The Edge interview: Kim Stanley Robinson

INTERVIEW

Kim Stanley Robinson

Interview by Mike Don (1996)

The Martian trilogy is something of a departure from your previous work, in that it's a far more ambitious undertaking. What's the background to this?
I try to match the form of my books to the idea I had, and having had the idea to tell the story of the terraforming of Mars – it's a big idea – I thought it was going to be one novel. In my mind it was called Green Mars. I wrote that story years ago just to claim the title because I knew it would take me years to finish, and I didn't want anyone else to grab that title in between times. I started writing the project still thinking of it as just one book. I wrote about 200 pages of the first draft; and they [the colonists] hadn't even arrived. At that point I thought, there's no way this is going to fit in just one book; so I had a talk with my wife and my agent, and they said, well, it sounds like a trilogy to us. It was relatively easy to figure out what the other titles should be, given that the story was about changing the colour of the planet. Then I just had to execute it.

In the events of Green Mars, and the early part of Blue Mars, there seem to be slight parallels with the circumstances of the American revolution . . .
Somewhat similar, but I didn't want to do anything explicit. Basically I wanted to make up a new story: you get yourself onto a new planet, with technology like the technology I'm describing, and the historical analogies are deceptive; they look like there's some valid comparisons, but they're so superficial they're actually leading you into mistakes about what's really going on. I don't believe in historical analysis as a good way to understand things, and I did not explicitly study the American Revolution; I had to take it step by step in its own logical terms.

There are, however, some fairly explicit political statements in Blue Mars; specifically the references to cooperatives and non-hierarchical ways of working.
I'm not saying I was doing everything entirely from scratch – that would be impossible – but I hadn't modelled the sequence of events on any other particular sequence of events. I really tried to make up a new plot, but the system that they devise definitely has origins in a wide variety of precedents here on Earth. It's best that way, because rather than just thinking, well, this is Robinson trying to reinvent the wheel, it's actually a mixture of things that have really worked here on Earth; it's easier to believe in this as a workable society.

There's a passage in the chapter on them drafting their constitution, where Vlad makes a speech which is virtually classical Marxist analysis.
Yes, I could go along with that. I'm happy to oblige, in fact; it is a classical Marxist analysis of the problems of capitalism, and then the solutions, I think, are not ones that have been tried so far under the Marxist banner, but that's good. And also, I respect the notion that there's still going to be some kind of market, that you don't want utter and complete control, so the idea of co-ops and the ideal of a mixed economy, sort of social democratic, is appealing to me. So I had a mixed bag of political origins for this stuff. I'm happy that people recognise that and don't think I'm making it all up. I'm not. I'm doing the research and trying to make a combination.

Do some of the ideas possibly reflect your own views?
Obviously. There's no point in writing a utopia if it doesn't reflect your own views – certainly, in that constitutional chapter, I felt I was really taking some risks in writing about politics at such length but, well, if you're going to do that it's 'put all your cards on the table' and be very explicit about how the society works so people don't have to make guesses. Maybe it's a slightly boring chapter, and maybe I can make it interesting; it's a challenge. There aren't many novels that'll take a big chapter of talk about the writing of the Constitution!

I noticed that the labels 'Red' and 'Green' in the Mars books have virtually opposite meanings to their Earthly equivalents . . .
Yeah . . . deliberate. It struck me as funny.

How has it gone down in America?
The book's come out here first. It's not out in the States, so there's been no reviews to speak of. The one in Interzone, I notice, says it's kind of a slog getting through the political chapter, but it's a kind review and it's very mild. You write a novel 1600 pages long, and you can pause to try doing something a bit different that might please the people who like that sort of thing; and if the other people that aren't really into that, they're enjoying the novel, they'll go ahead and give you some leeway, and then you can get back to the story they like later on. The big novel is a wonderful format, you can throw a lot of stuff in and keep people pleased.

Would you ever consider setting the Mars books as part of a future history?
No, I don't like the idea. It seems an imposition on the freedom of the novels to come. I also feel that the Mars trilogy is a single long novel, and I'm already going to encumber it, so to speak, with a companion volume of non-fiction; articles, poetry, perhaps the text of the Constitution we were talking about, folk tales [to be called A Martian Romance]. But I'm not going to go forward. The novel ends and that's the end of the story, there's never going to be a sequel. That's probably true of novels further on in history. In a way, The Memory of Whiteness – it doesn't link up properly and I wouldn't want it to – does tell of a Solar System a thousand years further along. The dates in Memory of Whiteness are really absurd, but that book exists for people who want to know what happens next in the Solar System. An advanced, system wide civilisation; so in a way I've already done that.

What struck me about Memory was the rather . . . ornate . . . style.
That's right. I'd make some changes in Memory of Whiteness if I were to do it again, but I do think it provides a lot of entertainment. I made a goal when I was writing it that every scene should take place in a different setting, and that each setting should be evoked coolly enough to give people an idea of what it looked like there. So as they take their grand tour round the Solar System there must be a hundred settings described. It actually taught me some lessons about what I needed to do with my Solar System tour in Blue Mars, to be more selective, not comprehensive, and do what's necessary for the novel and not get caught up in any programme or idea. It's a fun novel to read in its way and a good learning experience for me. But I must say that writing about music is fundamentally impossible.

There seems to have been an upsurge of interest in Mars lately; in addition to your trilogy, there have been an enormous number of Mars-set books from other authors. Do you think there's an explanation for this, perhaps in the talk of a Mars expedition?
It was impossible to miss the fact that there was a sudden flux of Mars novels, but I don't think there's any explanation for it . . . The only explanation I could come up with is that it took that long to digest the implications of stuff discovered in '76 and '69. It just took that long for the collective group of SF writers to figure out what kind of stories might be put on this new landscape we'd been given. That's still not a proper explanation though, because you'd think that for some people it would take three years to figure it out, for some it would take forty. For all of them to take, um. . . the books came out in a flurry in the early nineties, 15-17 years after the 76 data came in. That's a ridiculous amount of time to pass, to say it takes seventeen years to digest a new world.

Another thread through most of your work, the Mars books and the Orange County trilogy [The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge] especially, is a sense of environmental awareness . . .
It's become more and more of a concern, and I've begun to realise it's really one of the things I want to write about, one of the things that drives me to write, to be able to construct stories that tell things about this concern. I've studied it more; and also it seems like a variety of different things that I thought of as separate from one another, that I've studied in the past, in recent years have begun to link up in my mind into a larger whole; they fit together into a bigger pattern I didn't perceive before. Utopia, and wilderness, and environmental concerns, and politics, they are all part of one project now, whereas before it seemed they were different interests, in different books.

Another thing the Mars books allowed me was to bring everything I was interested in together into one whole, that I've finally begun to see the shape of . . . The environment – the reason I'm really interested is that, being a Californian, I'm looking at a landscape under enormous pressure from overpopulation, from too many people moving in there, and the natural environment really taking a hammering; and that concerns me, it's my home, it's a landscape I find just . . . gorgeous. So variable. Within California you have freezing mountains and warm Mediterranean beaches, rain forest and the driest deserts; it's really a magical place in that sense, it's got everything.

Your solution in The Wild Shore was rather a drastic one, though . . .
Only in literature can you impose such a cool solution to the problem, to kill everybody off, and then the few people left have got the chance to start again. You can see how beautiful the wilderness is and how being close to it, like in Wild Shore, actually gives the characters' lives more meaning, and the material things they lose are more than compensated for by the sense of community and their closeness to the natural world. But it's not a good solution to the problem. What you would want is for people to voluntarily change towards that, which is why Pacific Edge is an attempt to take what's best out of The Wild Shore and then also what's best out of the Gold Coast society, the high tech, the powerful science, combine them into a utopian solution when people have gone closer to nature because they wanted to, rather than had to.

In a sense, then, Pacific Edge is a synthesis of the other two?
Yes; taking the best out of them in an attempt to avoid the worst of them, because they both have dreadful situations in different ways. The Wild Shore: despite their closeness to nature, they go down to the graveyard and everybody's only living about 30-40 years. I wanted to make that quite clear, by that trip to the graveyard this is not my attempt to paint a pastoral Utopia! Rather, it's a miserable place that has its compensations. And The Gold Coast is obviously miserable. On the other hand, I presume they've got relatively good health care; expensive, but decent. They've got science working for them even though it's a consumer dystopia, there're good aspects to it as well.

On another topic entirely, Escape From Kathmandu seems rather different to your other work, lighter in tone . . .
I like it myself; I'm very happy with that book. It would never have been written if I hadn't gone to Nepal with my wife. The book wouldn't even have occurred to me, that's the thing. I liked reading about climbing in the Himalayas, but the books don't tell you what the experience is like. It might have been the fact that for my wife and I it was a really happy time, having finished our student years and gotten through some hoops we had to jump through. The relief of that, and the pleasure of being there, in those beautiful mountains, and all the comedy of the culture there and its clash between West and East – it all added up to a very easy feeling. The book just wrote itself after I got back, in a remarkably short time.

I must say that I'm remembering it a lot these days because I'm working on an Antarctic novel that comes on the heels of a trip to Antarctica, and it reminds me of the way it felt to write the Nepal book. A lot of intensely funny situations down there, the idea that this is going to be an adventure novel with a high-spirited . . . I really think I'm back into a project as close to the Kathmandu book as I'll ever do; not as farcical, but with high spirits.

What did you think of Arthur C Clarke's Snows of Olympus, which ties in with the present interest in Mars?
It's interesting in a way. There's some gorgeous illustrations, and it really makes you think about terraforming Mars. There's also some jokey stuff in there that tests the computer that pays little attention to the reality on Mars, in terms of putting an ocean so high that Olympus Mons becomes an island. That would flood 95% of the Martian surface, and it's not really on the cards. But Clarke's been really important to the whole thinking about Mars for many years now. He's aware of my work, which is nice. I really appreciate the comments he's given for the book. It's helped it a lot. And he's been in contact. He was actually one of the people who helped me get to Antarctica, for which I'll be eternally grateful. He wrote me a letter of recommendation to the US National Science Foundation.

There's been a lot of talk about the state of SF today, with the rise of genre fantasy, the role of SFX dominated films; what are your feelings?
In many ways the field looks really healthy to me. Of course there's variety, and of course there's some commercial stuff that's more popular than pure science fiction; on the other hand, I have no complaints. There is an audience out there that is vastly appreciative of good science fiction. It's a pretty big audience, and there's no reason to go around moaning because there are bigger audiences for other things. There's a lot of good science-fiction being written, to the point that I feel there's more good science fiction than I possibly have time to read so, as a consumer, why should I complain? Being in a situation where I can't keep up with the good stuff that's being written, that's a sign of health. There's been times in the past when there's been less good science fiction than there's been time to read it. I don't think I have that feeling these days.

British SF seems to be doing exceptionally well; I would be surprised if anyone over here complained, at least in terms of the results as literature; Gwyneth Jones and Iain Banks, Geoff Ryman, Paul McAuley, Steve Baxter, and Greg Egan – I know he's Australian, but it seems the British publishers are where he's got his most prominent appearance – Kilworth, Holdstock, Simon Ings.

I think people are being inspired by the sense that good things are yet to be done. You look around and see what everyone else has done and you say, 'My gosh, that's an ambitious crowd out there!' If you want to be read you have to go ahead and stretch, give it your best try.

I think it's a sort of reflex to complain that comes from earlier years when things were harder, and the reflex stays when the situation has changed. There's a British word that doesn't exist in America; whingeing. There's a lot of whingeing going on, and I don't have any patience with it. Good literature's being written and what else matters? It's silly to complain – life's too short! •

This interview first appeared in Mike Don's Dreamberry Wine, a catalogue of mostly second-hand, mostly SF-fantasy-horror (& related) books (mostly reasonably-priced paperbacks), which occasionally publishes interviews and includes, in each issue, book reviews and a letters column. See Mike's site.

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