Mars trilogy author to discuss relevance of science fiction

BY DAWN LEVY

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will deliver the 22nd annual Bunyan Lecture Thursday, April 18, at 8 p.m. in the Teaching Center at the Science and Engineering Quad, Room 201. His talk, titled "Mars as a Tool of Human Thought," is free and open to the public. The Astronomy Program in the Department of Physics hosts the event.

"The talk is about Mars as a means, not an end in itself," Robinson said in a phone interview. "Mars is a tool to illuminate the situation on Earth in the 21st century. Earth is in a time of environmental and political crisis. The coming century is a dangerous one for humanity."

With human activity altering the global environment, he says, "we're already terraforming Earth and we don't know how." And increasingly, politics is destiny: "Earth is in the grip of a global capitalist system that's entrenched and that has the future mortgaged. But that will change."

Robinson has published about a dozen novels and several short story collections. His most famous works are the Mars trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. Red Mars won the 1993 Nebula Award for best novel. Green Mars won the 1994 Hugo Award for best novel, and Blue Mars won the 1996 Hugo. Robinson's other prizes include the Asimov, John W. Campbell Memorial, Locus and World Fantasy awards.

While researching the Mars trilogy, Robinson fed his head with satellite images of the Red Planet, which struck him as "real but empty. It's a planet with as much land area as Earth and a huge amount of water underground. It's essentially habitable without grotesque efforts by humans. If you're from the American West, there's a lot that's familiar with it, but there's also a giganticism of scale."

Red Mars begins when 100 of Earth's finest engineers and scientists land on Mars with a goal of transforming a desolate wasteland into an Eden populated by plants, animals and people. But to do so, they have to overcome their own personalities, prejudices and politics.

Robinson says he wouldn't be surprised to see humans on Mars in his lifetime -- but he's not holding his breath. "Mars sort of sits out there as the hardest thing we can technologically do, the edge of what we can achieve."

Born in Illinois in 1952, he grew up in Orange County, Calif., wandering orange groves that were later ripped out and replaced with freeways and condos. As a genre, science fiction addresses the "future shock" he felt about the mutation he saw. His California trilogy -- The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge -- explores changes that threaten the Golden State.

Robinson holds a doctorate in literature from the University of California-San Diego, with a 1982 dissertation on science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick. Robinson went on to write novels including Icehenge, The Memory of Whiteness and A Short, Sharp Shock.

In 1995, he spent two months in Antarctica researching a science fiction novel called Antarctica as part of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. He describes his most recent novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, published in March, as "an alternative history in which all the Europeans were killed by the Black Death."

Science fiction is more relevant now than ever before, Robinson argues. "We live in a world that is heavily dominated by science and technology," he says. "They're among the main drivers of history right now. Sci-fi seems the best literary mirror of the world we live in. We're all living in a giant sci-fi novel that we're all writing together, at least in the industrialized West."

At 3 p.m. April 18, Robinson will speak to students and faculty at a Center for Space Science and Astrophysics seminar in Varian, Room 208. His talk, "Science and Science Fiction," will explore the intersections of literature and technology.

The Bunyan Lecture is named for James T. Bunyan, a member of the Hoover Institution whose will specified that his estate endow lectures that "inquire into man's changing vision of the cosmos and of human destiny as revealed in the latest discoveries in the fields of astronomy and space exploration." The lecture's distinguished speakers have included Kip Thorne, Frank Drake, Martin Rees and Carl Sagan.