Kim Stanley Robinson by Robert Markley (review)

In Kim Stanley Robinson, part of the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series published by the University of Illinois Press, Robert Markley ambitiously sets out to tell the story of Kim Stanley Robinson's oeuvre by offering a "mid-career report that traces the developing concerns in his fiction" (10). The challenge of connecting the wide-ranging concerns of Robinson's fiction necessarily risks eliding or simplifying key elements of that story. Nonetheless, Markley is able to leverage Robinson's characteristic iteration over crucial narrative and critical themes throughout his oeuvre to articulate the trajectory of Robinson's concerns across three decades of writing, making this work an excellent introduction to a writer who is fundamentally engaged with the question of utopia and its relevance for our contemporaneity. This project is especially important in an era struggling with the problem of devising a utopian response to the impasses that obstruct adequate responses to anthropogenic climate change.

Markley does not analyze Robinson's work according to a strictly chronological sequence of publication. Instead, Kim Stanley Robinsonfirst compares short fiction and novels from two periods of Robinson's career. Chapter 1, "'I Saw Through Time': Falling into Other Histories," is critical insofar as it frames the discussion throughout the text through Robinson's concern with history, contingency, and the future. This chapter analyzes "The Lucky Strike" (1984), "A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations" (1991), and "A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions" (1991) alongside two later novels, The Years of Rice and Salt(2002) and Shaman: A Novel of the Ice Age(2013). While Shamanis not an alternate history, Markley argues in the introduction that it "pushes the generic boundaries of alternative history into a speculative past" (11). This characterization risks blurring the reader's understanding of how alternate histories rooted in specific events embody a different kind of speculation compared with the explorations of history conducted in prehistoric fiction. In addition, Shaman's description in the introduction as "pre-Anthropocene literature" (11) invokes a category that includes too much: the term collapses literature published before the contested boundaries of the Anthropocene and works set in those eras but written during the Anthropocene. The inclusion of Shamanin the discussion in chapter 1 does enable Markley to underscore how Shamanpositions knowledge as a multilayered dislocation that helps to reactivate the past in the context of a movement toward the future to contextualize the significance of Robinson's use of alternate history (48).

Chapters 2 through 4 deal chronologically with Robinson's major trilogies. Chapter 2, "Three Futures for California: The Orange County Trilogy," explores the three possible futures portrayed in The Wild Shore(1984), The Gold Coast(1988), and Pacific Edge(1990), which proceed from 1980s images of California's Orange County. Chapter 3, "Terraforming and Eco-economics in the Mars Trilogy," considers how Robinson's acclaimed Mars trilogy, Red Mars(1992), Green Mars(1993), and Blue Mars(1996), negotiates a new utopian future through a network of communities and their efforts to cobble together an economic system relevant to the demands of living on another planet. The Mars trilogy is rightly characterized as a "utopian odyssey, a falling into ecotopian theory," and "a utopian policy statement and a hard-won course" (109–10). Chapter 4, "'How to Go Forward': Catastrophe and Comedy in the Science in the Capitol Trilogy," returns to Earth to explore how this cobbling together of new systems might look were it oriented to respond to the challenges posed by abrupt climate change. These three trilogies expound on Robinson's key concerns: how the past shapes possibilities for the future, how literature itself "becomes a form of action, a moral and socio-political intervention" (68), and how utopian literature might be reconfigured to provide a "'necessary survival strategy' for an overheated planet" (114).

Markley is attentive to how Robinson's fiction works as a mode of cultural criticism in itself...