Kim Stanley Robinson: “Climate, Fiction, and The Future”
On this episode, Nate is joined by climate science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson to discuss how he contributes to the discussion of climate and pro-social changemaking through writing.
On this episode, Nate is joined by climate science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson to discuss how he contributes to the discussion of climate and pro-social changemaking through writing.
A story is not just an allegory, or a metaphorical point. It’s a love affair, and one of the most wonderful ways of breaking the trance states being put on us at this point in time, is to figure out what you love.
To put the whole weight of the future on the shoulders of those of us who happen to be around just now can be paralysing, the weight unbearable.
I found Dennis Mombauer’s supernatural eco-novella The House of Drought to be both captivating and confusing.
Aside from John Michael Greer’s several deindustrial novels (Star’s Reach, Retrotopia, the Weird of Hali series), Catherine McGuire’s Lifeline is, if I am not mistaken, the first full novel to emerge into publication from the deindustrial fiction community that sprang up around Greer’s After Oil anthologies and carried over to Into the Ruins and New Maps.
Stuart McMillen is a systems thinker disguised as a cartoonist. His long-form comics condense important academic topics into understandable and entertaining works of art.
I could rhapsodize a great deal more about the fine writing, emotional power and originality of Arboreality, but suffice to say that for connoisseurs of deindustrial fiction, it isn’t to be missed.
Always Coming Home must stand as a landmark of deindustrial literature, from years before the genre was ever named.
It is my belief that we will create the future we long for only because we are able to master the art of telling the most compelling stories. Stories that are delicious, irresistible, mesmerising.
Taylor Brorby has written one hell of a memoir. It covers many critical topics that come up in Crazy Town, from fracking to civil disobedience to that most inept of policies: aiming for infinite economic growth on a finite planet.
Stories about these forests and villages can help connect people to these old-growth systems and their irreplaceable worth and inspire people to continue to work to protect them.
Though fictional, the book raises a very real question: Can the human capacity to imagine alternate climate futures actually help generate new, more hopeful realities?