31 Dec 2015

As 2015, the year of "AURORA", closes, Kim Stanley Robinson offers his reader a short story -- fully available at Tor.com here.

"Oral Argument" is a transcript of a hearing at the US Supreme Court on patent laws that allows us to get a glimpse of a very green future.

This is one of the few short stories of Robinson's as of late -- he mostly concentrates on novels; see the list of short stories here. This publication is like a 2005 one-page story, "Prometheus Unbound, At Last", which was published in a magazine (Nature) and not in a "conventional" SF&F magazine or collection.

The image by Wesley Allsbrook used to promote the story, the bronze bull at Manhattan covered in moss, algae and all kinds of growing things, could be seen as a teaser to Kim Stanley Robinson's next novel coming in 2016! It will take place in a future with severe climate change and sea level rise, in a Venice-like half-submerged Manhattan. Stay tuned for more, and merry post-solstice festivities!

17 Nov 2015

KSR.info 2.0!

Submitted by Kimon

Welcome to the new version of this site!

This new version will allow for smoother updates and a faster and more convenient way for this webmaster to get information to you on all things KSR! It also integrates the information of the news, reviews, and encyclopedia in a single portal, making connections and cross-referencing (and protection from spam) smoother and making discussions and interactions and content featuring easier. In short, future-proof.

Launched over six years ago, KSR.info still aims to be an open collaborative site, with content written/created/submitted by its members.

What used to be the "MangalaWiki" is accessible here. For some time now the wiki had been closed to modifications, with this new version it is no longer the case. Learn more about how you can contribute here. You don't have to be tech-savvy to provide your input or suggestions, and if it still is too daunting there are always the comments in every page or the contact page.

So, take a look around, and make use of the social media! You can see Stan's personal selection of his favourite talks/interviews, skim through the archival list of interviews, refresh your memory about Sax, find out the meaning of 'Haj', and much more... There is quite a bit of content on the Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt, with more content on the way -- the site is an ongoing work.

Let's celebrate with this recent video of Stan at the 2015 Bioneers conference, on "Rethinking Our Relationship to the Biosphere":

9 Nov 2015

Out now: GREEN EARTH!

Submitted by Kimon

Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Earth" just came out, in paperback and e-book!

"Green Earth" is more than an omnibus edition of the three books in the Science in the Capital trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below and Sixty Days and Counting. "Green Earth" combines them in a compressed single volume -- fully updated and compatible with today's world and three hundred pages shorter, but still counting 1100 pages!

"Green Earth" appears as a single volume to coincide with the UN Framework Contract on Climate Change 21st Conference of Parties in Paris, later in November and start of December -- where world leaders will gather to hopefully steer world development towards a more sustainable path than greenhouse gases-heavy business-as-usual. It is also a title that fits well with much of KSR's work, like an extension of his famous Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy (and is also the title of a chapter in Blue Mars!).

The synopsis reads:

Catastrophe is in the air. Increasingly strange weather events are pummelling the Earth. When the Gulf Stream shuts down and the Antarctic ice sheet starts melting, climate extremes multiply, and some winters hit like an ice age.

New U.S. President Phil Chase is on a mission: he’s determined to solve climate change. His science advisor, Frank Vanderwal, is a bit more messed up. When massive floods hit Washington, Frank finds himself living in a treehouse and in love with a woman who’s definitely not what she seems, one who will draw him into the shadowy world of Homeland Security, and other, blacker agencies.

Only science can save the day. Frank knows he has to find a way to save the world so that science can proceed.

"Green Earth" comes with an introduction by KSR. A short version of that introduction appears at io9: "What I Learned From Cutting 300 Pages Out Of My Epic Trilogy". Selected bits:

Almost fifteen years have passed since I started that project, and in that time our culture’s awareness of climate change has grown by magnitudes, the issue becoming one of the great problems of the age. In this changed context, I had the feeling that quite a few of my trilogy’s pages now spent time telling readers things they already knew. Some of that could surely be cut, leaving the rest of the story easier to see.

Science fiction famously builds its fictional worlds by slipping in lots of details that help the reader to see things that don’t yet exist, like bubble cities under the ice of Europa. Just as famously, novels set in the present don’t have to do this. If I mention the National Mall in Washington D.C., you can conjure it up from your past exposure to it. I don’t have to describe the shallowness of the reflecting pools or the height of the Washington Monument, or identify the quarries where that monument’s stone came from. But the truth is I like those kinds of details, and describing Washington D.C. as if it were orbiting Aldebaran was part of my fun.

Nothing important was lost in this squishing, and the new version has a better flow, as far as I can tell. Also, crucially, it now fits into one volume, and is thereby better revealed for what it was all along, which is a single novel.

The real-life counterparts of Phil Chase and Charlie Quibler gather in Paris to iron out an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol (1997-2012) and usher a post-2020 era with more ambitious action on combating climate change. According to the UN, contributions of countries in preparation of the Paris meeting "have the capability of limiting the forecast temperature rise to around 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, by no means enough but a lot lower than the estimated four, five, or more degrees of warming projected by many prior to [this process]" -- certainly higher than the 1.5-2 degrees most scientists deem as minimal damage for humans and the biosphere.

8 Sep 2015

Kim Stanley Robinson's latest, AURORA, has been out for two months now.

This video is a great introduction to Aurora. Stan explains the concept and motivation for the novel, and his talking is complete by animation. This is a good piece of promotional material by Orbit Books, similar to their illustration on how to build a terrarium from 2312!

The entire first chapter of Aurora, "Starship Girl", is available to read at Orbit Books.

More than just human DNA inside the human body, the fuel problem for acceleration/deceleration, the non-realism of the staple of faster-than-light travem in most science fiction, the complexity of maintaining a functioning society in a confined space, the way humans and all living creatures we know evolved and are tailored for life on Earth, on the development of artificial intelligence, these are some of the issues tackled in the interviews discussing Aurora.

Beware of spoilers! Aurora, moreso than your typical KSR novel, has twists and turns and page-turner developments as the Aurora mission unfolds.

This short and sharp interview with the Sacramento Bee sets the stage for these hotly debated ideas at the center of Aurora:

Q: “Aurora” touches on the growing notion that humankind will soon be able to leave Earth and start fresh on another planet.
A: It’s a nasty proposition and a wrong idea. The harder you press it, the more you realize it won’t work. Even the closest star systems are too far away.

Q: Your “Mars” series speculated on colonizing Mars, and a new book “How We’ll Live On Mars” by Stephen Petranek says we’ll be on the Red Planet by 2027.
A: Mars is in the ballpark, but we’re still 35 years out. Let’s be clear we’re talking about astronauts going there, doing scientific studies and coming back. The actual colonization of Mars is centuries away, and terraforming it (transforming it to support human life) might be a 10,000-year project.

Q: But what if we could get to another planet for colonization?
A: This is a mistake because there’s no place other than Earth where humanity can be healthy and safe. When we land on another planet, we’ll find out if it’s either alive or dead. It it’s alive, we’ll be in trouble because the life that’s there already will either make us sick or kill us. If it’s dead, we’ll have to terraform it, in which case we’ll die before it’s ready.

Here is an interview for Science Friday radio, on interstellar travel, on Earth as our spaceship -- "There is no Planet B" -- on managing climate change, on who the narrator for Aurora is, plus a reading of an excerpt.

A short interview at Capital Public Radio, where Stan talks about how Aurora was constructed but also reminisces on his 40 year career as a science fiction writer.

In another Aurora interview for The Guardian, for the Books Podcast, Robinson's exploration of time and space are juxtaposed with psychologist Sheldon Solomon's exploration of death. It's interesting to hear him out on future history and the existential underpinnings of thinking about the future of humanity, of having objectives beyond the length of our lifetimes and how we have to cope with our own mortality with the new knowledge that science has brought to us on our size and place in the cosmos. It includes the reading of a passage of Aurora, and a discussion of forms of politics "passengers" might adopt in the context of a generational starship.

Science fiction realism versus fantasy is at the center of this other interview for The Guardian, along with writers Alastair Reynolds and Ann Leckie.

The spacefarers in his latest novel, Aurora, set out on a voyage to a star 11.9 light years away with no warp drives, no sentient robots and no nanomachines. The ship’s technology offers impressive upgrades on familiar 21st-century models, from “printers” that can manufacture anything the travellers require, to aquantum computer so sophisticated it wonders if it should award itself the pronoun “I”. But Robinson’s mission launches in 2545, putting his characters as far away from the world of Taylor Swift and the Apple smartwatch as we are from Niccolò Machiavelli and the matchlock musket. It’s almost as if Thomas More had imagined a captain setting out for the moon in a clipper.

Robinson makes no apology for the 21st-century tech of his 26th-century explorers, arguing that progress in science and technology will asymptotically approach “limits we can’t get past”.

“It’s always wrong to extrapolate by straightforwardly following a curve up,” he explains, “because it tends off towards infinity and physical impossibility. So it’s much better to use the logistic curve, which is basically an S curve.”

“‘Science’ implies the world of fact and what we all agree on seems to be true in the natural world. ‘Fiction’ implies values and meanings, the stories we tell to make sense of things.” David Hume argued that it’s impossible to argue from the way the world is to the way the world ought to be, Robinson continues, “and yet here is a genre that claims to be a kind of ‘fact-values’ reconciliation, a bridge between the two”.

“Can it be? Well, no, not really – but it can try.”

In this interview for Electric Literature, affiliated to To The Best Of Our Knowledge show/podcast, Robinson expands on the technical and human challenges to undertake such an interstellar voyage, and expands on artificial intelligence and the importance of science fiction utopias. Excerpts:

My working principle was, what would it really be like? So no hyperspace, no warp drive, no magical thing about what isn’t really going to happen to get us there. That means sub-lightyear speeds. So I postulated that we could get spaceships going to about one-tenth the speed of light, which is extraordinarily fast. [...] The physics of this is a huge problem.

SP: As you were imagining this voyage, which part was most interesting to you? Was it the science–trying to figure out technically how we could get there? Or was it the personal dynamics of how people would get along when they’re trapped in space for so long?

KSR: I think it would be the latter. I’m an English major. The wing of science fiction that’s discussed this idea has been the physics guys, the hard SF guys. They’ve been concerned with propulsion, navigation, with slowing down, with all the things you would use physics to comprehend. But I’ve been thinking about the problem ecologically, sociologically, psychologically. These elements haven’t been fully explored and you get a new story when you explore them. It’s a rather awful story, which leads to some peculiar narrative choices. [...] Because they’re trapped and the spaceship is a trillion times smaller than Earth’s surface. Even though it’s big, it’s small. And we didn’t evolve to live in one of these things. It’s like you spend your whole life in a Motel Six.

SP: You also wrote a whole series of books about Mars. You still have to get there.

KSR: But there’s an important distinction. You can get to Mars in a year’s travel and then live there your whole life. And you’re on a planet, which has gravity and landscape. You can terraform it. It’s like a gardening project or building a cathedral. I think terraforming Mars is viable. Going to the stars, however, is completely different because you would be traveling in a spaceship for several generations where you’re in a room, not on a planet. It’s been such a techie thing in science fiction. But people haven’t de-stranded those two ideas. They said, “Well, if we can go to Mars, we can go to Tau Ceti.” It doesn’t follow. It’s not the same kind of effort.

[...] I think Earth is the one and only crucial place for humanity. It will always be our only home.

SP: Does the future of AI and technology more generally excite you?

KSR: Yes, AI in particular. I used to scoff at it. I’m a recent convert to the idea that AI computing is interesting. Mainly, it’s just an adding machine that can go really, really fast. There are no internal states. They’re not thinking. However, quantum computers push it to a new level. It isn’t clear yet that we can actually make quantum computers, so this is the speculative part. It might be science fiction that completely falls apart.

KSR: Dystopias express our fears and utopias express our hopes. Fear is a very intense and dramatic emotion. Hope is more fragile, but it’s very stubborn and persistent.

Bonus: Stan teases his _next_ novel! In the Sacramento Bee and Science Friday interviews:

A: I’m postulating a sea level rise and I’m doing a “drowned Manhattan” novel. For a Californian, writing about New York is scarier than writing about Mars.

And let's leave it at that for the time being!


AURORA reviews galore!

7 Jul 2015

Out now: AURORA!

Submitted by Kimon

Our voyage from Earth began generations ago.

Now, we approach our new home.

AURORA.

As of today July 7 2015, Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel, Aurora, is out! (hardcover, ebook, audiobook)

The first two reviews are from none other than Gerry Canavan in the Los Angeles Review of Books: "The Warm Equations" -- along with reviewing Neal Stephenson's Seveneves -- and it's relatively as spoiler-free as possible...

Aurora traces the story of one of the generation starships flung out from the solar system during the Accelerando, Robinson’s alternative name for the prophesied technological Singularity. In previous books these launches have always been something of a dead end: those explorers journey (as he says in 2312) “beyond human time, beyond human reach” into “a vastness beyond comprehension,” outside history itself. [...] I think Aurora may well be Robinson’s best novel.

...and from Gary K. Wolfe for the Locus of July 2015.

Podcasting duo Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan also did an extensive interview with Stan for Coode Street here.

We are delighted to be able to present what is one of the first major discussions about this extraordinary new novel, which we think will prove to be one of the standout SF novels of 2015.

Stan also talked to the Verge ESP podcast, here.

More material -- and KSR tour! -- as it becomes available.

(banner image from Coode Street)

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