Still, I’m Reluctant to Call This Pessimism
GERRY CANAVAN & KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
GC ► What is the relationship between ecological science fiction and crisis? Are there other categories beyond “crisis” available to us in SF today? Or is crisis the only relevant category if we want to think seriously about the future we are creating for the planet?
KSR ► The coming century will bring to one degree or another a global ecological crisis, but it will be playing out at planetary scales of space and time, and it’s possible that except in big storms, or food shortages, things won’t happen at the right scales to be subjectively experienced as crisis. Of course it’s possible to focus on moments of dramatic breakdown that may come, because they are narratizable, but if we do that we’re no longer imagining the peculiar kinds of ordinary life that will precede and follow them. Maybe to find appropriate forms for the situation we should be looking to archaic modes where the seasons were the subject, or to Hayden White’s nineteenth-century historians, whose summarized analytical narratives were structured by older literary modes, turning them into philosophical positions or prose poems or Stapledonian novels.
I think even the phrase “climate change” is an attempt to narrate the ecological situation. We use the term now as a synecdoche to stand for the totality of our damage to the biosphere, which is much bigger than mere climate change, more like a potential mass extinction event. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are representing the whole by the part most amenable to human correction. We’re thinking in terms of thermostats, and how we turn them up or down in a building. That image suggests “climate change” has the possibility of a fix, maybe even a silver bullet of a fix. No such fix will be possible for a mass extinction event.
Lots of words and phrases are being applied to this unprecedented situation: global warming, climate change, sustainable development, decarbonization, permaculture, emergency century, climate adaptation, cruel optimism, climate mitigation, hopeless hope, the sixth mass extinction event, and so on. But maybe sentences are the minimum unit that can begin to suggest the situation in full. “This coming century looks like the moment in human history when we will either invent a civilization that nurtures the biosphere while it supports us, or else we will damage it quite badly, perhaps even to the point of causing a mass extinction event and endangering ourselves.” A narrative rather than words or labels.
GC ► Is it a problem, then, that our narrative forms (both fictional and political) seem to rely on “crisis” for their internal energy? SF, especially ecological SF, seems to trend toward sudden, apocalyptic breaks that may not reflect the glacial pace of environmental change. Even in your Science in the Capital series (to take one example) you turn to “abrupt climate change” as a way of narrativizing, on human spatial and temporal scales, a complex network of feedback loops that in actuality is almost impossible to perceive at the level of day-to-day perception. Are there other models for thinking about change, and where do you see these at work in your work?
KSR ► It’s true that I puzzled over how to narrate a story about climate change, which I got interested in when I went to Antarctica and listened to scientists down there talking about it. That was in 1995, and I could not think of a plot for such a story. Then in 2000 the results from the Greenland ice coring project showed that the Younger Dryas had begun in only three years, meaning the global climate had changed from warm and wet to dry and cold that quickly. That finding was a big part of the impetus behind the coining of the term “abrupt climate change.” By 2002 the National Academies Press had published a book exploring this new term and assembling a good explanation for the drop into the Younger Dryas; it appeared that the Gulf Stream had stalled, because the North Atlantic had gotten much less salty very quickly as the result of one of the massive outflows of fresh meltwater that were occasionally pouring off the melting top of the great Arctic ice cap. These same studies pointed out that the North Atlantic was now freshening again, because of the rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice cap.
Major climate change in three years: that was a story that could be told, I thought. But while writing the novel I found that even in this crisis, abrupt on geological scales, events still resolved to individual humans living variants of ordinary life. There would be storms and freezes, power outages, and the threat of food shortages; these would make those years expensive and inconvenient, and give them a tinge of dread, it seemed (like now); but doing something about it was going to consist mostly of political action in Washington and elsewhere, and in geo-engineering projects of doubtful effectiveness and safety, which would be executed by some people, but not everyone. Beyond that, it would be daily life of a slightly different sort, and seldom more. I still wasn’t finding the crisis. And the movie The Day after Tomorrow showed me what can happen if you choose to represent climate change only as crisis. I wanted something better than that.
So in Science in the Capital, and again in 2312, I kept coming up against the lack of a break to something radically different. It seemed as if the story of climate change was going to have to be told as some kind of daily life, which in narrative terms meant it could not be a thriller. Thrillers live in crisis mode, and anything extraneous is a category error. A review calling Science in the Capital “a slow-motion thriller” made me smile, because there can be no such thing. If a thriller stops to portray the protagonist frolicking in the snow with his toddler son, or changing his diapers, that’s a blatant genre break. It’s true I wanted those, and wrote in as many as I could. At the time I thought of it as just fooling around, giving the novel surprises, but maybe it was also a stab at representing how it might feel to live during climate change. The biggest crisis in the story is thus not any weather event, but the scientist Frank going through a change of consciousness. For any of us that is always a big crisis.
Now I think that the novel proper has the flexibility and capaciousness to depict any human situation, including ordinary life. That’s what the modern novel was created to do, and that capacity never leaves it. It’s only when you shrink the novel to the thriller that you run into problems in representing ordinary realities.
GC ► It seems to me that the dystopian or apocalyptic side of your work has increased in importance since Pacific Edge and the Mars trilogy, especially in your most recent novels. In the Science in the Capital trilogy our relationship to ecological crisis is much more contingent and haphazard, almost just-in-time. In Galileo’s Dream—though we don’t find out all that much about the transition between the present and humanity’s future on the moons of Saturn—the strong implication is that this has been a terrible, even tragic history, with great losses. And in your most recent novel, 2312, we return to something very much like the Accelerando of the Mars trilogy, only now the environmental problems of Earth have not been dealt with at all—leaving Earth a “planet of sadness,” home to starving billions. Does this reflect an increasing pessimism about the possibilities of the future? Or is something else at work?
KSR ► I try to give my novels whatever attitude I think will help them work best. The bleak history sketched in Galileo’s Dream, for instance, is there because I needed a reason for people from the far future to be interfering in Galileo’s life, and what I came up with was a history so bad that some future people would want to erase and rewrite if they could. I’m always working like that, so I don’t feel my own sense of the future is well expressed by my books. Indeed in Green Mars I had the West Antarctic Ice Sheet slip off into the sea, just in order to create so much chaos that it would seem more plausible that Mars could successfully secede from Terran rule. That’s not pessimism, but just a somewhat brutal focus on making plots seem realistic.
I do have a constantly shifting sense of what the future will “most likely bring,” like everyone else. And I am still very interested in writing about utopian futures. How to express that interest changes over time, and in the wake of previous efforts.
GC ► 2312 in particular seems like a direct attempt to rewrite the situation of your Mars trilogy with significantly more pessimism, at least in terms of the Accelerando’s uneven distribution over class and species lines. One character suggests that even post-scarcity won’t be enough to end the problem of human suffering at all, and that in fact true “evil” might be possible only after scarcity: “Before [post-scarcity], it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, altruistic, cooperative, a lover of all…. However you explain it, people do bad things. Believe me.” Another chapter contains a long list of reasons why utopia is impossible, from original sin to greed to “because it probably wouldn’t work” to “because we can get away with it.”
KSR ► For me that list is not a list of reasons why utopia is impossible, but rather a list of the shabby excuses we make for not making improvements when they are technically achievable. It was a pretty long list, and yet not comprehensive.
It’s true that the situation on Earth in 2312 is presented as somewhat dire. It’s very much like the situation we are in now. The exaggeration of three extra centuries of damage merely heightens the representation of now. It’s a kind of surrealism, and it could mean that the book describes an impossible future history, in that if things were to go that badly for three hundred more years, they might long before the year 2312 have necessarily spiraled down into something very much worse than what the book depicts. But the way that we live now, in a mixed situation, with some in misery and some in luxury, suggested that we might limp along in a degraded manner for quite a long time. In any case the book’s scenario is a distorted image of present reality, in the usual metaphorical way of science fiction.
Given that SF novels are always images of the times they were written in, maybe 2312 is somewhat more pessimistic than my earlier novels, even if I myself am not. In other words, it’s just the difference between 1990 and 2010. In those twenty years there’s been a lot of dithering, and that might seep into the text in unexpected ways. Still, I’m reluctant to call this pessimism.
GC ► 2312 does point to the continued possibility of utopia as you define it in Pacific Edge, “struggle forever.” The characters do make an improvement in the situation of the solar system, and the logic of the novel’s encyclopedia-like interstitial chapters suggest that, in retrospect, a genuine historical break of some kind has been initiated.
KSR ► Yes, that part of 2312 suggests humanity will have the means to repair damage to Earth, and also to make a more just society, and that the two efforts are parts of each other. Having started with a metaphorical description of our own time, there is then a prescription for action in the plot, again presented in surreal or symbolic form. Anything we do in reality will surely be messy and protracted, and the “we” will never be a unanimity. What I wanted to suggest is that because we have the ability to do better, our situation eventually will get so dangerous it will force us to do better. The desire will be there, and the tools are there (science and politics and culture), so the struggle is on, starting now and going on for some centuries at least. We don’t have to wait until the year 2312 to act, obviously, and it would be terrible if we did. Since we know now that we can greatly improve the situation by what we do, we should start now, and shoulder the frustrations of how long it will take without too much whining or quitting.
GC ► You’ve said that there won’t be a sequel to 2312—no 2313, no 2412. Does this speak to the ultimate unrepresentability of utopia? Would it be possible to set an artistically successful novel in a “civilization that nurtures the biosphere”—or, to paraphrase Tolstoy, are all happy civilizations alike?
KSR ► Well, as we have not yet seen any happy civilizations, the first one to come along should be interesting as a novelty at least. So yes, it should be possible to write an artistically successful novel set in a happy civilization. I would like to try one myself, but if I did, it would not be a sequel to 2312, as really it should be set much closer to now. It would be a new try at the subject that would follow on my earlier books, but in the way that a train of thought is followed (or not). I think it’s well worth coming back to the problem from time to time, as our current situation and its potentiality keep changing. So there is an opportunity to try something different.
The problems that will remain even in utopian futures are big, like death, or heartbreak; others could be added without straining anyone’s imagination. If these big problems still occur in a social context of equality and well-being, might they not become even more acutely felt, as clearly unavoidable losses and sorrows? Doesn’t our inescapable biological fate mean the utopia should always shade into tragedy?
GC ► A chapter in 2312 emphasizes the impossibility of a classic science fictional subgenre in which you’ve never participated: the galactic empire of the space opera, with human beings zipping between stars at supra–light speeds. You note that everything we currently know about physical reality tells us this is simply an impossibility—and further note that if it is an impossibility, Earth becomes tremendously important, the single best place we’ll ever know.
KSR ► The only place we’ll ever know. I firmly believe this point made in 2312, that our solar system exists at human distances and constitutes our home, or our potential home—Earth our home, the solar system a potential home—while the universe beyond the solar system exists beyond human distances and will forever remain a backdrop only, to be observed but not visited.
Clearly there is one exception in terms of stories engaged in real possibilities, which is the story of the generational starship. This is a really interesting science fiction subgenre, full of excellent work already, but it is almost always saying a variant of what I said above; we can’t get out to other stars and stay sane, as they are all too far away.
GC ► I’m curious, though, as a thought experiment: if we could get beyond the solar system—if relativity were revised tomorrow—would that really change significantly your commitment to environmentalist thinking? Does ecological thought depend in some sense on a recognition of a limited futurological horizon for mankind, or, alternatively, does it draw from other modes of thinking besides the imperial-economic question of how far we can go and how much stuff we can bring back? Given how capitalism has acted on a planet it knows to be finite and limited, one can scarcely imagine how it would act if it genuinely had the entire universe to spread across. It seems to me from this perspective that ecological thinking may become more important, not less, when mankind faces no limitations on its endless expansion. The wall of the solar system almost makes this too easy a problem, by shifting the register from morality to self-interest; we have to protect our environment to keep ourselves alive, not because it’s right.
KSR ► If we had the galaxy within reach … but this is something like the land of Cockaigne, which I’m not sure is science fiction. In any case it’s not a thought I can follow. I guess the way I come at it is to ask myself: What kind of story could I tell using this device of the galactic setting, that I couldn’t tell by way of a more realistic device? And when I don’t find any, as usually happens to me when I think about any fantasy devices, I can’t see the point of trying them, or at least, I can’t find my own way into them. If a good idea for a galactic story did come to me, I would immediately get much more interested. It doesn’t feel like that’s going to happen, but you never know. I enjoy reading some writers’ space operas, and I’ve written a time travel novel, a reincarnation novel, a shape-shifter novella; I don’t stick to realism on principle, it’s just a tendency.
As for having to protect our environment to keep ourselves alive, rather than because it’s morally right, that’s fine by me; it’s probably better that way. I suppose if we had entire galaxies to play in, we could be more careless about housekeeping without killing ourselves. That would shift ecological thinking and morality both, I’m sure. But it is too much of a hypothetical.
GC ► The moment from your work that frames this question for me most directly is the radicalism of the Red Martians from the Mars books, who insist on protecting Mars simply for its own sake, even though it has no persons on it at all. Part of the dystopian character of 2312, in fact, descends precisely from the fact that in that timeline Mars was settled quickly and maximally, with no regard to preservation, and with something like a seventh of the planet being permanently scorched in the process.
KSR ► This brings up the question of intrinsic value, whether places have value in themselves independent of our use of them or even our regard for them. It’s a question in environmental ethics, but as Chris McKay pointed out in “Should Rocks Have Standing?”—echoing Christopher Stone’s famous essay “Should Trees Have Standing?”—when we speak of “nature” we tend to mean “life,” so that the lifeless rocky bodies of our solar system are not “nature” as we usually mean it. There’s slippages all over in our words of course, but this problem of nature’s intrinsic value became in my Mars books a way to discuss the possibility of Mars as it is now having a value for us that was greater than its use value; and that if we felt that strongly enough, it would make sense to live there with as little impact on the place as possible, as a visitor almost, or at least an inhabitant that changes almost nothing. It seems like an extreme position, and yet desert lovers on Earth might already feel something like that. Greening a desert might have utilitarian value, but if you love deserts for their look and feel, then an aesthetic is being harmed if you green that desert. In the Mars books the Red position was analogous to that situation, with the added element of Mars’s exoticism and otherness, the way it is a very gorgeous rock right now with its own history inscribed on it. It’s a very odd special case in environmental thinking, if you think of it as a lifeless rock (as it may not be), and I’m not even sure it is much use to us in thinking about more general
cases.
GC ► In 2312 something similar happens with the animals—the final utopian reversal of the threatened “mass extinction event” with which our conversation began. So much of debates over animals both in and outside SF seems to hinge on the question of whether animals exist as beings in their own right or as something more like that desert, existing (or not) purely to satisfy human needs. I’m struck by Christina Alt’s essay on Wells that begins this volume, which finds Wells taking the deliberate extermination of animal life as a marker of utopian achievement. So much supposedly ecological thinking seems predicated on an anthropocentrism that denies the possibility of nonhuman values.
KSR ► Nonhuman values I take to mean human values in support of the nonhuman. In the case of animals, it’s very clear, I think; they exist as beings in their own right, they do not exist to serve us. We predate on them as food, but that is a violation of their existence. We are such powerful animals that we have even domesticated some other animals to make our predation on them easier, but they still live their own lives, whether enslaved to us or not. I think it’s best to consider all our fellow mammals as direct cousins, with mental lives much like ours. I’ve been learning to think similarly about birds, though these are much more distant relatives; fish even more so. I still feel it’s all right to eat them, because animals eat other animals, but that doesn’t mean the eaten animals were not existences in their own right, and should be treated respectfully and humanely. I think Temple Grandin’s position in these matters is impressive and persuasive.
I think what ecological thinking brings us here is the ability to see better how much we are interrelated to all the other species in our biosphere. If we drive them to extinction we are damaging ourselves too, because we are all part of a functioning network of organisms. There can be an anthropocentrism that acknowledges this physical reality and then goes on from there, continuing to value humanity first, but realizing every other living thing is part of us in a quite literal sense. Also, valuing humanity means valuing sentience, and that exists in other living creatures. So as a matter of self-regard and as a matter of respect for others, we need to care about all living creatures and act accordingly.
GC ► You once told me that you see part of your job as a science fiction writer as speaking on behalf of the people of the future—to ensure they have a voice in a present that is robbing them blind. Do you think much about the people of the future as readers of your novels? What might the people of 2100, or 2200, think about a culture that consumed stories of their radically transformed world as entertainment, while simultaneously refusing to act in the material realm?
KSR ► “Speaking for future generations” is a narrative mode or a rhetorical stance. It’s similar to the stance of writing as if from the future; in other words, a fictional position. Both can help to create an effect that Roger Luckhurst called “proleptic realism.”
As for people in the future reading my work, hopefully it would be like reading any literature from older times. Books are a window back into previous minds and their thoughts. Old science fiction inevitably looks creaky and dated, but in revealing ways, and hopefully despite the datedness, some of the ordinary pleasures of the novel will remain, if they were there in the first place. It is a worry, that SF becomes wrong in ways that obscure everything else about it. But when I was reading for Galileo’s Dream, I learned about the genre you could call renaissance fantasia, which includes works like the Hypnerotomachia, or Bruno’s The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, or Somnium by Kepler. These are strange texts, but they have an inventiveness and linguistic energy that reminded me of science fiction. Maybe they were the science fiction of their time, when science was still natural philosophy. In the future people may judge our science to be almost as unformed and primitive as natural philosophy (our science not yet ruling the world, after all, as it might in the year 3000), but hopefully our science fiction will still hold some pleasure as a kind of fantasia.
I don’t think people in the future will judge science fiction readers of our time as being especially hypocritical, just because we were reading science fiction while not acting on its lessons in the real world. We will be complicit with all the rest of our time, whatever happens, and it may be that science fiction readers will be judged to be among the secret agents of whatever good comes out of our time. It will be very hard to untangle all that and assign culpability or praise.
By and large I think science fiction has been fulfilling its role as a tool of human thought, while at the same time striving to entertain enough people to make money in the current economy. That’s the usual odd combination of requirements that art deals with.
GC ► How do you evaluate the influence of SF on ecological and environmentalist discourse? For every Silent Spring that uses science fictional imagery to mobilize people, there is a Star Trek that persuades us that we just have to sit back and wait for cold fusion to fix everything. Does SF generally steer us right, or wrong?
KSR ► Science fiction is a genre, and can hold many different kinds of content, across a wide ideological range.
It probably does have certain generic attributes that constitute its “content of the form.” For instance, as it is composed of stories set in the future, or in alternative histories, or in prehistory—thus, all the histories that we can never know—it does seem to indicate a commitment to history. It’s a strange version of that commitment, focusing as it does on the histories we can’t know; a kind of realism of the absent, made of thought experiments that use the counterfactual or the unknowable.
Another kind of content of the form comes from the genre’s focus on the future; this seems to be saying that there will be a future, and maybe a human future. And because future histories are sketched out to explain these fictional futures, there’s also usually the implication of causality, even an explanatory causality. Most stories have that, however.
Beyond these contents of the form, many different messages can be conveyed, some helpful, others harmful. Some thought experiments are so badly designed that their results (the contents of the form) are “not even wrong.”
Still, pretty prominent in science fiction is a body of work that concerns itself with planets and how humans live on them, and these stories are always ecological in some loose sense. And a subset of this group of stories is about Earth as a planet. One basic message they all convey goes something like, “We live on a planet, and planets are therefore interesting.” This is a good thing to remember and think about, as being inescapably ecological. So again, my feeling is that science fiction has by and large done its job as a form, and helped us to think ecologically.
GC ► How does this concern impact your own practice as a writer? What sort of research do you do when you set out to write? How do you square a commitment to the facts to your commitment to the art?
KSR ► Facts are stories, and often the raw material for my stories, so really it is just one single commitment. Most of my stories are realist stories in some sense.
One recent exception that might help illustrate my attitude toward these matters: Galileo’s Dream is a time travel novel, so I felt more comfortable writing that as a fantasia. Time travel does regularly get defined as a science fictional idea, of course, but I think it is unreal enough to be best presented as a fantasia, so that’s what I did. But more often I’m trying for science fiction with a strong reality effect, so the physical facts of the world are very much part of those projects.
My research consists mostly of a lot of reading, augmented by conversations with scientists, historians, and others. I generally sketch out a story in my mind and then start researching it, and what I learn often greatly alters the initial idea. I keep researching right to the end of the writing, so often the later parts of a book (especially the multivolume ones) will seem to know things that the earlier parts didn’t, and this is indeed the case.
Because I am trying to create a strong reality effect for variously unreal situations, research is important. It is always bringing me more stories, and many of these are at least as interesting as my initial idea, and they all seem to be woven together and lead off in all directions. It can become a problem finding where the appropriate edge of the spreading network of interesting stories should be cut. It’s like cutting a patterned fabric when you love all the patterns. Thus the length of my novels, and the crowded feeling they often have. But I am seeing better now that cut stories can be interesting in their cuts, and that’s been helping me to shape the latest novels.
GC ► Did earlier ecological SF provide examples or inspiration to you?
KSR ► Yes, my very first attraction to science fiction had a lot to do with the strand in the genre that could be called the planetary romance. What I got was often simply the joy of exploration, something I had already found as a young reader in Jules Verne, but now that joy extended to a romantic feeling about visiting other planets, and regarding them as places or landscapes. My discovery of science fiction happened in the same years I was discovering the Sierra Nevada on foot, also the years I was first reading Gary Snyder and then Buddhist texts, so the three interests were wrapped together for me, they became parts of a single pursuit.
I particularly enjoyed books like Edgar Pangborn’s early novels (West of the Sun, etc.) and many of the planetary adventures of Jack Vance, who had a very evocative way with landscapes, no doubt because of the way he lived and sailed around Earth during his working life. I also enjoyed Clifford Simak, who managed to make Wisconsin a mysterious planetary surface, connected to places all over the cosmos. Then the first four novels of Ursula K. Le Guin cast a very strong spell, and in City of Illusions the exotic planet to be traversed was a far future Earth, which was nice as well. After that I read Herbert’s Dune as a planetary romance, but also an ecological primer on desert survival.
All these together won me over. It was then I read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar quartet, which made a very different impact, a somber corrective: planets were great, but we were wrecking ours. Quite a few of Brunner’s earlier novels had been planetary romances in the old joyful style, so for him to put the Dos Passos lens on the damage we were doing to Earth was powerful. This for me marked the moment when ecology was added to the original romance. That allowed me to resituate Ballard as more than a psychological novelist, and The Crystal World became a great novel of our alienation from a wrecked
Earth.
Since then I have continued to enjoy novels about other planets, everything from Lem’s Solaris to Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day. I’m sure this strand in science fiction is what led me to my work on Mars. There exists a kind of canon of planetary science fiction by now, and ecological science fiction is either a subset of that, or vice versa.
GC ► Do any particularly bad stories spring to mind from your early reading? Stories with ridiculous or repugnant premises that point us in a completely wrong direction?
KSR ► Oh, yes, there are several types of bad stories. One that points us in a completely wrong direction is this commonly expressed notion that Earth is humanity’s cradle. I know this story began with Tsiolkovsky, but it became a commonplace in American science fiction, and I still hear it a lot in discussions about inhabiting Mars or space more generally, both in the science fiction community and in the space advocacy community. The assumption in that phrase and the future history it suggests is that humanity can survive apart from Earth, which is completely unproven and is likely to be wrong. It further suggests that, as humanity has a destiny to colonize the universe, the “cradle” is of only momentary importance, a thing to be used in infancy and then discarded, or at most revered as “Old Earth.” This story therefore carries within it terrible mistakes in thinking about our reliance on our planet, and it rightly causes an instinctive revulsion against the space project on the part of people who are a little more grounded. It is much more accurate, considering that only 10 percent of the DNA inside us is human DNA, to recall Flora Thompson’s line from Lark Rise to Candleford, which is quoted in John Crowley’s Little, Big: “We are bubbles of Earth! Bubbles of Earth!”
Another bad story is the one about “the Singularity,” which is also connected, though it is not exactly the same idea, to the notion of uploading human minds into computers. These both point us in wrong directions, as being disguised versions of immortality or transcendence—the rapture of the nerds, as Ken MacLeod put it. They are religious stories, misunderstanding or misrepresenting the brain, computers, consciousness, and history. And again they encourage carelessness toward Earth as our indispensable home, and even toward our own bodies, and our historical project as a species.
GC ► It’s interesting that you bring up religion, as in addition to denigrating climate change as a science fiction, the denialist Right has frequently insisted it is a “religion.” I think we’d both feel comfortable criticizing these characterizations in fairly strident terms—and yet it seems to me one must admit that reality has been taking on the aura of a biblical apocalypse of late. If science fiction is the realism of our time, as you have often said, what to do with the fact that it frequently seems to be the opening crawl for some B-movie dystopia?
KSR ► What I’ve said is that we are now living in a science fiction novel that we are all writing together. That doesn’t necessarily mean we are writing realistic science fiction. If our imaginations are crawling with B-movie dystopias, it may mark that in some Ballardian symbolic way we are hoping for these, rather than fearing them. The underlying feeling may be that anything would be better than now, and that only a big break will free us from the chains we have forged and wrapped around ourselves. But this is mostly hoping for an easy way out, an alternative to revolution where we don’t have to do anything. These dystopian scenarios would break the hold of the present order, yes, but they would also make things even worse. We would be freed of some constraints, but worse ones would replace them. This is where Ballard’s apocalyptic fantasies, depicting disaster as a flight to freedom, are wrong, because in the chaos he describes so lovingly (I’m thinking of the end of The Drowned World) we would be much less free than we are now. I think Ballard himself recognizes and says something like this in The Crystal World, the last and most beautiful of his planetary disaster series. The painfully ironic thing is that the kind of freedoms he seemed to crave, which were psychological and personal, can be had by merely walking outdoors, or by hanging out with people you love. It doesn’t take the collapse of civilization to defeat suburban alienation. In this project the Dalai Lama is a better guide to happiness than J. G. Ballard. I guess that should be immediately obvious, but I mean that focusing on present reality, and what you can do in it to better things for yourself and everyone, is better than the imaginary freedom expressed in the apocalyptic strain in our science fiction.
Maybe we can say that we need to see the real situation more imaginatively, while imagining what we want more realistically.
GC ► Along the same lines: Is utopia a religion? Or, perhaps it would be better to say: Is there continuity between the vision of utopia you set out and the (happy) end of history figured by something like the Christian kingdom of heaven?
KSR ► Is science a religion? I have trouble grasping exactly what a religion is, once you take it out of church. It’s a big word. I think the Christian kingdom of heaven is meant to be an end state, where the operating rules are fixed for good, and the inhabitants are immortal souls. That seems to me very different from an idea that we could try to make a more just society, which is my notion of utopia. That will always be a receding horizon ahead of us, which we can at best approach asymptotically, and will never reach. So it’s the difference between a desired end state (but what do they do there?) and a set of means to operate in a process that will never end.
GC ► Is there a fundamental conflict between mystical and scientific ways of thinking the environment that is registered in your work, or across SF generally? Is narrative SF on some level incompatible with eco-religion, deep ecology, and other attempts to derive reliably transcendent categories out of “Nature”?
KSR ► My principal criterion for science fiction is that it be set in the future, so if you depict a future in which some kind of eco-religion became widely believed, or was somehow revealed to be true, that’s just another science fiction scenario to me, which will work or not as a story, but still be an example of science fiction. So I don’t think there is a fundamental conflict.
For myself, I often regard the environment, meaning the planet but also the universe, as a miracle. I have mystical feelings for the Earth and the universe, but feel these can be joined to the most minute investigations of science; nor am I off-put by human attempts to manipulate the Earth or physical reality for human purposes. So science as investigation, and technology as manipulation, are both fine by me in principle, and not an impingement on my mystical feelings. We study and thus worship a sacred reality, which we manipulate in order to survive. This is an emotional state. It seems to me science is already the best eco-religion, in other words, therefore the one I adhere to, but as a lay person.
Deep ecology seemed to be suggesting that humanity was a planetary disease that would run its course and then die back or die out. This did considerable harm to the environmental cause, thus ultimately to the environment. To me deep ecology made it clear why environmentalism needs Marxist critical theory. That said, Marxism could often use a major infusion of ecological thinking, maybe even from the deep end of the pool, if not the drowned stuff. Quite a few of the original observations of Arne Naess were scientifically valid, or admirable in their values. But adding the adjective “deep” was a mistake. The point should have been that plain old ecology was already at the right depth to be very helpful.
GC: I’m reminded here of Gib Prettyman’s observations in his chapter on Le Guin, which suggests the ways in which Marxism, ecology, and Eastern religion sit in somewhat uneasy relation with one another. You yourself have frequently taken up non-Western ways of thinking in your novels, for instance your use of non-Christian religion in the Mars books and Tibetan religion specifically in both Years of Rice and Salt and the climate trilogy. Is this an attempt at crafting a synthesis, or more of an attempt to think the problem?
KSR ► It’s just thinking the problem. I’m not capable of a synthesis of those three. Maybe something more like a bricolage. I am interested in all three, and have tried plotting stories by putting them together in various combinations, and tracing what happens. I tend to use Marxist critical theory when thinking about history, ecology when thinking about the biosphere, and Buddhism when thinking cosmically or personally, although immediately when I say that I realize I often use all three in a slurry. My narrators often take “the most scientific view” of everything, even metaphysics, because that leads to funny sentences. And thinking of science as a critical utopian leftist political action from its very beginning—something like the best Marxist praxis so far performed in the real world—is very provocative and stimulating. Likewise thinking of science as a devotional practice, in which the universe is the sacred object of study. It can be almost a scissors-rock-paper thing among the three. The enjambments have been good for my books.
GC ► Do you feel like these kinds of experimental enjambments are more successful than attempts to found “new” eco-religions, as Octavia Butler suggests in her Parables series and Margaret Atwood does in her MaddAddam books, especially The Year of the Flood? Perhaps this is really a question about historical continuity versus radical break, and the retention of old forms in the new.
KSR ► I don’t know. My inclination is to trying mixing elements we already have rather than invent something new, especially any kind of religion. We have the elements of a good eco-religion already, in science and Buddhism. So, possibly this new mongrel religion should be named, and its pedigree given, in order to impress it more clearly on the mind. As the exercise would hopefully be a thought experiment only (thinking of how several cults have come out of various books’ fictional religions), it could be a way to reformulate the concepts of ecology into new and revealing stories. On the whole, I don’t see any problem in trying both methods and seeing what kind of stories come.
GC ► You’ve spoken recently about the ways scientists have become politically engaged, even radicalized, and in some ways this is a major theme of both Science in the Capital and 2312. Do you find SF (of the kind you write, or even SF more generally) has a role to play in that? Do the scientists you meet still read science fiction? Does science fiction provide a framework through which scientists can begin to understand themselves as political agents?
KSR ► I think science fiction can help scientists, yes. I hope for that, and try to write some of my novels with that goal in mind.
Now it has to be said, many scientists do not read fiction of any kind; they’re like everyone else in that regard. Fiction readers are a subculture, maybe a big one, maybe a minority of the population and growing smaller; it’s very hard to say, especially in this stage of technological change, where so many people are very engaged with computers and therefore perhaps reading a lot. And it seems to me that as we are all addicted to stories, there is bound to be a certain draw to the best stories, and written fiction has almost all the best stories. So as we are a species of story addicts, there is always going to be a place for fiction, as being the best stories.
But scientists are busy, and the scientists who read fiction may be a minority among scientists. Still, these are the ones who tend to have philosophical interests in what they do, and to realize that doing science is by no means a natural or self-evident activity. In their curiosity they read, and of course science fiction comes up as a possible source of good stories about science, even illuminating stories. So, many scientists will give science fiction a try. Many used to read it when they were young, then gave it up when they got too busy, or when they came to realize that it did not seem to know much about real science, that it was naïve, a collection of power fantasies for younger readers. It’s hard to overcome that judgment and get those people reading SF again. It depends on their level of curiosity, but one very common personality trait of scientists is a lot of curiosity. So there is always the possibility that word of mouth will bring them to some interesting book that they will then check out; and if it pleases them, or even if it irritates them in a stimulating way, they may go on and read more.
I’ve seen scientists react very strongly against my assertion that science is a form of politics and that scientists should get more involved as scientists in policy making. That breaks what for them was a dichotomy, in which science was clear and good and pure, while politics was dirty and bad and corrupt. They say to me, “But if we spoke politically as scientists it wouldn’t be science anymore, and what is good in science would get wrecked.” There is some truth to that objection, and yet I still think it’s good to irritate them in that way. Subsequently they may see things from a different angle. There is a lot of “dirty politics” inside science, as they know better than anyone; they have to struggle to keep science “scientific.” Part of that struggle involves precisely diving into funding, policy, and politics. So it is a good problem to bring up in their minds. Really, scientists need science fiction, or could use it; but it needs to be good on science, or they will see that it isn’t, and it won’t work for them.
GC ► A recent slogan of yours—again echoed by one of your characters in 2312—has been that social justice is a survival technology. You’ve also recently discussed the ways in which scientific praxis (at least in some idealized form) reflects a kind of actually existing communism—cooperative, collaborative, rewarding work done outside a market logic. And yet in the bleakest of our dystopian fictions—John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, for instance, to choose one book you have been influenced by—we find reflected the ways in which science and scientific progress seem to be hurling us faster and faster toward final cataclysmic disaster. Where is the intervention point, or the Archimedean lever, for science to reorient itself toward survival and justice as ultimate goals? If story and narrative have power here, why don’t they seem to be working?
KSR ► But let’s imagine that they are working, just slowly, and against resistance from countervailing forces. This is how I imagine it to be happening. Also, you said “scientific praxis (at least in some idealized form)”: no, I mean to say that actually existing science is already working, not just outside market logic, but against market logic. This is my point, and it can be stated in different ways, one of them being that economics should become a subset of ecology, which already measures and values things that economics mismeasures and does not value.
Brunner is a good example of how stories can help here, and have. He did often represent science in a mode of reckless hubris, making the environmental situation worse; but he was writing in the era of the atomic bomb and thalidomide and DDT being sprayed in the streets. There was a postwar moment, in other words, when the scientific community was painfully overconfident in its ability to manipulate the world for human good. In essence they were being unscientific in this attitude, because they were acting on a belief not based on enough evidence to justify it. Their confidence was an arrogance, but having just won the biggest war in history (by way of radar, penicillin, and the atom bomb), as a community they lost their head and thought “We can do anything!”
But the scientific community is very self-regarding and reiterative; it is always trying to make a better scientific method, it is explicitly an unfinished project at all times, and implicitly, maybe even unconsciously, it is a utopian project trying to push history in directions that will reduce suffering and increase justice. So now the 1950s moment of hubris looks embarrassing to the scientific community, and in general there is a much more careful attitude and methodology. Science is better than it was in the 1950s, in ways that can be demonstrated; here too we have to historicize, to be aware of change and progress. In that longer account, Brunner’s books were one part of the corrective to the 1950s moment of hubris, joining the stories of Rachel Carson and many other sources of critique from all directions.
There’s always going to be the need for this kind of self-examination and corrective action. We are better now at doing science, partly because we’re better at doing theory, and partly because science fiction retold all the old stories about pride going before a fall. However, we’re still allowing capitalism to shape our actions and wreck the Earth, meaning our bio-infrastructure, meaning ourselves. So our culture is not yet scientific enough; when it becomes so, we will be making more rapid progress toward both justice and sustainability, as the two are stranded parts of the same project. At least this is the story I’m trying to tell.