Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Tom Moylan ‘N-H-N’: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Dialectics of Ecology’ While the catastrophes around us are in the natural world, the causes and solutions for the problems arising from ecological destruction are down to us, the humans who are the self-conscious members of that same world. While we know that the alienation, exploitation, and destruction of nature can be traced back to deeper causes (in the Neolithic division of labor, in patriarchy, in Western rationalism), we also know that in modernity it has been the world system of capitalism that has intensified and expanded the ruination of nature. What we need now is not business as usual but rather critiques and visions of how this world works and how it might be transformed. To make this move we need ways to envision what is to be done and what is not yet. The science fictional imaginary has long been one of the most powerful sources for such a cognitive mapping and re-visioning. In this context, I will talk about Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction in terms of his ecological engagement. Central to Robinson’s ‘consensus vision of what might be’ is the status of nature and humanity’s place in it. From the focus on one town in Pacific Edge (1990), to a city in the Science in the Capital trilogy (2004- 2007) to a continent in Antarctica (1997), to a planet (and solar system and universe beyond) in the Mars trilogy (1992-1996), and to history and life itself in the Years of Rice and Salt (2002), Robinson’s affiliation with nature can be seen throughout his work, as he explores immediate challenges and long-term visions. Robinson’s world-building does not produce a passive landscape for human plots and counterplots; rather his biosphere is the dynamic substrate of all existence, the basis for the eventual transformation of both humanity and nature. It may appear that Robinson sails close to the standpoint of a Western anthropomorphic domination of an external nature, but I argue that his position is rather one of an engaged solidarity within the evolving body of nature itself. Robinson prepares our minds for a break beyond the current system, and in so doing he dialectically transcends the antinomies that stifle us: be they nature and humanity, organic and technical, sacred and secular, personal and political, or red and green politics. Robinson’s utopian science fiction works in terms of a double move of program and impulse, representation and figuration. He has created a series of narratives that unfold utopian programs of human agency and political intervention; but his scenarios and models, his natural and human worlds, also figure the negation of the world as we know it (thus reminding us of the impossibility of utopian resolution in the present reality) and point us toward a radical novum at the horizon. Tom Moylan is Emeritus Professor and Founding Director of the Ralahine Center for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick, author ofDemand the Impossible(1986) andScraps of the Untainted Sky(2000) and co-editor ofDark Horizons (2003).
