How a Utopian Sci-Fi Author Writes Toward a Low-Carbon Future
“It's a race against disaster. So you have to run like hell,” says climate fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson on this week’s Zero.
Tackling climate change means knowing how to tell its story — and the story of humanity’s efforts to beat it. That’s familiar territory for Kim Stanley Robinson, an author of climate fiction whose more than 20 novels include The Ministry for the Future.
Ministry reads more like a fictional anthology of a near-future in climate crisis than a traditional novel, and opens in 2025 with a heatwave that kills millions in India. It’s a grim scene, one followed by myriad portraits of humans striving to cope with an increasingly inhospitable planet. There’s ecoterrorism, geoengineering and even a wild chase over the Swiss Alps. But what ultimately emerges is an “optopian” roadmap: the world coming to terms with climate change and beginning to address it in earnest.