Books by Kim Stanley Robinson

“Hard sci-fi is normally not my favorite genre—I want a little more depth into the characters—but he does such a fantastic job of looking at the different ideologies that you would see if you were creating a settlement on a new planet. So some of characters are settlers who are excited about terraforming and they want to turn Mars into a Green Mars—that’s where the name comes from. They want to make it as habitable as possible, as fast as possible. At the same time, you have other characters, geologists in particular, who want to preserve the pristine Martian environment, the Red Mars. They create these political factions. There is even political violence about this. And this is happening at the same time as they are all trying to figure out the actual politics of, ‘How do we govern ourselves? Are we part of Earth? Do we want to be independent?’” Read more...

The Best Sci Fi Books on Space Settlement

Erika Nesvold, Physicist

Those who enjoyed Dune primarily for its sense of place—those searing days of relentless heat, the shifting sands, the blinding dust storms—may be interested in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, the first of his acclaimed Mars trilogy, in which an international expedition lands on the cold and barren planet with ambitious plans to establish new human colonies there. Red Mars is much more of a hard science fiction book, greatly taken up with the practicalities of terraforming—there are diagrams—but if you like your political wrangling and acts of war interspersed with planetary physics, this is the book for you. (If so, I think you will also enjoy this impressive visualisation of the Arrakis climate, as modelled by research scientists from the data Herbert provides in Dune.)

From our article Books like Dune

“It’s an ecological thriller. We open in India, with a ‘wet bulb’ moment, which is when humidity is very close to 100% and the temperature very close to a human homeostatic body temperature. If the external environment is that hot, and you can’t sweat, you’re going to cook—in the book, 20 million people die. Then, as a result, India says it is going to start seeding clouds of sulphur dioxide. Then there’s an eco-terrorist group which has realised that the way to get people to do something is to bomb the private jets of the super-rich. And gradually this body, the Ministry for the Future, starts to get a bit of power. Kim Stanley Robinson did a lot of research. I interviewed him for a podcast, and he spent many years talking to people to find a plausible scenario. You’re not reading this book for the quality of the language the way you are with the other books, you are reading it for the ideas.” Read more...

The Best Eco Thrillers

Manda Scott, Novelist

“I consider him the greatest contemporary long-term thinker in SF. He is grappling with the kinds of topics I’m trying to grapple with in my book, such as how do we think long-term about biodiversity loss, the climate crisis, artificial intelligence and so on? Over the last couple of years I’ve read more books by Kim Stanley Robinson than by any other writer.” Read more...

The Best Books for Long-Term Thinking

Roman Krznaric, Philosopher