 Greetings. I'm Ron Clement and this is in the studio. I've been an avid reader of science fiction since I was a kid. One of the things I love about Davis is that I've always been able to go to a locally owned independent bookstore where I can browse and buy from an excellent inventory of science fiction books. In this town I can always find someone who shares my passion for the genre. And if I happen to be riding my bicycle through village homes I can advance upon one of science fiction's most honored writers. That man, Kim Stanley Robinson, is our guest today. Stan is the author of numerous novels, novellas, and short stories. Among his works are New York Times bestsellers, and he has won the Locusts, World Fantasy, Hugo, Campbell, and Nebula Awards. Stan? Pleasure having you here. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Ron. My pleasure. Good to be on. I understand you've lived in Davis for a long time. What first brought you to the community? Well, I came here with a girlfriend in 1978. And then I stayed until 1980 or so and went back to San Diego, came back to get together with my wife, Lisa. And we've been married now 30 years. And we were in Davis while she finished her degree. We left in 1985 for two years in Zurich and four years in Washington. And then came back to Davis to bring up our kids and spend the time here since, I guess it's now been 22 years that we've been back. We came back in 1991. So, three stints in Davis for me. You see yourself staying here indefinitely? It's home. I've lived here so long that although I grew up in Southern California, I think of it as home. And I like it. So, it's our home. Well, I love Davis. I've been here since 1967. Of all the places I've been, this is one I always want to come back to. Very nice place to live. Great place to raise a family as well. That's right. And also, it's a small town. You know people. It has a small town feel. It has small town efficiencies. You can get a little work done. You don't get caught in traffic jams. There's a lot of things about Davis that I forget through the years because I've been here so long. I forget how much I like them because I take them for granted. But then when I go other places and I come back, I realize that these are real advantages for living a sane and productive life. That's always good to hear. Were you committed to being a full-time writer when you came to Davis or did that develop after you got here? That is really just a manifestation of the last 20 years. I was a teacher at UC Davis. I taught freshman composition so I was a visiting lecturer. And then when our kids were born, I was the home parent. I took care of the boys. My wife has been a full-time scientist the whole time. So, it was only really with the success of Red Mars and the fact that we had two kids to take care of that I stopped doing teaching and started writing really part-time but they call it full-time because I didn't do anything else except bring up the boys. Were you trying to be a writer or were you sort of, when you say part-time developing full-time, is that fairly typical for an author? I think it has to be. Really, writing is a strange game and there's a lot of what you might call unrewarded excellence out in the world of the arts so that you have to think of it as a part-time job I think the whole time until circumstances change and that is a little bit out of your control. It has to do with audiences and publishers and essentially no matter what you write you can't really control its fate in the world so it's best to scaffold that artistic existence with a real pain job which is what I say to all beginning writers, all students everybody interested. Do it for the love of it, do it part-time have something that pays the bills and that also teaches you things about the world that you can then put into your writing so a job is not just paying the bills but also giving you raw material for your writing. It has a dual purpose and both of them are crucial. With your family, did you decide to give it a try for a while or to just really dig in? I mean after Red Mars is an example. Well after Red Mars then at that point someone had to be the parent at home at least if that was possible and it was because I could essentially write during nap time, I could write when my wife was home. The great thing about writing is that you can do it in the time that you have for it and not have to have structured hours. Well would you say that's your discipline or could you generalize for professional writers? Well it's a good question. I can't generalize because I think every professional writer has a different pattern and a different history that they came to it but I think most of them would talk about this surprising moment when they were actually selling enough copies and getting big enough advances that they could call that their main job. Typically they would be doing something else and then realize that they would make more money for any given hour of work writing than doing anything else. Well that's unusual and surprising. The writer's epiphany. Yeah and it's kind of wonderful because at that point you can really throw yourself into it and not be distracted and not lose time doing other things. So if you're interested to write novels, novels are very time intensive very labor intensive. I reckon I work maybe I don't know five hours of page on these books and so when you think about how many pages there are the hours stack up. So if you have to do other things to pay the bills then you're just going to take you that much longer to write a novel. Once you get to go full time then you can just do them faster. Did you choose science fiction or did it choose you? In a way I think it chose me. What I think about science fiction is that it is the realism of California and really of the world now and this has been developing over my career and when I said it 30 years ago or even 40 years ago it sounded a little bit strange but when I say it now I think people understand our world is completely formed by science. That we live within a scientific culture and our actually built infrastructure, our lives, our medical lives, our social lives in the internet and everything, they're all scientifically created. So now when you write science fiction you're describing the society that we live in right now so you're doing realism. So I was always interested in writing about the real lives that we live the real world that we're in but I chose science fiction because it struck me that was the most accurate way to do it. That was the way that had the most charge to it specifically. Do you have a working definition that you use for science fiction? Yes, it's very simple. I'd say science fiction is any story that is set in the future and then there are some little corollaries that have to be tucked in there. Like if you postulate that something different happened in the past like say the Axis I World War II or the South One, the Civil War or something like that. Those are alternative histories and they get counted as science fiction because they're a different future for a past moment. So alternative histories are a little complicated but by and large what you can say is that if a story is set tomorrow in the story, that's a science fiction story. If it's set 100 years in the future it's still science fiction and that's a very simple sort of Damocles type definition. If it's in the future it's science fiction. So I would agree, I think of Harry Turtleduff as an example is more like Jules Verne's sense of feeling historical at this point in alternate history. Well Turtleduff is the great alternative history writer. He's specialized in it. He's made it his career. Well he'll take various moments in the past and he'll postulate a change where something different happened like Napoleon conquered Europe. I'm giving only military examples but my alternative history was if everybody in Europe had died in the Black Death what would have happened in world history after that and that's the Years of Rice and Salt novel that actually ends up in Davis, California but of course because of my change Davis, California is the farm university for a Chinese-Japanese culture because North America has been colonized from west to east and the diseases that would have been brought to North America no matter who brought them have devastated the Native Americans as they did in our timeline. So alternative histories play that game but science fiction plays the same game starting with this moment and going off into the future. What if we postulate this happened, we'll get to that kind of future, maybe it's dystopian, maybe it's utopian and you postulate other changes and you get to different kind of futures and it makes you think about what we're doing right now in terms of what will come next. So I think it's a powerful way to talk about our society right now and it's also a lot of fun. You get the great adventures, you get the great senses of possibility, you get off planet. It's been my intellectual home. Like Davis has been my physical home, I would say that I live in the small town of science fiction as my intellectual home. Anymore, the weather's nice here. I can still feel the cold of Antarctica from your writing. That was quite an experience. Stan, if I could, maybe we could explore your creative process. We've got several of your books here. If you wanted to choose one, we could kind of go through what happened. I'll take the latest one because I can remember what happened in it or how it came about. 2312, I just published last year and so this paperback edition is brand new. Well, I had it. So where'd you get the idea? The idea for the story was very simple. I wanted to make a kind of a joke. I wanted a love story. It started with the idea for a romance between a mercurial person and a Saturnine person. These are astrological signs and personalities. They're kind of antiquated and nobody really truly believes them anymore. You still find those people out? There are Saturnine people, exactly. I thought my mercurial person would be from Mercury and my Saturnine person would be from Saturn. Then it was a kind of a joke. But it all followed from that because if you have human beings living on Mercury, well, you need it to be about the year 2312. You have to be 300 years out before it becomes plausible. Same with Saturn. So I decided to go out 300 years, which for my science fiction is going way out there. I think it's the furthest in the future of any science fiction novel I've ever written, at least of my major work. You're kind of a near future. I'm a near future guy. And yet, having had this idea early in my career, I had novels like Ice Hinge and the Memory of Whiteness that were solar system novels, a couple of hundred years in the future. So I stole from myself. I went back to my work of my 20s and I took things like a rolling city on Mercury because Mercury rotates so slowly that you could have a city on train tracks and it would only have to go about 5 miles an hour to stay in the shade because it cannot be in the sun or it'd be cooked. What kind of temperature difference? Well, I think it's 700 degrees Fahrenheit on the sunny side and very cold on the night side, like say I'm not sure about this, maybe 250 or 300 degrees below zero. So it's a massive change but in the zone between light and shade you've got about a 30 or 40 mile wide zone that is essentially the dawn terminator and I have my city being pushed by sunlight, by the power of sunlight always into the darkness and so just one tiny fraction of the city, the highest point is in sun and that solar power is the whole rest of the city to move on these tracks. Well, this is a crazy idea from my 20s and I just recycled it because it's very definitely true that the only person you can justifiably steal from is yourself. So I took from my previous work and I concocted this and I had a wonderful writer at Orbit Books. It was the first time we'd worked together and he kept encouraging me. He said, make it big, show us everything else in the solar system. What's going on on Earth? What's going on on Mars? And how far out are they? And so he forced me to develop the idea and make it bigger than I might have otherwise. So this is the process. Reviewers often put you in the hard science category from what I've read because you're looking into chemistry and physics and biology in some very significant ways. But I was looking back at your background in Bachelors in Literature, Masters in Ph.D. in English. Yet you seem to write very deftly about science. So how do you get from literature to being an adept scientist? I mean we look at David Bren. He's a scientist. It's mostly an English major's trick. It's a matter of rhetoric and looking plausible. It's a kind of a stage magic. If you can imitate the way scientists talk, then you can make things look very plausible. And science I find is extremely public. They're trying to be accessible. They're trying to be comprehensible. It's just that the world itself is complicated and that's why science looks complicated because the world is complicated. But science is not like legal language where they're trying to be esoteric using a jargon deliberately to obfuscate the situation. Science is trying to explain things as clearly as it can. And once you understand that and take it on that level, then you just read science news, you read the internet articles about the situations, and then you talk to scientists themselves about their work. And it turns out to be a matter of imitating their style and paying attention to what they say to you. And then you can do anything. I would say though that I'm not a hard science fiction writer and I don't like any of these sub labels. There's hard science fiction, there's soft science fiction, whatever that would be, sociology or anthropology. There's feminist science fiction, there's literary science fiction, there's military science fiction, there's techno thrillers. Well all of these are way too confining and restraining. Science fiction itself is already a genre very limited and specific. Well you have low brow, high brow in a sense. Yes, but this is what science fiction helps to break down. There's no low brow and high brow. You've got the silliest movies ever made or science fiction movies. Some of the greatest novels of the 20th century are science fiction novels. And so it's a very tall genre vertically between high brow and low brow. And what it's trying to say is there's no such thing as high brow and low brow. There's just art that it entertains. And if it works, it works at one level or another. So I've never, I don't like any of these distinctions. I have accepted the label science fiction writer because I think science fiction is interesting and important. But all the finer distinctions I think are cutting it too fine and trying to make pigeonholes so small that people don't want to go in there. Well we live in a world where we want to put everything in silos, don't we? Yes, that's right. And parse everything. Now as you're working on your book, are there people you rely on insiders for feedback, to review your drafts? I've noticed as I read that it seems in recent years, maybe with the advent of the internet, that the acknowledgement sections of books seem to be growing. I've always put an acknowledgement section in the back of my books because I get a lot of help. But I don't want people reading my drafts. So I ask them questions and I do a lot of research ahead of time that involves interviewing people. So that is a planetary scientist down at NASA Ames, Chris McKay. Well ever since Red Mars he's been there to answer oddball questions about the solar system for me. Did you find him? I think I read about him in the literature on Mars and then I just called him up and most scientists, if you call them up, they'll be happy to talk. In fact the real problem is getting them to stop talking about their area of specialty. But I've learned to be good at that too. Well you live in Davis which is full of the US and the university. And Village Homes is filled with scientists and ecologists, agricultural specialists, zoologists. So there's no problem with getting expert help and most experts are happy to help. And I'm happy to acknowledge that a novel is not one person making up things out of their head that is somehow an individual act of creativity. I think novels are more like being the telephone central exchange operator that is plugging in a lot of voices into one story and you plug in enough voices and you get a kind of a group message that's bigger than you. And it's not just your imagination, it's you speaking a community's worth of information. Well with 2312, from initial idea Yeah. Saturday Night in Mercurial to turning the final draft into your publisher, I would think that would be about four years. Four years. But the initial idea often precedes by a good long time the actual starting of the writing. And the writing I can say took more like one year of intense work. Do you start with treatments or outlines or do you try to get the whole thing done? Oh just the barest of suggestions as to the idea. Almost love story Mercurial, Saturday Night in person, need the solar system, that's all I know. And then what I need is for an editor to say yes I like that idea, go with it, that can take some time. And the research can take a little time although usually I'm researching while I'm writing so the two go together. You mentioned your agent or your publisher, your editor. How did you find these people or did they find you? My agent died a couple years ago and so this has been a great disaster in my professional life, a beautiful guy. But essentially I was connected to him in the late 1980s. And after that I had a kind of a manager or an agent that was more like an older brother that basically knew so much more about the industry that I just stayed in Davis and wrote my books. And he did the strategic thinking very well and I felt like I was taken care of in a way that allowed me to just focus on the art and then the commerce side of it was his job, which he did beautifully. So one of the reasons I've had such a great career was Ralph Vichinanza. Now I'm working with one of Ralph's assistants and I presume it'll be okay but I'm at the tail end of my career anyway and in a way the ghost of Ralph's Isn't that presumptuous? You're at the tail end of your career? I'm at the tail end chronologically. I hope for a late Picasso like burst of ancient energy but novels are time intensive. You could bring on a second. We've seen quite a bit of that now and some of the so-called grandmasters certainly did that. No, I would never do that. One of the great joys of writing novels is you don't have to collaborate, you do your own thing and I can't believe these guys do that. So we won't see one with you in spider robins? No, no, it's a terrible idea. Callahan's Cross-type Planet or something. Spider's a great writer and everything but no, I love the idea that I write the books on my own and in fact I don't have much in the way of advice. I don't really like my books being edited. I just want to write them in the way I want to write them. I put them out there. They are strange books. They don't resemble other novels. People tell me that in no uncertain terms. And I like them. So I just do my own thing. Well, I enjoy reading your books. Well, thank you. Well, some more than others but they're always stimulating. They're experiments and they have a high positive and they have a high negative and I take it that that's because they're different and a little weird. Speaking of negative, I mean it's a different context but it seems over the last, I don't know, maybe 15 years science fiction has become somewhat darker, fatalistic, pessimistic if you will and one of your peers, the writer Neil Stevenson, a couple of years ago was asked about the state of science fiction and he said something to the effect of you notice it's dystopian. Yeah. And what's your take on that? I mean the dark versus the light dystopian versus hopeful. Well, I think it's happened. I think that perception is correct that science fiction has gotten kind of dystopian between people like Paolo Bacigalupi and also the Hunger Games, a very important science fiction and what I think is that people's sense of the future has gotten darker and science fiction is very responsive to the way the current society thinks about the future. So science fiction was very positive in the 40s because a bunch of engineers and a bunch of kids in the rural America reading it were saying, hey, the future is going to be great. We'll have nuclear power. We'll be living on Mars. It's just fantastic and be better than this farm that I'm stuck on working, you know, doing physical work and suffering when I'm an intellectual that wants to live, you know, around the rings of Saturn. So you have this positive science fiction back then in the 30s and 40s of so-called golden age and it makes perfect sense. Well now we had 9-11, big trauma where we suddenly realize that history isn't over and this planet is not arranged coherently in terms of everybody's society and you have climate change which is surely happening and is sure to come. And so young people reading are thinking well, the future. Are we even going to be able to live as well as our parents and grandparents? It isn't an obvious yes. So science fiction is very sensitive. It's like a canary in a coal mine and it responds to these emotions. It's a very emotional literature despite the techy, spock-like aspect. But remember spock has got this violently emotional human side to it. It lives in another alternate universe as well. Exactly. So science fiction has been saying lately the future could be dark and it's a kind of a 1984 warning sign. It's trying to say to the world, let's not go down this path because it would be horrible. It would be like the Hunger Games or like Bacchia Gallupi's Wind-Up Girl. Shipbreaker. Well maybe we're just being more realistic too. Science fiction is based on scientific knowledge grows. We now know that it's highly unlikely that we'll go into space, kill the bugs, and take our place in the galaxy. Although those space operas were wonderful stories, maybe the last big one was Orson Scott Card. Right. But that turned into a real philosophical treatise. Well I think that's right and a space opera will always exist as a kind of fantasy space where you can tell great stories and it's fun to read and what you can say is maybe in 5,000 or 500,000 years humans will be doing this stuff around the galaxy. It's not perhaps impossible and so let's tell those stories and that's a lot of fun. Because science fiction in the end is always about having fun. Even the darkest stuff, the dystopias you're thinking, ah but it would be so interesting to survive, to make do, to make a fire in the dark and manage to feed your family and it's always exciting. Let's put it that way. And I don't think it's being more realistic now to say that our future is going to be dark because we don't know what our future is going to be like. And science because it keeps on advancing and because one of the sciences is justice and other science is social systems. In other words the software of society is also getting better. We're globalized, everybody in the world has got their cell phone, everybody in the world knows what's going on. There's no more ignorance and the potential for good out of that situation is as big as the potential for bad out of climate change and the various problems we have. So there's a realistic possibility of utopia as well as a realistic possibility of dystopia and that's the strangeness of our time that both these very different futures are both quite possible. So then we get to choose, we get to work towards the good one and this science fiction outlines them both. Most of my science fiction has been utopian and positive, trying to describe worlds where things are going well or else like in these science and the capital books 40, 50, 60 dealing with problems in a rational manner to try to make things better. The idea of the Gulf Stream stopping still scares people to death. Yes, although less likely now that they've done the numbers on the amount of fresh water necessary in the North Atlantic which is really what causes the Gulf Stream to stall is not likely to happen in the way that I described it but I was working on information from the year 2000 rather than the year 2013. Well, we still have Governor Christie of New Jersey standing out there on the sand saying we're going to rebuild and save these disappearing barrier islands. Well, this is okay. I mean we are going to have to be adapting and mitigating and adapting to climate change and I think it's good to make statements that whatever, say it's 50 years from now or 100 years from now, those people are not going to be sitting down going oh, they blew it 50 years ago and so now we're going to sit on the beach and weep. They're actually going to be working, dealing, making do and making the best of things no matter what situation they're in. Well, and Stan, now that 2312 is doing so well, have you taken a break or are you working on something new? No, I don't take breaks. I like writing and that's my job and so I've got a book coming out next month called Shaman which is about the people of 32,000 years ago that painted the Chauvet Cave in Southern France. So that recent movie by Werner Herzog called The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is about this cave that was just discovered in 1995 and it's one of the most beautiful of the painted caves of Southern France equal to Lascaux and Altamira and yet it's twice as old as those caves. We seem to be pushing back the time that humankind arrived in Europe. Yes, that's right. The archaeologists keep pushing back that time and the Americas as well so as we learn more. That gets all very complicated, this whole problem of when the Americas were peopled but yes, it keeps getting pushed back. So when are we going to see Shaman? That is September 3rd and books have birthdays these days. Oh, they've wrapped it. Oh yes, everything is ready to go. They have birthdays because of the e-book downloads. You have to pick a moment during which people can then hit the button and download it. So that will be September 3rd. Okay. Well Stan, we're just about at the end of the show and I would like to do one thing. Your son Tim is an intern here at Davis Media Access and I want to thank him for talking into coming on the show and Tim's behind camera one. I don't know if we can get a shot of Tim on there and maybe you'd like to wave. Yeah, he can do his cameraman thing. It's like in the baseball stadiums that cameraman always just keep doing their work as you know. Great, thank you. I have many things to thank Tim for and this is one of them. So Stan, thank you very much for being on the show. I wish you the best of luck with Shaman and every other book that comes out and I'll look forward to reading them. Stan's books, of course, are generally available. If you're looking for a good read, please check them out if you haven't already. Until next time, this is Ron Clement. Thank you for watching in the studio. And thank you Davis.