In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays by William J. Burling
  • Jason W. Ellis (bio)
William J. Burling, ed., Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009, 312 pp. $45.00 paper.

The late William Burling’s edited collection Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays combines previously published essays and an interview with original articles on Robinson’s short and long fiction. The anthology’s contributors explore Robinson’s writing from a number of critical standpoints, including utopian studies, science-fiction studies, alternative historiography, genre studies, political theory, and ecocriticism. Its inclusion of both widely cited and new essays, its overall breadth of theoretical approaches, and its essays’ rigorous uniformity make this volume useful for researchers and students alike.

Burling reports in the preface that he inherited his editorship of Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays from an unknown party thanks to the mediation of the author whose work is the subject of this impressively robust collection. This is not to say that he inherited some amount of initial groundwork that he then had to see through to completion; instead, Burling had inherited only an idea for a collection, which he then had to make real. Burling had already established himself in the field with significant scholarship on Robinson, politics, and utopian studies. His interests in these interlocking areas spanned the domains of the classroom, conferences, and publications, which is evidenced by this volume, as well as by his curriculum vitae, course handouts, downloadable publications, and syllabi.1 Furthermore, he understood that this edited volume carried greater responsibility than just archiving the existing scholarship: rather than serving solely as a retrospective, the anthology adds substantively to the critical dialogue in its own right by “establishing Robinson as an intellectual figure of the first rank and by defining the interpretive debate for the near future” (p. 3).

Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable inaugurates the importance of Robinson’s work to popular culture through a consolidated demonstration of its consistent and significant themes as debated in a representative sample of the best Robinson scholarship. This collection gains much of its strength from the substantive dialog and debate among its contributors within these essays. Additionally, the contributors cite sources that form a much broader discourse than what can be contained in this single volume. [End Page 195]

The collection is composed of eighteen chapters, thirteen of which are reprints of seminal works on Robinson, and five of which are original works of research for this book. It is divided thematically into three major sections: “Utopia and Alternative History”; “Theory and Politics”; and “Ecology and Nature.” The final section of the book includes one of the most widely cited interviews with Robinson, as well as a selected bibliography of the secondary literature.

In the following, I have chosen to briefly name and describe each chapter as a reference for scholars to easily utilize the book’s contents. The essays in this anthology represent many different voices and styles; however, each demonstrates extraordinarily applied rigor and unity of thought. Many of the essays are reprinted from other books and journals. Burling also wisely included new scholarship to augment these previously published works. The chapters expand the survey of Robinson’s oeuvre and add cutting-edge conversations to the constantly developing dialogue.

The first section on utopia and history begins with Thomas Moylan’s “Witness to Hard Times: Robinson’s Other Californias.” He argues that Robinson follows a trajectory of apocalypse, dystopia, and eutopia in the Three Californias trilogy. He also asserts that Robinson challenges the imaginative limitations imposed by the past through “the inter-relationships between writing, political analyses, and personal collective engagement” (p. 12). In the next, widely referenced essay, “‘If I Find One Good City, I Will Spare the Man’: Realism and Utopia in the Mars Trilogy,” Fredric Jameson reevaluates realism in Robinson’s Mars trilogy by using Darko Suvin’s definition of utopia: “Strictly speaking, Utopia is not a genre in its own right, but rather the socio-political sub-genre of science fiction” (p. 48). Eschewing traditional conceptions of realism, Jameson artfully demonstrates both how science is an extension...

pdf

Share