It expresses both fears and hopes specific to 2019 - and now, because of the shock of the pandemic, it can serve as an image of “how it felt before.” It’s already a historical artifact. So following that, “The Ministry for the Future” was written in 2019, before the pandemic. As prophecy, SF is always wrong as metaphor, it is always right, being an expression of the feeling of the time of writing. These are all affect states, not chronological predictions I think it’s very important to emphasize science fiction’s double action, as both prophecy and metaphor for our present. But it’s interesting now to look back and see me describing “the Dithering” as lasting so long. In other words, it was a literary device, not a prediction. In that novel, I provided a timeline of sorts, looking backward from 2312, that was notional and intended to shock, also to fill the many decades it takes to make three centuries, and in a way that got my story in place the way I wanted it. KSR was interviewed by James Bradley for the collection Tomorrow's Parties, edited by Jonathan Strahan, with 'Twelve visions of living in a climate-changed world' consisting of short stories, artwork, and the KSR interview. We’ve been cocooned in fossil fuels for too long, and busting out of that sheath of crap back into the wide world will be a liberation. Be mindful of your carbon burn, and make what you burn really count. So pay attention feel your body think it over. These are the real levers of effective action for individuals in our time: mobilization, solidarity, political mass action. It’s usually not very hard to figure out which politicians will do this.

An individual’s most powerful form of action remains politically supporting laws to curb emissions.

It’s also true that individual action can do only so much to decrease the carbon burn of civilization, given its current infrastructure. That’s why the fossil fuel industry was the first to promote the individual “carbon footprint,” rather than face the poisonousness of its own product.

There’s even danger that raising the question of how we live risks shifting the burden of change away from governments and corporations. Kim Stanley Robinson's latest column in Bloomberg Green is on: ' Kim Stanley Robinson Makes the Case for Counting Your Carbon':īecause not much is left in the budget, individual choices are worth thinking about and then changing. The world turns and I'm back with another impressively long list of links on everything KSR!

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson