As reported previously here, Robinson was featured in Rick Kleffel’s Agony Column interviews site along with fellow writer Rudy Rucker: “Seeing the Future with Kim Stanley Robinson and Rudy Rucker“. The live event at Capitola Book Café took place on June 4 at Santa Cruz. Says Rick Kleffel:

The event actually started before the event, when we all gathered upstairs at the very low-key pizza joint next to the Capitola Book Café. My son, Dietrich, who was taping video of the event, joined Rudy, Stan, myself and a number of Rudy’s and Stan’s friends for a very nice, talkative meal. It set the tone for the evening.

Setting up the event at Capitola Book Café is a different experience every time. Sometimes we sit on stools, sometimes on chairs behind as desk, but this time, Rudy and Stan literally made themselves at home in easy chairs, while I took a stool. It made for a very relaxed conversation.

The hour-long full recording of the event, including both writers reading from their novels (Stan reads from the end of Galileo’s Dream), can be found here.

There is so much music out there! Man-made, of course, but so much of it sounds alien or even science-fictional to our Western, mass-media-fed ears.

Take for example traditional music from Tanzania, choral singing from tribes living in African savannahs, songs passed down orally and never put on record — until very recently! Impossible Music has released a CD of recordings of the “Loruvani Choir: Songs of the Maasai Steppe“.

As CS says (he helped produce the record, and met Robinson when he was in Antarctica), a Westerner might not think of that music when he thinks “classical”, but it is certainly classical to the ears of the Maasai culture! Think twice of that when you read The Memory Of Whiteness and try to conceptualize its Orchestra!

From the CD insert:

Spiritual and uplifting, Maasai and Swahili gospel songs, based on ancient and traditional tribal tunes which float out of the heart of the sweeping African grasslands, are the roots of rhythm which will affect East African music for decades to come.

These songs from the origin of the world will be as important and defining to East Africa as the Delta Blues were to America.

They will combine with sounds coming out of the Congo to form something we haven’t yet imagined.

It is possible to hear samples and purchase here.

Last year, Stan Robinson participated in the conference “Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe” at Australia’s Monash University. One year later, several of the talks given there have resulted in a publication by the Arena Journal: Issue 35/36 (2011) is dedicated on exactly this topic.

Changing the Climate explores nature and environment, power and society, narrative and image in meditations on ecology, ecocriticism, science and speculative fiction, film and contemporary art. With a chapter by Kim Stanley Robinson.

The paper in this issue cover a wide range of contemporary art, from literature to film. There is an entire section dedicated to Kim Stanley Robinson, appropriately entitled “Science in the Capital“! Apart from Robinson’s contribution, “Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change“, this part also includes a paper by Tom Moylan, “N-H-N’: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Dialectics of Ecology“, and another by Chris Palmer, “Free Exchange and Dark Secrecy in the Capital“. All three papers must be reworkings of some sort of the speeches they gave at the conference. The abstracts are accessible via the above links.

The Arena Journal has massively published on utopias and the future previously: Issue 25/26 (2006) was dedicated to “Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia” and Issue 31 (2008) was dedicated to “Demanding the Impossible: Utopia and Dystopia“.

The Davis Enterprise, the local newspaper for Davis, California, the city where Kim Stanley Robinson lives, recently interviewed Robinson.

On Galileo’s Dream, “I had this image of him [Galileo] flying through a telescope to Jupiter. In a sense, I came to Galileo almost backwards, because I didn’t know about him 20-30 years ago. But I got to be very fond of him.“

On 2312 that’s coming out next year, “It’s an attempt to discuss the human world 300 years from the publication date“.

On e-books vs physical books, “I personally prefer to read physical books“, but “I’ve talked to people who’ve said they’ve read ‘Galileo’s Dream’ on their iPhone. It’s all text, and it really doesn’t matter what the format is.“

…and various other topics.

Photo of the Arboretum at Davis by Allan Jones