Kim Stanley Robinson – a giant among men (with some others)!

I am reading fiction for the fun of it. I don't have a lot of professional reading and for the first time in my life I am in very easy walking distance of a branch of a decent public library system. I don't have to plan a trip to the library, I just have to remember when the branch is open.

One of the things that I am reading is science fiction that's strong on presenting future (and past) history. I have in the past read Neil Stephenson, whose work sometimes falls into that category; now I am getting into Kim Stanley Robinson. KSM wrote what I think is the best American utopian SF ever created, the Mars trilogy. I read it a ways back and I enjoyed it tremendously. In the last month or so I have read two large KSM books that rethinks the developments of world history in the early modern and modern eras by creating alternative histories.

One of them is Galileo's Dream which follows Galileo Galilei both through his own life in the 17th century and his quantum-theory-implemented trips to the Galilean moons of Jupiter in the year 3000. There is a tremendous amount of philosophical thinking embedded in this book, as we follow Galileo's life and researches in great detail and the efforts of human colonists in the Jupiter system to encourage and protect and even sacrifice him to make sure that Galileo's thought develops and is disseminated in such a way that humanity benefits from the Scientific Revolution and is not destroyed by it. There is a great deal of discussion of physics, ancient and modern, and more about the politics of the 17th century Vatican than you want to know.

Another KSM book that I am finishing up is the Years of Rice and Salt, which almost reads like a first draft of Galileo's Dream. It is an alternate history based on what might have happened if the Black Death had killed off the people of Western, Eastern and Northern Europe while only diminishing the population of the rest of Eurasia. It is a world where Christianity has been eliminated as a cultural influence, and the major cultures are Chinese, Muslim and Iroquois. Plus Buddhism.

Rice and Salt has a lot of explication but it does not lack human interest. We are given to understand that many of the characters we meet in different eras are reincarnations who meet occasionally in the bardo, the Buddhist hell to talk about how tough it is to make a difference in the earthly life. The characters are interesting in their earthly existence and every once in a while KSM throws in a vivid description of a place or a situation. For instance, here is KSM discussing the lack of trees in the Chinese capital after the tremendous sufferings and dislocations of the Long War (sort of like World Wars I and II, but much longer):

Every tree in the city had been cut down during the Twelve Hard Years, and even now the city was bare of almost all vegetation; the new trees had been planted with spiked fences protecting them, and watchmen to guard them at night, which did not always work; the poor old guards would wake in the mornings to find the fence there but the tree gone, cut at the ground for firewood or pulled out by the roots for sale somewhere else, and for these lost saplings they would weep inconsolably, or even commit suicide.

Do you have to be a historian to like these books? No, KSM sells a lot of books and the readers can't possibly be all historians.

I should mention a third author who has a touch of this alternative history but who actually explores even bigger ideas. Robert Charles Wilson is somebody who I met on my first month in Toronto, back in the early 70s. He is one smart guy and it shows in his fiction. RCW has written a variety of books, but some of the best ones combine a lot of contemplation of the history of the whole universe (sort of like Olaf Stapledon) with individual human characters. If you know Stapledon, you know that's an unusual combination.

"Whatever happened to the great novel of ideas?"

...asks an unnamed Time reviewer on the back of Neal Stephenson's Anathem.  The reviewer continues:

"It has morphed into science fiction, and Stephenson is its foremost practitioner."

Please.

Count on Time to miss, for decades, the fact that science fiction has been the literature of ideas for more than a century, and then suddenly discover it and proclaim it to the nations.  (And yes, there have been great novels written in the genre, and a great many with interesting ideas but less literary merit.)

But said reviewer is right about Stephenson. The man is amazing. He latches onto interesting scientific ideas and historical phenomena, absorbs vast amounts relevant information, transforms it into exciting literary conflicts and characterizations, and spits out 1000 page books of great merit. On a routine basis. Hugo Gernsback, the early 20th century pulp magazine editor who tirelessly beat the drum for science fiction as the only suitable literature for the modern age, might not have been thinking of Stephenson, but in some ways Stephenson is a perfect science fiction writer, if you are willing to take on the challenge of wrestling with real ideas and how people deal with them.  Stephenson's people are real enough to keep you engaged, and the ideas are cosmic.

A friend on Facebook was lamenting that there isn't much of a market for "stimulating religious and philosophical cliff-hangers."  I was pleased to be able to tell her that she was wrong. You could hardly come up with a better description of Anathem; and since my correspondent has picked up the book just by coincidence, she is in for a treat.   Alien  monks, cloistered so that they can safely pursue the philosophical nature of the universe without blowing up their planet; then called forth to prevent somebody else (a group that includes us!) from blowing up the planet; with all the action framed by and motivated by millennia of debates about the nature of reality.   And they are real debates that have actually taken place in our real intellectual history, which continue today as philosophers and scientists play for the highest stakes.  There is nothing fake about this story. You can see our present and our past on practically every page.

I have to admit a certain jealousy of Neal Stephenson, based on a series of novels he has written about 17th century Europe.  Having taught that era  more than a few times, I reflect on the contrast between studying up on a fascinating time in history and creating fascinating novels about it, and studying up and producing a year-long course for undergraduates. Well, we all do what we can.  And I'm glad that Neal Stephenson can do what he can do, and that he can get his stuff, eccentric as it is, published and appreciated by reviewers. That way, I get to read it.

Update:  If you know the book, go see this.   Or even if you don't.

Climate-change disaster and Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver

I am going to confess to a common fault. If things are bad enough, I just don't want to think about them, certainly not in any detail. And, as someone remarked at my dinner table two nights ago, things are pretty yucky right now.

The worst thing happening right now, if not the closest, is that climate change seems to be destroying an entire country, and not in a matter of years or decades, but in a matter of weeks or months. One commentator said about the Pakistan situation, "Where are the rock stars?"  For that matter, where are the Saudi princes?

Instead of talking about that, at least the moment, let me reflect on the skill and eloquence of that amazing writer, Neal Stephenson. I am reading his novel Quicksilver, and it has led me to reflect that some people will do a certain amount of research and write a course on early modern Europe, while someone else will to about the same amount of research and write something approaching  a masterpiece of historical fiction.

Here is Stephenson portraying a former harem slave speaking to William of Orange on a beach in Holland in 1685:

"In a way, a slave is fortunate, because she has more head-room for her dreams and phant'sies, which can soar to dizzying heights without bumping up 'gainst the ceiling. The ones who live at Versailles are as high as humans can get, they practically have to about stooped over because their wigs and headdresses are scraping the vault of heaven -- which consequently seems low and mean to them. When they look up, they see, not a vast beckoning space above, rather --"

[William]"The gaudy painted ceiling."

"Just so. You see? There is no head-room. And so for one who has just come from Versailles, it is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little, and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand-grains in a beach that in essence never changes."

Comments welcome!

Image:  Amsterdam.