Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources Jeet Heer The New Utopians Kim Stanley Robinson and the novelists who want to build a better future through science fiction. The New Republic, 9 November 2015

[9] Robinson’s decidedly left-wing slant on science fiction puts him at odds with the right-wing tradition of hard science fiction that often seems dominant, at least in the United States. While Europe has a rich legacy of socialist science fiction that runs from H.G. Wells to Olaf Stapledon to China Miéville, the United States has been more comfortable with libertarian science fiction that imagines space colonization as the next frontier for the free market. This is particularly true of the engineering-oriented can-do tech tradition that was codified in the 1930s and 1940s by John W. Campbell’s magazine Astounding Science-Fiction. Campbell’s most influential protégé, Robert Heinlein, started as a socialist, but by the 1950s was writing novels that extolled militarism (Starship Troopers) and imagined space colonies becoming free-market utopias governed by the code of TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, the battle cry of a lunar colony rebellion in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress). Heinlein inspired a library full of imitators such as Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, and Newt Gingrich, who have used the genre to argue for hard right politics.

[10] Being a utopian science fiction writer can be lonely. Robinson calls his set, along with Bisson, whose work combines dark humor and environmentalism, and Ursula K. Le Guin, an icon of feminist and environmental utopias, “a study group more than a school.” Yet there is evidence that Robinson’s style of utopian science fiction might be finding resonance with other writers who have grown tired of the end of the world.

[11] In the summer of 2003, a report on climate change commissioned by the then head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, was revealed to have had references to the effects of global warming removed by White House staff. “Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment,” was replaced with the following: “The complexity of the Earth system and the interconnections among its components make it a scientific challenge to document change, diagnose its causes, and develop useful projections of how natural variability and human actions may affect the global environment in the future.” The next year, Robinson published Forty Signs of Rain, the first book in what would come to be known as the Science in the Capital trilogy, in which the president, a Republican climate change denier, squashes any efforts to deal with mounting evidence of global warming.

[12] The trilogy is being reissued as a set for the first time this year, a time capsule of very recent history. The Bush administration’s multiyear campaign to undermine the EPA and offer its own narrative of the negligible effects of climate change was exposed by Rolling Stone in 2007. Time magazine, in 2008, named Robinson a “Hero of the Environment” and the “foremost practitioner of literary utopias.” The horror and hope of the Science in the Capital trilogy returns at a moment we finally may be getting our act together on global warming.

[13] By reissuing the trilogy in a slightly abridged one-volume edition titled Green Earth, Robinson has had a chance to reflect on how his predictions look in the light of unfolding history. As he told The Coode Street Podcast earlier this year, the polar vortex-induced freezing he described in the second book of the series has already hit the East Coast of the United States the last two winters. “Things have gotten even uglier in some regards,” he noted, “but on the other hand, since 2008 nobody believes in capitalism in the way they used to . . . denial of climate change per se is pretty much going away, but the political fight over what to do about it is going to be very intense.”

[14] If political paralysis and ideological obtuseness are the villains of the trilogy, the novels have an unexpected hero: the bureaucrats of the National Science Foundation. The core action of the trilogy is the way the members of the NSF become politicized, then figure out ways to challenge denialist politics and form alliances with groups ranging from the Pentagon to the insurance industry to save the West Coast as a storm system threatens to drown California. In the second book, Fifty Degrees Below (2005), the Gulf Stream stalls, plunging the East Coast into a deep freeze. But the enemy remains a government unwilling to listen to its scientists. In the final book, Sixty Days and Counting (2007), a new president in the mold of Al Gore takes office, and saving the world looks a lot like an ecological New Deal. The West Antarctic ice sheet has collapsed, but the Gulf Stream has been jumpstarted with millions of tons of salt, the White House installs solar panels, genetically modified lichen absorb carbon in Siberia, and, in a stunning climax, an ecologically devastated China switches over to clean energy. As literary critic Adam Trexler noted in his 2015 study Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, Robinson is “moving beyond the problem of the truth of climate science to think about how science might become part of a utopian political mobilization.” 

[15] Robinson, in effect, sees science itself as a kind of utopia: a collaborative, cooperative, international, disinterested attempt to understand the world and make it a better place. He doesn’t deny that, in practice, science might be corrupted by everything from petty rivalry to cupidity, but the act of doing science carries with it values that need to be broadened out and made a part of political life. Robinson, usually a merely efficient writer in the mode of Isaac Asimov, goes into special reverie when describing scientists lost in the act of thinking.

Frank dug into the substantive part of the proposal. The algorithm set was one Pierzinski had been working on even back in his dissertation. Chemical mechanics of protein creation as a sort of natural algorithm, in effect. Frank considered the idea, operation by operation. This was his real expertise; this was what had interested him from childhood, when the puzzles solved had been simple ciphers. He had always loved this work, and now perhaps more than ever, offering as it did a complete escape from consciousness of himself. Why he might want to make that escape remained moot; howsoever it might be, when he came back he felt refreshed, as if finally he had been in a good place.

That “good place” of pure research is the core of Robinson’s utopianism. As he told literary critic McKenzie Wark, “I remain an advocate of science as a method of understanding, a set of institutions and practices, a philosophy of action, a utopian politics.” 

[16] Here we see one limit of Robinson’s utopianism: The Science in the Capital trilogy becomes a call for a technocratic revolt, albeit one that aligns itself with broader social movements. (In Forty Signs of Rain, the members of the NSF work with Buddhist monks who live on an island threatened by drowning.) Still, the delight in science as a basis for politics is a minority pursuit. Even if the scientists do help mitigate and minimize climate change in the interests of all humanity, the core experience of being in a community of knowers is shared by the few. Science in the Capital is a wonderful guide for how the climate problem might be addressed, but it underplays the role that grassroots activism by nonscientists will have to play.

[17] In this regard, the trilogy offers a much narrower utopia than the ecological communitarian society Robinson created in his earlier novel, Pacific Edge (1990), the concluding volume in the Three Californias trilogy, where every member of the community participates in lengthy political meetings (which, to be sure, is not everyone’s cup of tea, let alone ideal of a perfect society). Perhaps the sheer scale of the climate problem makes the type of community described in Pacific Edge no longer feasible, so even Robinson’s utopianism has to give ground.

[18] In the tradition of Rousseau, Robinson wants to forge a link between the modern and the primitive: Utopia means, in part, recovering the archaic energies of the past. He sees science as compatible with primitivism because the scientist has the natural disinterested curiosity of humans in the state of nature. In Robinson’s novel Red Mars (1992), a scientist reflects on life in a space colony:

This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from three million years of practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get a chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy one’s curiosity, or play. That is utopia … especially for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody. So a scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric utopia, carved out of the transnational money economy by clever primates who want to live well.

The “prehistoric utopia” Robinson describes is enthralling to read about, but, like the technocratic revolt of the Science in the Capital trilogy, is something for the few, not the many. Robinson’s utopia is enticing to dream about, but not fully a place you’d want to move into.

[19] Curiously, Robinson’s utopianism is linked to a persistent imagination of disaster: The push for action comes from a climate catastrophe (floods, freakish snowstorms) that forces rivals to come together. The Science in the Capital trilogy was published over three years that redefined natural disaster for the new century: Hurricane Katrina highlighted the need for federal government aid in the summer of 2005, and Al Gore gave the world a frightening lesson about carbon dioxide emissions in An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. But based on real-world events, one might doubt whether disasters have quite the politically benign effect that Robinson foresees. While many of the residents of Louisiana post-Katrina and New York post-Sandy helped each other in the face of disaster, the political system remained as deadlocked and divided as ever. In the aftermath of Katrina, New Orleans political elites used the situation not to bring people together, but as a form of providential slum clearance, with the poor African American communities that were dispersed not welcomed back, resulting in a considerably whiter city. Nor did Hurricane Sandy bring Americans together. In fact, 67 Republicans, including prominent figures, like Representative Paul Ryan, voted against disaster relief funding. Future climate disasters will be just as likely to lead to battles over scarce resources as to cooperation.

[20] As utopian as he is, even Robinson is aware that, at best, we can only hope to mitigate climate change and adapt to it, and there’s a real possibility that humanity won’t get its act together to solve core problems. In his recent novel 2312 (2012), he offered a vision of the next 300 years in which parts of humanity build wondrous space colonies (some go body surfing on the rings of Saturn) while the home planet languishes in environmental degradation. As Robinson explained to The Coode Street Podcast in 2011, “The Earth could be quite a jungly planet with a much higher sea level, and it does not necessarily mean that we couldn’t inhabit space because our technological powers are growing so fast. One of the few things we won’t be able to do is save the Earth from this next century’s warming, that may be beyond us. But other terraforming projects where you can slam comets into the planet might be possible.” To paraphrase Jameson once again, the lesson of 2312 is that it is easier to terraform Venus than to reach an international climate accord. Even the most splendid utopian imagination has its limits. 

[21] Robinson’s attempt to keep the flame of Utopia alive in a despairing era has made him a lonely figure. But suddenly, in the last few years, a new literary genre has emerged that hopes to revive ecological utopianism. Rallying under the banner “solarpunk,” a ragtag band of freelance futurists and science fiction writers have argued that we have an obligation to imagine positive futures where plausible technologies give us practical green solutions.

[22] “Imagine a sustainable world, driven by clean and renewable energy,” reads the introduction to Solarpunk (2012), a Brazilian anthology of solarpunk literature whose opening lines were roughly translated in an Australian article in 2014. “Now imagine large space sailboats driven by solar radiation, production of biofuels via nanotechnology, the advent of photosynthetic humans, and, as there is no perfect society, even terrorism against corrupt businesses and governments. Welcome to the bright green world of solarpunk.” A mix of green technology, economic ideology, sociology, science fiction, architecture, and even fashion, solarpunk remains more of an aspirational mindset and lifestyle than a cultural movement, but the popularity of the term speaks to a hunger for an alternative to the apocalypse. “It’s hard out here for futurists under 30,” declares one manifesto. “We’re solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.”

[23] Solarpunk is still a new genre, more a call to arms than a substantial body of literature. Still, in the Tumblr posts and stories that have been written so far, a few recurring themes emerge. Solarpunk writers are interested in how an ecologically balanced post-scarcity sustainable future will look and feel to ordinary people. A very popular Tumblr post by the visual artist Olivia Louise, published in 2014, served as a major spark to the solarpunk movement, because it made explicit that the goal was an aesthetically pleasing habitable future. Louise called for “a plausible near-future sci-fi genre, which I like to imagine as based on updated Art Nouveau, Victorian, and Edwardian aesthetics, combined with a green and renewable energy movement to create a world in which children grow up being taught about building electronic tech, as well as food gardening and other skills, and people have come back around to appreciating artisans and craftspeople, from stonemasons and smithies, to dress makers and jewelers, and everyone in between.” This vision is a call back to the Victorian dreams of William Morris (who wrote his own utopia, News From Nowhere, in 1890), John Ruskin, and the members of the Arts and Crafts movement who hoped to humanize industrialism. Carrying forward and advancing the kind of utopianism that runs from Morris to Robinson, and now solarpunk, is a heartening sign that the dream of a better tomorrow is still possible, even in the face of the apocalypse. To build a better future we have to first imagine it.