Robinson: Well, we’re in the year 2012, and I decided I wanted to go out a long way - at least for me.
Or listen to the interview in Episode 62 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (link above), which also features a discussion between hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley and guest geek Tobias Buckell about ecological themes in fantasy and science fiction. Read our complete interview with Kim Stanley Robinson below, in which he describes how the Mondragon Accord might replace capitalism, recalls running into Jimmy Carter in Nepal, and expresses skepticism about the technological singularity. But nothing in the book violates known science. For example, Robinson points out that even the world’s top researchers can’t say how much ocean levels might rise. It’s hard to say how much of this might come true. Citizens live hundreds of years, are augmented with cybernetic technology, and casually swap genders. In this future, rising sea levels have turned New York into a city of canals, asteroids are hollowed out to create giant nature preserves, and malicious schemes are calculated with the aid of quantum computers. Yet the novel shows that a single solar system can provoke plenty of wonder and provide ample territory for intrigue. Most stories about space exploration imagine starships zipping between alien worlds, but 2312 is set firmly in our solar system.
2312 combines many of the concepts the writer has developed throughout his career, such as the idea of a city that constantly circles the planet Mercury, remaining in the temperate zone between night and day (an idea that originally appeared in his first novel, The Memory of Whiteness). But it’s made a bit easier by the fact that Robinson, who is best known for his novel Red Mars and its sequels about terraforming Mars, has spent a lifetime thinking about the future. Projecting 300 years into the future is no easy task.
“I decided I wanted to go out a long way - at least for me,” says Robinson in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
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