Kim Stanley Robinson (Image credit: SFX Images Ltd)
For today’s interview, I’m proud to introduce another amazing author: the great Kim Stanley Robinson, whose newest novel 2312 just came out on May 22nd. If you haven’t read the novel yet, don’t worry: this interview is relatively spoiler-free and actually works very well as an introduction to the novel. (You can also check out my review here.)
Far Beyond Reality: I’m sure I speak for many readers when I say 2312 has been a highly anticipated novel. Can you introduce the book to us? What is it about, who are the characters, and what should we expect?
Kim Stanley Robinson: 2312 is a science fiction novel set in and around the year 2312. The project began for me with the idea of describing a relationship between a mercurial character from Mercury, and a saturnine character from Saturn, and proceeded from there. To accomplish that first goal I needed a solar system-wide human civilization, and this then drove the rest of the project, casting it out a long way into the future, long enough for there to be time for such a civilization to develop. After that I saw that I was in a zone that came roughly after the end of my Blue Mars, and without wanting to stick to the history described in my Mars trilogy (Mars in this novel has a slightly different history and is mostly off-stage), I did think it was an opportunity to extend my ideas of future history a little farther out. As this work unfolded, I realized that as happens in quite a few science fiction novels, the world itself became a major character, and what happened to my Swan and Wahram would be compelling partly in relation to how real or vivid their world felt. At the same time, three hundred years is a long time, and when you think about what we might be up to by then, it can be quite exciting, also daunting; it is sure to be a complex time, almost overwhelmingly diverse and strange. So I decided to try to convey that feeling, and eventually I came on the form of John Dos Passos’s great U.S.A. trilogy, which had been previously used also by John Brunner in his Stand On Zanzibar. This collage method, which combines a lot of different kinds of writing, is very adaptable, and very good at conveying a complex situation in an entertaining way.
So, 2312 became a novel about Swan and Wahram and their acquaintances as they try to solve a mystery together, try to avert a danger to the solar system-wide civilization, actually a suite of dangers, which threaten an already complicated and unstable political situation. Their relationship remains at the heart of the novel, but it’s a historical novel too, with the public side of things also featured. Various speculations as to what humans might become, with our growing powers but our inherited huge problems, are included, I hope to a somewhat startling effect. It’s sure to be that way when things like longevity, gender complications, artificial intelligence and rapid terraforming are all thrown into the mix.
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Lucius Shepard’s classic story “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” introduced the world to Griaule, a huge (as in six thousand feet long) paralyzed dragon who shapes the lives of the people living around, on and in some cases inside him by means of the malignant mental energy that seems to be his only remaining power.
Far Beyond Reality 