Climate, Fiction, and The Future
The Great Simplification #66 with Kim Stanley Robinson
This Week…
Artists have a long history of channeling social change into their works, shaping our cultures, societies, and institutions. When informed by science, this becomes a powerful tool for action. Joining me today is climate science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson to discuss how he contributes to the discussion of climate and pro-social changemaking through writing.
Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He is the author of over twenty books, including the internationally bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, and The Ministry for the Future. He was part of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995 and 2016, and a featured speaker at COP-26 in Glasgow, as a guest of the UK government and the UN. His work has been translated into 28 languages, and won awards including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. In 2016 asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.”
There have been many calls to improve the communication of scientists to the general public in hopes it will help people understand the severity of the various global threats we face. A key component to such communication comes from art and literature. Even further, the humanities help us think about the type of future and culture we want to have given the information that science brings us. Can artists and storytellers pave the way to different futures and then get engineers and architects involved? How can we incorporate fiction into our set of tools to bring more people into awareness of the pressing systemic dynamics underpinning global events?
In case you missed it…
In the finance world there is something called a Global Macro - an overview of all the relevant events and updates of the previous day. But people paying attention to the meta-crisis know that there is also a real Global Macro - from sea surface temperatures recently at all-time recorded highs, to the threat of nuclear war, to failing nation-states. How does a single person make sense of and cope with the 24 hour news flow reporting our increasingly chaotic world? Despite relative silence in the media, our cultural challenges are now far greater than stock markets and currency movements. We need people paying attention, understanding, and engaging with the ‘real’ Global Macro.
If you appreciate The Great Simplification podcast…
Be sure to leave a review on your preferred podcast platform! Leaving reviews helps the podcast grow, which helps spread awareness of our systemic situation from experts in ecology, energy, policy, economics, technology, and community building so that we can better understand - and respond to - the challenges of the coming decade.
The Great Simplification podcast is produced by The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF), a 501(c)(3) organization. We want to keep all content completely free to view globally and without ads. If you’d like to support ISEOF and it’s content via donation, please use the link below.
I'm so glad you had Stan on as a guest. My favorite quote from "Ministry" is:
“My body worked so well that eventually all things everywhere were swallowed and digested by me. I grew so large that I ate the world, and all the blood in the world is mine. What am I? You know, even though you are like everything else, and see me from the inside. I am the market.” ― Kim Stanley Robinson
The image in my mind is the Superorganism...
Oooh I look forward to listening to this one. I’ve had a break (good for the psyche) for a while but have some catching up to do, you’ve had some great interviewees recently.
I think the “story” is a very important issue, maybe one of the biggest issues. Hope you’re doing well Nate!
“There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”
-Daniel Quinn, Ishmael