writing, with the Sierras re-
cast as Mercury or Mars—a reflection
of his early ambition to become a poet
in the vein of Kenneth Rexroth or Gary
Snyder. William Gibson, the author of
“Neuromancer,” told me that “the cy-
berpunk crew” didn’t know what to make
of Robinson—“this tan, fit, khaki-chi-
nos dude who could’ve made a good
living as a shirt model.” They assumed
that he was “too straight to get where
they were coming from.” But Robin-
son’s politics were perhaps more radi-
cal, since he imagined the possibility of
an improved world. His uncool, uto-
pian interests—ecology, equality, demo-
cracy, postcapitalism—were prescient.
It isn’t easy to be a utopian science-fiction writer. “Star Trek” is famously op-
timistic but isn’t in any sense realistic;
in general, when sci-fi engages in seri-
ous social analysis, it curdles. We may
feel that dystopian stories are more plau-
sible, yet Robinson thinks that there’s
something a little craven about them.
Isn’t it odd, he has written, to enjoy “late-
capitalist, advanced-nation schaden-
freude about unfortunate fictional citi-
zens whose lives have been trashed by
our own political inaction”? It’s better,
he believes, to be utopian, or at least
“anti-anti-utopian.” Robinson has a sweet
and sunny disposition—he writes long,
lambent e-mails signed “Your Stan”—
that’s pulled taut by a thread of anger.
He is especially impatient with those
who urge giving up when giving up is
against their best interests. What he
seeks to practice is, in a phrase popular-
ized by the Marxist philosopher Anto-
nio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intel-
lect, optimism of the will.”
As we made our descent, a bowl of
mountains encircled us. Gentle hills of
white granite rolled into the distance.
Bridges of rock connected them; re-
flected light illuminated the hollows.
Dwarf trees and tufts of flowers nes-
tled in shelters from the wind. The
landscape was fractal: basins within ba-
sins, spiralling patterns of white and
rust rock. It was fun to wander, find-
ing routes. Jameson, who reads Robin-
son’s novels in draft—“The Ministry
for the Future” is dedicated to him—
told me that they stand out not just for
their scientific and political rigor, but
for their depictions of “athletic, physi-
cal joy,” which lighten the mood. “In
standard novels, there isn’t any place
for play, for physical exertion,” he said;
in Robinson’s books, characters hike,
climb, and swim through the worlds
they hope to save. We walked easily
over the rises in search of a lake at which
to camp. We’d grown happily silent,
lost in the flow of rock.
Robinson learned to write credible
utopian fiction in part through a frac-
tal sort of thinking, connecting the
personal to the planetary. In graduate
school, at the University of California,
San Diego, he read Proust, the English
Romantics, and Shakespeare while hik-
ing in the Sierras as often as he could.
(He calculates that he has camped in
the mountains for two years in total.)