THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022 37
the world turn beneath me for myself.
The ticking of the clock, the smallness
of the Earth—more realizations.
We dressed and set out for Knap-
sack Pass, our climb for the day. The
bottom of the pass was a lush meadow,
carpeted with grass and small flowers,
under which streams flowed; the water
sometimes emerged into the sun, and
we reached down through breaks in
the ground to fill our bottles. Above
us, the pass seemed to be a thou-
sand-foot jumble of car-size rocks, with
no obvious path up.
“I took Lisa here on our first trip
to the Sierras,” Robinson said. He
opened a small packet of Cheez-Its
and looked meditative. “I totally botched
the approach.”
“What happened?” Biagioli asked.
“I went up there, on the left side,”
Robinson said, pointing. “And I tra-
versed too high, under those boulders
beneath Columbine Peak. She was so
fit, so strong—she didn’t even know
anything was wrong. But there are
sections up there where you start to
feel a little desperate.” Since then, he
said, he had found the best possible
route over Knapsack—a straight shot
up the middle, not very difficult, but
hard to see because of the way the
rocks were arranged.
Just then we heard some sounds
from behind us. Two hikers were mak-
ing their way down into our meadow.
As they got closer, they turned into
chilled-out, bearded men in their thir-
ties. They were the only other people
we had seen since leaving the trail after
Bishop Pass.
“You guys going over Knapsack?”
one of them asked.
We nodded.
“We’re thinking about the route,”
the other said. “Maybe that one, there.”
He pointed toward the route Robin-
son had taken with Lisa—including its
troublesome traverse, across the slope
of the mountain.
Robinson nodded. “Yeah, I’ve done
that one,” he said. “It’ll get you over.”
“Sweet,” one of the hikers said, ad-
justing his pack.
“It can be tough, but you’re young
and fit,” Robinson said. “We’re still get-
ting water, so we’ll let you guys go first.”
As they set off, Biagioli observed,
“You didn’t tell them about your route.”
“Well, it’s no fun to hike with other
people,” Robinson replied. “And every-
one’s got to learn for themselves. That’s
the whole point! It took me, I don’t
know, seven or eight crossings to stum-
ble into the fact that the straight-line
route right up the gut of it works, and
none of the other routes work without
outrageous effort.”
“It’s path-dependent, as the econ-
omists say,” Biagioli joked, referring
to the idea that the way things are
isn’t necessarily efficient; today’s ar-
rangements reflect the accidents of
the past.
“Yes, very much so,” Robinson said,
chuckling. He looked up and groaned.
“Ah—God, guys. I know that slope well.
It’s loose. It’s steep. It’s traversey. It’s
hard fuckin’ work. And you can see that
when they get around that shoulder,
they’re not to the pass. And right now,
they can’t see whether between them
and the pass is this horrible ravine that
they might have to cross, or not. And
only by exploring it can they find out.”
It was a novelist’s view of the situa-
tion—one that subordinated mere
knowledge to experience.
There is knowing and knowing.
Some knowledge sits inert within us;
other knowledge shapes us. This past
summer, Robinson and Lisa drove across
the country. “In Wyoming, we hit a pall
of wildfire smoke so thick that we
couldn’t see the mountains just a few
miles away on each side of the road,”he wrote, in an article for the Finan-
cial Times. “It went on like that for 1,000
miles”—a sign as clear as one of the
ten plagues. Among the most discon-
certing ideas in “The Ministry for the
Future” is that the signs of climate
change will have to become unmistak-
able—and painful—before we really
acknowledge what we know. We will
learn only with experience.
Is it possible to be reshaped by fic-
tion, so that we can respond more read-ily to reality? Can we jolt ourselves
awake with our imaginations? Diane
Cook, whose post-climate-change novel
“The New Wilderness” was short-listed
for the Booker Prize in 2020, told me
that she sees Robinson’s fiction as “ac-
tivism as much as art”; in a less frag-
mented society, she said, “The Minis-
try for the Future” could have played a
role like that of Upton Sinclair’s “The
Jungle” or Rachel Carson’s “Silent
Spring.” The book tries to do what a
news report can’t. It wants to offer us
the experience of crossing the pass be-
fore we cross it—to give us a feeling
for the routes we might take.
We had a little lunch—nuts, crack-
ers—and then started up, slipping
through a gap in the rocks toward a
streambed. The climb was steep, at first
on grass and then on granite blocks a
few feet high. Robinson had told me
that Sierra granite breaks naturally into
staircase-like chunks rightly sized for
a person; I hadn’t believed it, but it
turned out to be true. The path, invis-
ible from a distance, revealed itself up
close, one step at a time. Most of the
climb was easy; occasionally, it was hand
over hand. At some moments of con-
fusion, small cairns of stones, left by
other hikers, indicated the way forward.
After a long period of sustained
work, I stopped and looked back. I was
surprised to see how high we’d climbed.
The lakes we’d explored the day before
lay in a chain far below. When we
reached the top, I saw that the light on
the other side was different—it re-
flected the color of Palisade Basin, a
world of iron-gray boulders and rust-
colored ravines. A series of steep drops
led downward, like the seats in an
amphitheatre.
I sat on a rock and drank some
water while Robinson and Biagioli
talked about Galileo. Looking ahead
across the basin at the ridgeline of
the Palisades, I enjoyed the sense of
being higher than a mountain range.
In the distance was Potluck Pass, so-
called because there was no obvious
route—everyone had to invent one
for himself.
“This pass is really striking,” Bia-
gioli said. “I really like it—the giant
steps.” I thought of one of Robin-
son’s painstakingly imagined Martian
vistas. His scientists move through