On Irish Science Fiction: A Letter to the Editors

Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of nineteen novels, including the Mars trilogy, has been awarded two Hugo Awards for Best Novel (1994 Best Novel (1997), two Nebula Awards for Best Novel (1994 Best Novel (2013), and many other literary prizes for his science fiction. His work regularly engages with questions of ecology and our collective social future in the wake of climate change and the sixth mass extinction. Robinson was the Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Colby College in 2018 and a Muir Environmental Fellow at Muir College, University of California, San Diego, in 2011. His recent work deals directly with the climate crisis, and New York 2140 (2017) depicts New York City after sea-level rise inundates most of Manhattan and forces residents to create new forms of social, economic, and political engagement. His most recent novel, Ministry for the Future, was published in October of 2020. It has been lauded for directly grappling with the “transitional phase toward a better and different society,” a period that critics of speculative and utopian fiction argue almost always gets overlooked in favor of a focus on “the final stages of a utopian experiment.”¹

Robert Markley describes Robinson as “a utopian writer—if we understand that utopia is not an endgame but an ongoing struggle for a more just and sustainable society.”² The author’s interest in bringing together political, ecological, economic, and collective social ideas into fiction suggests that science fiction can offer us alternatives to capitalism.³ Science fiction—and particularly the genre “cli-fi” (climate fiction)—offers, by some measures, the only “serious” treatment of “the ecological devastation of Earth by industrial capitalism.”⁴ Indeed, Robinson himself argues that “if you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece.”⁵ To contemplate the contemporary moment of environmental crisis requires engaging with scenarios of the future: thus the genre of science fiction and questions of the environment are inextricable. Robert Markley goes as far as to argue that Robinson’s work is a case study for “seeing science fiction, and not traditional literary realism, as the truly significant genre for our current moment in human and planetary history.”⁶

This claim for science fiction as more significant than literary realism is also a claim for the political necessity of moving away from the territory of individual moral action and back to imagining something like a collective. Amitav Ghosh makes precisely this point in The Great Derangement, arguing that “the contemporary novel has become ever more radically centered on the individual psyche while the collective . . . has receded, both in the cultural and the fictional imagination.”⁷ Ghosh deftly links this novelistic shift not to inherent elements of literary form but instead to a cultural sense of “progress” and modernity that runs parallel with accelerated carbon emissions and other aspects of the “Great Acceleration” during the twentieth century. Science fiction may be uniquely poised to offer pointed critiques of both the contemporary political situation and longer cultural histories. “In their ambitions to record a history of the Anthropocene that we do not yet know,” Markley argues, Robinson’s “novels brilliantly chart imaginative topographies that encourage us to reassess our collective histories and imagined futures.”⁸ Thus we can see science fiction at its best as offering not just that imaginative leap to a future that is not (only) dystopian or postapocalyptic but also offering potential avenues for moving to a more sustainable and just place both environmentally and socially.

But what about science fiction in an Irish context? What might Irish science-fiction writers have to say about political and environmental issues? How might their work be changing in response to the climate crisis? I heard that Robinson had an interest in Irish writing, so I asked him if he had ideas about the past and future trajectory of Irish science fiction. This letter is his response.

Kelly Sullivan

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Dear Kelly,
Thanks for the invitation to...