Kim Stanley Robinson (1952– ) is an award-winning US writer of science fiction whose novels have become incredibly influential outside of the genre world. Robinson has become known to the general public through frequent mentions by climate-change scientists and references both in pop culture and in magazines such as the Economist—whose 2015 special on global warming led off with a summary of Robinson’s novel 2312 (2012). He, along with Karen Joy Fowler, is perhaps the most successful of the so-called Humanist science fiction writers.
Robinson became widely recognized with the publication of his first novel, The Wild Shore (1984), released as one of Terry Carr’s Ace Specials. It won the Locus Award and initiated the Three Californias sequence, set in three versions of Orange County on the Pacific coast just south of Los Angeles. Robinson is also highly regarded for his Mars Trilogy, starting with Red Mars (1992) and proceeding through Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996). All the books in the Mars Trilogy won the Hugo Award, and Blue Mars also won the Locus Award. The overall narrative unpacks in detail a future history during the course of which the human settlers of Mars gain political independence from Earth (Robinson, optimistic about reader tendencies, provides a full constitution in the text) while engaging in a debate over the ethics and practicalities involved in terraforming the planet. With suitable cognitive caution, the cast (and the sequence) comes down on the side of planetary transformation.
Though it might be possible to call him a hard science fiction Humanist, what in fact most characterizes the growing reach and power of his work is its cogent analysis and its disposal of such categorical thinking. In some form or another, Robinson’s career has consistently adhered to an overriding cognitive imperative: the argument that humanity will not thrive unless technology can be used in ways sympathetic to the Earth’s ecology, an argument intimately married to a conviction that the alternative to making the world better is allowing it to become fatally worse.
Robinson’s “Before I Wake” (1989) is not necessarily typical of his longer work, but at the short-fiction length he roves more widely. It’s a powerful Humanist tale about the nature of reality based in part on a dream journal Robinson kept between 1975 and 1980. Of course, the dream source is nicely balanced by Robinson’s natural tendency toward the rational.