Kim Stanley Robinson

Robert Markley

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051616
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Award-winning epics like the Mars Trilogy and groundbreaking alternative histories like The Days of Rice and Salt have brought Kim Stanley Robinson to the forefront of contemporary science fiction. Mixing subject matter from a dizzying number of fields with his own complex ecological and philosophical concerns, Robinson explores how humanity might pursue utopian social action as a strategy for its own survival. Robert Markley examines the works of an author engaged with the fundamental question of how we—as individuals, as a civilization, and as a species—might go forward. By building stories on huge time scales, Robinson lays out the scientific and human processes that fuel humanity's struggle toward a more just and environmentally stable world or system of worlds. His works invite readers to contemplate how to achieve, and live in, these numerous possible futures. They also challenge us to see that SF's literary, cultural, and philosophical significance have made it the preeminent literary genre for examining where we stand today in human and planetary history.

“I SAW THROUGH TIME”: FALLING INTO OTHER HISTORIES

From the beginning of his career, Kim Stanley Robinson has used the genre of alternative history to explore the ways that science fiction reframes crucial questions about politics, economics, and social organization. By the time he began writing fiction in the 1970s, alternative histories had spilled over from science-fiction classics, such as Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953), Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1961), and, later, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s The Difference Engine (1991), to “mainstream” bestseller lists with works including McKinley Cantor’s If the South Had Won the Civil War (1962) and Philip Roth’s The Plot against America (2004). Although there are surprising twists and turns and wrenching changes of perspective throughout his alternative histories, Robinson focuses less on the shock value of rewriting history for its own sake than with asking wide-ranging questions about how our stories of the past have shaped our sense of our possible futures. In such groundbreaking stories as “The Lucky Strike,” “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions,” “A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations,” “Vinland, the Dream,” and “Remaking History,” and in novels such as The Years of Rice and Salt and Shaman, he explores how history writing faces both back in time, reconstructing the past to serve a variety of present purposes, and forward to challenge our assumptions about reshaping the future for characters who initially see themselves trapped by their individual and global crises. In his epic of an alternative world history, Years of Rice and Salt, Robinson expands the conventional limits of the genre by imagining a world marked by the sociopolitical dominance of Asian empires and the moral authority of Buddhist and indigenous ideas of tolerance and something approaching gender equality.

RETHINKING HISTORY

Robinson’s early short fiction, published during the late 1970s and early 1980s, emerged at an important juncture for science fiction in the United States.1 Two decades on, the countercultural movements of the 1960s seemed either a path not taken or a naïve form of escapism that had faded into history. In the wake of liberatory dreams deferred, critics such as Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson argued for the significance of science fiction as a mode of critique of contemporary politics, culture, and economics. For Jameson, science fiction reverses the values and assumptions of classical historical fiction. If the historical novel, as the Hungarian critic Georg Lukács argued, emerged in the nineteenth century as a way to imagine “a determinate past” for the modern nation-state, Jameson maintains that science fiction imagines the present as “the determinate past of something”—a future or range of futures—“yet to come.”2 Robinson’s early fiction brings pressure against traditional ideas of a “determinate past” in terms of alternatives to the history that we are living through and to the future histories that we cannot (yet) know. While many of his contemporaries between 1975 and 1985 turned to the dystopian chic of cyberpunk, Robinson offered a different perspective on Cold War tensions, endemic racism and gender discrimination, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and (in the years before graphic boards and the World Wide Web) the widespread adoption of personal computers.3 Often focusing on the relationships between moral decision-making and the potential for utopian action, his short fiction asks readers both to reimagine the past and to rethink the possibilities for bettering the future.

In his remarkable short story, “A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations” (1991), Robinson explores the enervating sense of being trapped in and by a dreary present. Frank Churchill, a popular historian suffering from depression in the aftermath of his divorce, is commissioned to write a coffee-table history of the twentieth century.4 Working his way through various sources in the British Library, he grows obsessed with the violence and catastrophes of world wars, atomic bombs, and genocide, until he comes across a 1902 volume titled A History of the Nineteenth Century, with Illustrations. This book concludes with a burst of heroically naïve optimism: “I believe that Man is good. I believe we stand at the dawn of a century that will be more peaceful and prosperous than any in history.”5 Churchill leaves the British Library, rents a car, and drives north to Scotland, eventually taking the ferry to the Orkney Islands. There, on the windswept and wave-lashed coast, he visits the Neolithic ruins at Skara Brae and finds five-thousand-year-old stone houses, with stone shelves, cabinets, beds, and utensils. Although the inhabitants disappeared after six hundred years, Churchill realizes that what they have left “look[s] deeply familiar” and reflects “the same needs, the same thinking, the same solutions” as people in his own time (55–56). His experience of a neolithic history, before and oddly beyond the violence of modernity, brings him back from contemplating “end[ing] the pain and fear” by jumping off a cliff at “the End of Europe” (59). Instead, he recognizes intuitively that to live in the history of the present requires thinking beyond and living for the difference—the possibility—that the future holds. At the end of the story, makeshift camping in his car in a parking lot at the “End of Europe,” Churchill writes a postscript to his reading notes for his coffee-table history of the twentieth century: “I believe that man is good. I believe we stand at the dawn of a century that will be more peaceful and prosperous than any in history” (62). This is (as Jacques Derrida might say) repetition with a difference: in citing the century-old historian, the hero finds not a faith in but a way toward a “good” that exists beyond the tyranny of the present.

“The History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations” is suggestive of the ways that Robinson’s fiction distances itself from the kind of postmodernist ironies that abound in alternative histories written during the last decades of the century. As Philip Wegner and Jameson imply, postmodernism and modernism imagine the “good” primarily as a negation of the negative, alienated experience of the present, even as this negation often is treated cynically as a form of romantic rebellion or naïve complicity.6 If postmodernism tends to reject master narratives as either bad-faith modes of repression or as confirmations of a broad and deep skepticism, it tends to cast the future as a projection or extension of its own cynicism.7 In contrast, Robinson encourages readers to imagine the present as neither determined by the past nor determining a dystopian future. Instead, as Years of Rice and Salt suggests, the present itself is a kind of back formation—a negation of the utopian possibilities for a future potentially “more peaceful and prosperous than any [previous era] in history.” In this regard, to look back at the present from imagined futures becomes an incentive to keep striving to make things better, what Cartophilus in Galileo’s Dream describes as our efforts “to crab sidewise toward the good” (556).

In his early short fiction, Robinson shows us what is at stake in “Remaking History,” the title of his engaging story that rewrites the Iran hostage crisis (1979–80) as parodic farce. In the twenty-first century a burgeoning film industry on the moon remakes Hollywood blockbusters in the surreal context of a low-gravity, space-suited environment. In updating a 1980s classic (starring Robert DeNiro, among others) about the successful rescue of the American hostages from Teheran in 1980, the actors wonder if the rescue and Jimmy Carter’s subsequent reelection as president were all that important to late-twentieth-century history. One of them is not really “sure that Carter’s reelection hinged on [the rescue of] those hostages anyway. He was running against a flake, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he was some kind of idiot” (217). Although this sort of irony is familiar to readers of alternative histories, dating back to Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time” (1934), Robinson’s dig at Ronald Reagan clarifies the political dimensions of his alternative histories. Rather than an after-the-fact analysis that makes Reaganism the irrevocable outcome of ostensibly larger forces at work in American politics and culture, the “real” history that we know becomes contingent: the writing of history forges random and unpredictable events into seemingly inevitable chains of causes and effects. In “Remaking History” the recognition that “actual events [emerge at] the nexus of multiple causal pathways and chance perturbations,”8 however, does not entail a surrender to a world run by idiots but an opportunity to rethink both the past and present.

In this context, Robinson’s linked stories, “The Lucky Strike” (1984) and “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions” (1991), create alternative histories of the dawn of the atomic age, reimagining the moral and ethical implications of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The earlier story is set in 1945 and begins with the bombardier selected to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima waking from a nightmare about catastrophic destruction. Frank January realizes that “war breeds strange dreams,” but his nightmares seem, at once, both inevitable (as his readers know) and tragically unnecessary. They are full of the horrors described by John Hersey in his nonfiction book Hiroshima (1946): blinded and faceless victims, a river clogged with corpses, and survivors struck deaf by the atomic blast. Hovering in January’s future (and our collective past), the destruction of Hiroshima marks the horrific and logical extreme of technomodern violence. In the days leading up to the bombing run, January is enraged with both President Truman for ordering the strike and “the scientists who had designed the bomb” (81). To cope with his anger and guilt, he imagines alternative strategies—alternative futures—as a way to deal with the moral dilemma he faces. The generals, he daydreams, might arrange a demonstration blast, ordering January and his crew

to go to Tokyo and drop the bomb in the bay. The Jap War Cabinet had been told to watch this demonstration of the new weapon, and when they saw that fireball boil the bay and bounce into heaven they’d run and sign the surrender papers as fast as they could write, kamikazes or not. They weren’t crazy, after all. No need to murder a whole city. (79)

January tries to conjure into being a world of rational self-interest in which neither Americans nor Japanese warmakers are “crazy.” This dream world of rational cause and effect—drop the atomic bomb in the harbor and watch Japan’s inevitable “surrender”—is not the past that we know and ultimately not a future in which January can believe.

Written in the shadow of the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction, “The Lucky Strike” foregrounds January’s fears that endless war and insane violence are encoded in the DNA of the men who command him and the men in his crew. He realizes that “the war would always remain the central experience of their lives—a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do” (83). Their nostalgia for this “central experience” of shaping history, he imagines, would lead a post–World War II military leadership “unconsciously” to “push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again” so that, in their minds, they might return in a future war and “magically be again as they were in the last [war]—young, and free, and happy” (83). In this psychosexual nostalgia for the “good” war of their youth, January imagines a nightmarish future with “more planes, more young crews like [his], flying to Moscow no doubt or to wherever, fireballs in every capital, why not? And to what end? To what end? So that old men could hope to become magically young again. Nothing more sane than that” (83). In the alternative timeline of 1945, January becomes an unwilling symbol of moral resistance to the institutionalized, multigenerational violence of the atomic age—a mindset dissected in Joe Haldeman’s sf classic, The Forever War (1974). But where Haldeman’s characters are caught in the paradoxes of time travel, fighting endlessly, although not mindlessly against aliens, January takes (in)action by dropping the bomb too late to destroy Hiroshima. Initially, he lies about a supposed malfunction, but when he learns the generals have ordered another bombing run to destroy Nagasaki, he confesses that there “wasn’t a malfunction” and justifies his disobedience by arguing that because the Japanese have witnessed the bomb’s destructive force, “You don’t need to do it, it isn’t necessary” (92). Although he is proved right when the Japanese see the destruction near Hiroshima and the emperor orders his generals to surrender, January is executed for treason without knowing that he has saved countless lives and that his martyrdom sparks a global disarmament movement.

Yet even as January resists the logic of nuclear annihilation, Robinson emphasizes the unpredictable and unknowable consequences of his decision. In “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions,” Robinson explores what he calls his own “second thoughts about the postwar alternative history” (383) described at the end of “The Lucky Strike” by focusing on the complex variables that affect individual actions and their consequences. His story stretches the generic boundaries of alternative history by filtering the politics of historiography—what Jameson calls “the political unconscious”—through the lens of Richard Feynman’s “notion of a ‘sum over histories’” in quantum theory.9 As the narrator of “Sensitive Dependence” phrases the problem, Feynman’s version of quantum theory “proposes that a particle does not move from point A to point B by a single path, as in classical mechanics, but rather by every possible path within the wave” (102). This “path integral formalism,” filtered, in turn, through the work of the mathematician Roger Penrose, means that “quantum effects in the brain take over” (108) and cycle the mind through an “extraordinarily large” number of “parallel and simultaneous calculations” before reaching a decision:

And in the act of deciding, the mind attempts the work of the historian: breaking the potential events down into their component parts, enumerating conditions, seeking covering laws that will allow a prediction of what will follow from the variety of possible choices. Alternative futures branch like dendrites away from the present moment, shifting chaotically, pulled this way and that by attractors dimly perceived. …

And then, in the myriad clefts of the quantum mind, a mystery: the choice is made. We have to choose, that is life in time. … And at the moment [of choice] the great majority of alternatives disappear without trace, leaving us in our asymptotic freedom to act, uncertainly, in time’s asymmetrical flow. (108)

Quantum theory in this passage is less a metaphor for history or consciousness than the basis for both. The quest for covering laws, for ways to sift through all possible outcomes while recognizing the epistemological complexities of reaching a decision, is always quixotic. All of us, like January, are thrown back to the realization that initial conditions are never fully known: “The butterfly may be on the wing, it may be crushed underfoot. You are flying toward Hiroshima” (108). Robinson’s shift to the second person “you” makes clear the stakes in alternative histories: our “asymptotic freedom” means that we are always condemned to make decisions without the impossible luxury of being able to foretell the consequences of our actions. Reader and character merge less through empathy or identification than in recognizing a shared dilemma: “You are the bombardier. … You know what the bomb will do. You do not know what you will do. You have to decide” (107). But, of course, any decision is contingent. The narrator offers us competing future histories that stem from January’s decision not to bomb Hiroshima: by sparing the city, through a complex chain of events, the Hiroshima Peace Party bans nuclear weapons, an independent Palestine peacefully emerges, and the world enters a new era of prosperity. Or, the ban on nuclear weapons fails, and, by the mid-twenty-first century, January’s decision results in a world that has “very little to distinguish [it] from the one in which January had dropped the bomb”: massive social and economic inequality persists, “multinational corporations [rule] the world,” and “gigantic sums of money [are] spent on armaments” (106). Robinson’s “second thoughts,” though, do not result in a dystopian rewriting of “The Lucky Strike” but in a new narrative that encourages readers to rethink what it means to confront alternative futures.

In this respect, Robinson’s use of quantum theory to explore the complexities of both ethical decision-making and sociohistorical reality dovetails with the work of, among others, Karen Barad, a theoretical physicist and feminist cultural critic, who argues there is no sharp dividing line, no fundamental distinction, between quantum reality and lived experience: because pathintegral formalism means that there is an infinity of all possible outcomes, the “asymptotic freedom” that troubles January is the inescapable condition of existence: we are all flying toward Hiroshima and all condemned to act freely without the ability to peer into alternative futures to foresee the consequences of our actions.10 “History,” says the narrator in “Sensitive Dependence,” “is a particle accelerator. Energies are not always normal. We live in a condition of asymptotic freedom, and every history is possible. Each bombardier has to choose” (103). Certainty, it seems, is the first casualty of history.

Such questions of historical truth and individual responsibility are a focal point for Robinson’s fiction in the 1980s and figure prominently in Icehenge (1984).11 The novel examines the problems of memory, history, and autobiography in an age when people routinely live to be five hundred y...