When I was editor of Boom, we published a long interview with him entitled “Planet of the Future.” And we’ve invited him to give talks at UCLA several times. So if Robinson is going to write a book about the High Sierra, one of my favorite landscapes, too, I’m ready to tag along, even if it turns out to be a challenge.īesides, I like Robinson. Isosceles Peak from Dusy Basin, Tom Killion, 2012, used with permission from press The Ministry for the Future takes on the climate crisis on Earth and is, at once, the most dire and most hopeful thing I’ve read about climate change. That means his sci-fi novels are deeply entangled with realistic politics, even when set in outer space. He’s a utopian at heart, but he calls what he writes about “optopia,” for the optimal or best possible world given the circumstances. And I happen to more or less agree with both of those assessments.

Plus, I have heard Robinson speak a few times in recent years in defense of John Muir and wilderness in ways that made me think he was wandering into terrain that could be trouble.īut Robinson has been hailed as “our last great utopian visionary” ( the Los Angeles Times Book Review) and “one of the most important political writers working in America today” ( The New Yorker). That book mixes narrative sections with expository chapters that read like scientific and bureaucratic reports, intentionally on Robinson’s part, drawing attention to how even gray literature has become dystopian in the age of climate change. It also seemed to be structured like his latest science fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, which can be a bit of a slog, though an often riveting and sometimes terrifying one. I was worried about Kim Stanley Robinson’s new book The High Sierra: A Love Story.Īt 560 pages it felt like a mountain to be climbed.

Kim stanley robinson new yorker