A long-expected update
Submitted by Kimon
It's been a while since this website was last updated! Between the lack of a new publication by KSR (but not, as we will see, a disappearance from public life) and this webmaster's real life, time passed. We start with a big announcement, followed by our customary list of interviews and odds and ends.
The Kim Stanley Robinson archive goes to The Huntington!
Big news! The Huntington, a cultural and educational institution based in San Marino, California, has acquired the personal library and papers of Kim Stanley Robinson. It will join there the archive of such illustruous authors such as Octavia E. Butler, Hilary Mantel and Thomas Pynchon. The collection consists in "50 linear feet of papers, photographs, and manuscripts as well as thousands of digital files". What this includes:
- Draft manuscripts, typescripts, and digital files for nearly all of Robinson’s novels, with extensive revisions that reveal his writing process and evolving ideas.
- Research materials and notes on subjects ranging from Martian geology and Antarctic glaciology to climate science and economics, which informed his fiction.
- Correspondence with scientists, policy experts, and fellow authors, offering insight into his collaborations and his role in climate policy discussions.
- Personal notebooks and journals documenting Robinson’s creative process, daily life, and reflections on environmental and political issues.
- Thousands of digital photographs related to his travels and backpacking expeditions as well as ephemera related to his public appearances.
- Annotated editions of works by authors who influenced him, including Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
This gives a precious insight into KSR's creative process, both for his fiction and what impact it has on the real world, and is a historical and cultural heritage of great importance. Indeed, the Huntington aims to make the collection available to researchers by 2027.
“It’s a deep pleasure to have my archive go to The Huntington,” said Robinson. “I remember visiting from Orange County when I was in school; as a lifelong library lover, I was amazed there could be such a big and beautiful one. Since then, I’ve known The Huntington as the home of the Octavia E. Butler papers, and I’m proud to have mine join hers there. Science fiction is the genre best suited to expressing Southern California—as our work will show. I’m also honored to have my papers join the library that holds those of other authors I admire, such as Hilary Mantel and Thomas Pynchon.”
Here is the Huntington's official announcement. Already, the samples released with the announcement are extremely alluring: KSR's copy of The Dispossessed dedicated to him; a handwritten chapter outline for Ministry on what looks like a whiteboard (you can see that photo with this article); a handwritten draft of Green Mars; plus handwritten notebooks with plenty of stuff, lists, letters, photos, maps...
What does that mean for KSR? For one, it does not mean he wil stop writing. Although The Ministry for the Future was his last long novel for Orbit in 2020, he is currently working on a non-fiction book on Antarctica in the same vein as his 2022 High Sierra book. And there's more, as he expands to writing more than longform novels.
Interviews and live events
Listed chronologically:
16/Dec/24 interview for Nature:
What do you tell young people who worry about climate change?
I often talk to undergraduates about climate dread. They are the people of the future, because they’ll be here in 2075. Thinking about all the things that have to be accomplished by 2050 to avoid crossing tipping points into unavoidable catastrophe — of course you have climate dread.
The rise of eco-anxiety: scientists wake up to the mental-health toll of climate change
So I try to tell them that it means that your life has a project, you have existential meaning. You are not caught in the nihilism of meaninglessness that was capitalist realism. In the 1980s, you saw bumper stickers on US cars that said ‘he who dies with the most toys wins’. It was sarcasm, but it also pointed to a lack of meaning. Why live, what is it all about? Well, now we have that answered.
I also tell them: whatever you’re interested in, whatever your personal interests are, that can become climate work. Arts, public policy, psychology, the sciences, engineering, the humanities, they can all become part of climate work. Just find your angle. But, at the same time, acknowledge that we’re in an emergency, that something has to be done.
01/Jan/2025 interview with Akshat Rathi for Bloomberg Green's Zero: The Climate Race podcast. The podcast reposted it as one of its highlights of 2025. Also on YouTube:
17/Jan/2025 interview for Lin Weaver's Talking Point show at Davis Community Television, on The High Sierra (also on YouTube).
19/Jan/2025 interview for Richard Louis Miller's Mind Body Health & Politics program (also on YouTube).
22/Jan/2025 interview for the Danish podcast Langsomme samtaler ("slow conversations"); the conversation itself is in the original English (also on Pocket Casts).
23/Jan/2025 interview for ANWH's Frigate podcast (also on Pocket Casts).
28/Jan/2025 interview for the How My View Grew podcast (also on Pocket Casts).
29/Jan interview for the always-interesting Graham Culbertson's Everyday Anarchism podcast about Green Earth (also on Pocket Casts, Spotify, YouTube).
02/Feb/2025 discussion for a Mars trilogy book club organized by John Walter Knych (on YouTube).
13/Feb/2025 interview together with essayist Manjula Martin for Fossil Free California (on YouTube).
17/Feb/2025 second interview for Sam Matey's Weekly Anthropocene newsletter. This one is great, thanks to all the additional material! Some selected quotes:
One of the things about your column is this internationalist thing, the attention to what’s happening elsewhere. You and Mongabay do this, and it’s what we need to hear in America. We really need to know that the world is so complex that good things are happening everywhere, particularly on the biosphere front.
Full employment matters. A targeted 5% unemployment rate was established to instill fear in the heart of the poor, who will then take any job [...] more value of human beings, more ability to become themselves by having a certain amount of social security and probably a meaningful job rather than bullshit jobs. Better than that would be everybody thinking of their job as being meaningful in the larger human project of coming to terms with the biosphere, and that's another kind of utopian goal that needs to be put on the table time after time. It's not just a matter of making sure that you've got rent and water and food. It's a matter of having meaning. That doesn't get discussed enough.
Now, a group has come together. It's a combination of glaciologists and technologists from Silicon Valley, also financial people, and then also a group of internet and computer experts who are interested in doing things to help the world, which started a kind of a Saturday morning Zoom pandemic club amongst friends. They've all coalesced into a non-profit, a 501c3 now, called Ice Preservation. [...] Could we slow down those big ice streams to the point where West Antarctica was stabilized?
What I worry about is what has been usefully called hopium. You provide hope by showing us real things in the real world that are going on right now that, if they succeed, we will get out of this century without a mass extinction event. Now, we need hope and these things are real. I'm not saying what you and I are doing is wrong, as a kind of utopian political project of saying pessimism is wrong, cynicism is wrong. despair is wrong. What's right is fighting and pointing out how many other people are fighting for good things.
One thing I've been encouraging myself with is that even the president of the United States is limited in their power in the world civilization, and this is a century-long effort. You can't dismiss the loss of four years, but it won't even be a lost four years. The United States has never been, except under Biden, a climate leader. The rest of the world has done the things. The economics comes out of China. The EU is the political organization that cares the most. India is under immense pressure to get this right. Same with Brazil.
18/Feb/2025 interview for the Party Girls podcast (on Spotify, Pocket Casts). They also have extra content if you contribute to their Patreon -- here's a preview of that.
19/Feb/2025 live panel for the Praxis Peace Institute (recording on YouTube).
6/Mar/2025 seminar at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (recording on YouTube): "Optimism, Optopia, and Climate Change Stories", where he tried to motivate the younger generation for action.
+ some reporting on the event by Legal Planet and IoES itself:
You could quantify it and say that the damage done in the last 6 weeks to the National Institutes of Health means that all of us, on average, are going to have a shorter lifetime. You could then quantify that. There are 8 billion people on the planet. What if they’ve all lost a month? That’s 8 billion months that have been lost to death. So yes, people are going to die from the stupidities of the Trump administration’s attack on the federal government, I mean immediately from disease and from famine in the rest of the world.
What has to be responded to by all of us is ‘You cannot kill the future.’ Think about what they’re up to. There’s genocide, there’s ecocide, there’s futurecide. To kill the future means you see a trend in history that seems inevitable and going in a direction you don’t like because your privileges will be lost.
12/Mar/2025 panel with artist Ala Ebtekar, who is working on an upcoming edition of Asimov's Nightfall for Arion Press, which produces limited-edition fully hand-made books (on YouTube).
19/Mar/2025 talk together with public policy expert Stephen Heintz for the Long Now Foundation (Spotify, YouTube): "A Logic for the Future".
Even as we confront the new and returning challenges of this geopolitical moment, we also face a certain meta-challenge: the outdated assumptions, decades or even centuries old, informing our systems of international relations. The status quo — national sovereignty, neo-liberal economics, and zero-sum thinking above all — cannot be maintained in the face of shifting planetary conditions. What that status quo threatens to backslide into — imperialism, great power competition, and unfettered slaughter — is even less pleasant to countenance. Without a cohesive, intellectually rigorous effort to create new assumptions underpinning international relations, planetary thriving is itself at risk.
Three core shifts inform Heintz and Robinson’s thinking, cutting across ecological, political, and economic lines. First, they emphasize the need to recenter the value of all life, rather than the narrow-minded anthropocentrism of so much conventional moral accounting. Next, they propose a shift from national sovereignty to more collaborative modes of governance, taking the nation-state not as an essential unit of international relations but just one model among many on the planetary stage. Finally, they call on all of us to develop regenerative economic systems that can turn the tide on the regime of extractive economics that has become the dominant form of social exchange under contemporary capitalism.
21/Apr/2025 interview by painter David Brody for Painters on Paintings on the Chauvet caves and Shaman. Some selected quotes:
I had already begun work on my novel before the Werner Herzog movie “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” came out. I saw the movie twice in theaters, in 3-D, then bought a DVD of it so I could watch it frame by frame at home. It’s a very good movie, especially in the way Herzog trusts the cave and its paintings to be the items of interest, so that he pans back and forth across them repeatedly. His usual array of eccentric commentators don’t really impede the success of the film. Along with a great number of books on the Paleolithic and shamanism, that movie was one of my chief aids when writing my book.
[On the more organized packs of northerners taking slaves vs the small cooperative bands of southerners being hungry] Yes, I was speculating about these ideas, some of which I had read in the literature, and some of which were my own, including the notion that the domestication of wolves into dogs might have inspired a somewhat similar origin for humans enslaving other humans. Also, that when a surplus of food was created, in effect by refrigeration, this would begin the process of property, hierarchy, and patriarchy, shifting things from a more scarcity-based and thus egalitarian Paleolithic band society, to bigger Neolithic and agricultural town societies, where the split into classes began.
I did want to show that although gender roles were pretty defined then, and there were some separations in people’s social life and roles by way of gender (as in first people societies still living today), men and women were equal in social power.
I do think The Mind in the Cave, and the whole case for shamanic psychedelics that was made by Jean Clottes and David Lewes-Williams, with psychedelics of different kinds being one of the identifying features of shamanism worldwide—is pretty convincing, even though it must remain speculative, given the thousands of years separating us from the cave painters.
The Third Wind was particularly important. This narrator of the novel is some kind of spirit being. Early on I realized that the narrator of this novel needed to be not me but rather some entity from that time, explaining aspects of that time to its listener—who was listening, because the story was told, not written.
Also, I agree: the audiobook version by Graeme Malcolm is superb. That meant a lot to me.
24/Apr/2025 interview for the Public Books/Novel Dialogue podcast together with literary critic Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (also on YouTube, Spotify, Pocket Casts) + transcript in pdf format + of note, Miller, a professor at UC Davis, had KSR visit her English course in the past.
25/Apr/2025 interview for the International Peace Institute (on YouTube), on the side of a roundtable discussion on "The Declaration on Future Generations: Moving from Vision to Reality"
03/Jun/2025 interview for the Mongabay podcast + a preview on YouTube
10/Jun/2025 interview for the 2025 Public AI seminar (YouTube, AI-generated summary (!) on Google Docs)
29/Jul/2025 interview together with Oxford's Anette Mikes for Intesa Sanpaolo's Global Conversations with Global Leaders podcast (Spotify, YouTube, Pocket Casts).
26/Sep & 03/Oct/2025 interview with Tranen's Toke Lykkeberg for e-flux magazine, in two parts: "To Capture the Present Moment, You Either Write Historical Fiction or Science Fiction", Part 1, Part 2. A couple of quotes:
Instead of being a simple descriptor of our reality, the Great Acceleration is a complete mess. Some things are accelerating, others are already decelerating and falling apart. And this mess is what we call history. It can’t be named simply. That is also the point of your extemporary art, instead of contemporary art: an art outside of time.
Ministry takes on a rather grim topic. It could be a CoP report, it could be an IPCC report. These documents are thousands of pages long and they’re depressing. And yet I wanted to make a novel that was only five hundred pages long—a little long, but not very long compared to some of my other novels. And I wanted it to be fun, because reading a novel is for pleasure. So it’s Aristotle, it’s Brecht. Education can be fun and entertainment can be educational. It’s not either/or. The best art does them both. One of the ways I could think to make the novel entertaining was this play of genres, or play of forms. When you start a chapter in The Ministry for the Future, you do not know what form you are reading.
03/Oct/2025 interview for the New Indian Express: "Mars can't save you".
The idea of colonising Mars – the Muskian vision of a “multi-planetary species” – is, in Robinson’s words, “bad science fiction”. He explains: “We can’t breathe the air. We can’t touch the soil. The surface is laced with perchlorates – salts deadly to humans. You’d have to live underground, in radiation-shielded bunkers. Like a Motel 6 in a prison.”
“The Mars books were about building a better society on another planet,” he said. “But Ministry is about doing that here, now, under pressure, in crisis.” Even in Blue Mars, the message was never “let’s escape Earth”: it was the opposite. The Martians return to a ravaged Earth and say: “Mars can’t save you. We’re a mirror. If we can build a just society here, so can you.”
15/Oct/2025 interview for Natascha McElhone and Omid Ashtari's Where Shall We Meet podcast (also on YouTube, Pocket Casts).
22/Oct/2025 interview for the Financial Times' Tech Tonic podcast; transcript available (also on Pocket Casts): "Mission to Mars — Bad science fiction".
If you had a city on Mars and then something happened that killed every human on Earth, that community on Mars is doomed. Doomed to a slow death. They need Earth. They need everything that Earth provides. They would be an outpost only, utterly dependent.
More KSR news
On the occasion of the centenary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the Fitzgerald Society organized a reading of the whole work by prominent people, among them KSR together with Maxine Hong for a chapter (on YouTube) -- the whole thing is on their website!
As mentioned above, KSR is an advisor of the Ice Preservation organization.
KSR wrote the foreword to The New Possible: Visions of Our World Beyond Crisis, a 2021 collection of essays on a changing world, edited by Philip Clayton, Kelli M. Archie, Jonah Sachs, and Evan Steiner. Available from their website.
KSR contributed to the collection No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save our Planet, edited by D. A. Baden and Steve Willis. KSR's stories, "The Carboni", "Drambers" and "Project Slowdown", are (presumably) excerpts from Ministry. Available from Habitat Press.
KSR is the judge to a short fiction contest by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: "Write Before Midnight" -- winners to be announced in January 2026.
KSR appeared in a British documenary series on the history of science fiction, specifically exploring Ministry: Wonderland: Science Fiction in the Atomic Age. Available from Sky Arts.
For a survey on California literature organized by Alta, KSR recommends: "Cecelia Holland, who lives in Humboldt County, is one of our greatest living novelists".
Speaking of California literature, an essay on KSR's The Gold Coast was part of the 2025 collection California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature by John Freeman, who has been running Alta's California Book Club.
Everything else
Some more reviews of Ministry:
- Elizabeth Doerr (Cramming for the Apocalypse) for The Futurist Book Club
- The Hugonauts podcast
- Claudia Befu (Story Voyager) for a book club reading
Various articles mention Ministry for the Future or KSR in one way or another, and I'm sure this is just a partial list:
- Pakistan's World Echo News on the climate crisis
- Global Citizen on carbon pricing
- OnlySky on climate action and democracy
- The New Yorker on why we are tormented by the future
- The New Republic on the Los Angeles fires
- Story Voyager, in which Vlad the Impaler -- aka Dracula -- takes over the ministry for the Future and comes up with a plan for saving the world
- Mongabay on climate fiction's impact on climate action
- Envirotech Online on rewilding as a carbon capture technology
- Harvard Business School's The Harbus on climate change economics
- Clean Technica on the gutting of NSF financing
- Ken Rutkowski theorizes that Indira Gandhi could have had MftF on her bookshelf
- Delton Chen (inspired KSR for the carboni coin) on carbon rewards
- Daily Kos on burning yachts and climate action against the wealthy
- The Philipine Daily Inquirer on heat and health
- Science News Explores on Antarctica's glaciers and Slawek Tulaczyk of UC Santa Cruz (KSR's inspiration for the glaciologist in MftF)
- Science Alert and Futura Sciences on (not) terraforming Mars
- Splice Today on looking back at Covid and changing our imaginations
- The Guardian on the all-new Climate Fiction prize
- The Independent on weather control
- Open Global Rights on emotion and climate change action
- Public Books on climate fiction
- Jacobin on carbon pricing
- Low Impact on the money system
- John Menadue on redirecting capital
- A Stanford Law School project on blockchain-enabled carbon quantitative easing
- The Observer on global sea level rise
- The Ecologist on science fiction giving hope
Ministry for the Future is recommended in various reading lists:
- The Guardian's readers
- ETV Bharat (India)
- Times Now News (India) -- twice! -- no, thrice!
- Trellis Group
- The Mary Sue
- The Economist's The Intelligence podcast
- Vocal Media
Well, that's all for now -- but there's so much catching up to do that a second update will follow shortly!
