Kim Stanley Robinson (born March 23, 1952*) is probably best known for his award-winning Mars trilogy. He has been widely acclaimed by readers and critics since the beginning of his career, and is considered by many to be one of the finest living writers of science fiction (more can be found here)

Hello Stan and thank you for your kindness. Science fiction and alternate history. The two genres are getting more and more connected and you are maybe one of the authors that mixes the most in between the two of them. Is The Years of Rice and Salt an example of a new kind of fantastic literature?

No, I think it can be seen as an alternative history like those that have come before. This little genre somewhat resembles the utopia, in that it began before science fiction proper, in the "uchronies" of the 19th century (a Napoleonic officer wrote a long novel about what the world would have been like if Napoleon had conquered the world, etc.), but then when science fiction rose to prominence in the 20th century, the alternate history was carried along into it, because of the similar structural nature of the two genres, I presume, both of them being "histories that we can never know"----sf proper taking the present moment for its departure point into a fictional history set in the future, and the alternative history starting from some determinate moment of our past history, and departing from there into a new alternative fictional direction. It is the same mental operation, and so, I suppose, is why alternative histories like Philip K. Dick's MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE or Keith Roberts' PAVANE have always been included in science fiction studies, and they are regularly considered to be a part of science fiction. THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT therefore fits into a generic tradition already established, although it has some Asian elements that arise from the book's alternate premise, and make the novel also a reincarnation novel, so that in that sense it is perhaps an original mix of genres. But the relation between alternate history and science fiction are well-set already.

You seem to be very much connected with topics such as the protection of environment and the risks of spoiling nature.


Sure, it's true. The basic impulse for this arises from my personal life and what I like to do with my time, including hiking in the Sierra Nevada of California and the other mountain ranges of the world, spending time in the ocean which is how I grew up as a boy, and now gardening around my home, both vegetable and flower gardens. These interests have led me to a sharp awareness of the destruction humanity is wreaking on the Earth, and I think that if one is writing novels set in humanity's possible futures, in each of them the fate of the biosphere that supports us is going to be a crucial question. To ignore this in order to focus on "technology" exclusively is to misunderstand the basis of life, and that isn't something a novelist should do. So, I writing about environment and its fate as part of my proper work as a novelist (always looking for the biggest context of meaning) and a science fiction writer (honestly thinking about our possible futures).

Do you think that mankind risks actually extincion by spoiling what's around and by not using respectful policies to what's environment?

I don't know about extinction outright---that would require an exceptionally total disaster--- but we are already causing a mass extinction event for the rest of the biosphere, equal to the great ones of the past, like the KT or the Permian, and if we kill off species at the bottom of the food chain in the ocean, by over-acidifying the ocean with our carbon burning and then the oceans die, this may lead to mass die-offs on land too, and we are at the top of all these food chains, and presumably could suffer huge losses ourselves. In that chaos, if things got bad enough, I could imagine it spiralling down to something almost like extinction. If there is a "reverse decimation" and only a tenth of us survive, is that bad enough to cause us to pay attention and change our behavior? I think so.

Back to alternate history. The years of Rice and Salt was indeed a very intriguing novel. Do you really mean that Arab civilization could have colonized Europe if the1348 plague had devastated that way the Christian world?

I think it would almost inevitably have happened: while Islamic civilization was past its expansionary peak by that time, it was still doing quite well--- Dar al-Islam extended from Morocco to Malaysia, and if the land on the north side of the Mediterreanean were suddenly empty of people, I think fishermen and others would have started to setttle the coasts, decided it was safe, and quickly colonized the empty land, much as Europeans did in North America, ignoring the primitive peoples already there. Same in southeast Europe---if empty, surely the Ottomans and those in the Caucasus would have moved west and north, farther every generation until they were the ones occupying the continent, and on they would have gone, as Islamic Europe. This was by no means the most difficult of the historical extrapolations to defend in my larger alternative history.

Science fiction today. Some writers - Vinge, Stross - speak of the so called "singularity" as the main event in mankind's near future. Stross means this singularity is the Internet. Do you have your own singularity?

I take the Vingean singularity to mean a moment when machine intelligence as a complex reaches a certain critical mass and takes off in self-improvements and self-propelled evolution far past any point we could understand. I disagree with Vinge that any such thing could happen. Right now I'm reading Rudy Rucker's THE LIFEBOX, THE SEASHELL, AND THE SOUL, which is a description of reality as a set of computations, similar to what any computer or cellular automaton could accomplish, and what he makes clear in this excellent book is that almost all computations are equivalent to each other, even if some would take immensely more time to accomplish them. And that there are many computations that "irreducible" and cannot be speeded up by anything at all. The human brain being what it is, there is no chance of machine intelligence becoming so "intelligent" that we couldn't understand it; and meanwhile we are still the ones inventing and programming the machines, so we ourselves are a non-transcendable limit. Obviously this needs more space to discuss fully, but the conclusion I come to, is that "the singularity" is yet another science fiction metaphor, meant to convey what life already feels like in this accelerating moment of history----past all individual understanding! As such it works well.

Could this "singularity" of yours be the environmental question?

Well, I do believe we are coming to a "choke point" in history, in which the bad effects of all our technologies and the population surge that has resulted, has carried us into a dangerous moment in which much destruction could follow, although if we recognize the danger and react to it, we might employ our very powerful technologies to invent a clean and sustainable civilization, after which point all succeeding problems will be more and more in our grasp to solve. So that it is not a singularity as I understand the metaphorical use, but a world historical crisis, having to do with massive impacts on the planet and our need to counteract them immediately, with the results being either good, possibly very good (permaculture, longer lifetimes, human expansion into solar system, etc etc) or bad, possibly very bad (mass extinction event, population collapse. If history were a mountain climb, we could say we were at one of the cruxes of the climb.

Science fiction, fantastic and the "likely" . How close to reality are the stories you write?

Well, it depends on the particular project I am working on, but it can be truly said that up until now, I have tended to write at the realistic end of what can be imagined for our near future, so that no new technologies depending on radical changes in our physical understanding are postulated (no faster than light etc) and no aliens, etc. etc. So that in that sense and in those novels I am kind of a realist of the near future, so to speak. But in other novels (THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS for instance) I go farther into the future and employ technologies more radical to us, and in one short novel, A SHORT SHARP SHOCK I let loose from all restraint and wrote a kind of science fantasy or dream narrative; and I would do this again if the right idea struck me for a story. No limits imposed artificially, in other words, but I do obviously have inclinations as a fiction writer.

What are you writing at the moment?

I am starting a novel about Galileo, to tell the truth, and so may hope to come to Italy to visit his house before I am done!

home