As one of the solar system's pre-eminent writers of climate change-driven, politically astute science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson wouldn’t be anyone’s prime suspect for a crime against nature. Yet here we are, standing at the edge of his plot in a community garden, and it’s bare except for some scrubby, dying shrubs and what looks like sparse, thick-bladed grass. “It’s purple nutsedge,” Robinson says. “If you weed it, it just comes back.” He didn’t know that when he started weeding.

It gets worse. The only way to really kill the plant, he says, is with injudicious applications of RoundUp or a purpose-built herbicide called SedgeMaster—a name Robinson says with a delighted evil-villain inflection—but the garden, at the heart of the 1970s experiment in residential communitarianism near Davis, California where Robinson lives, is organic. The gardener is on board, but he’ll need permission from the community council for a one-time SedgeMaster application.

The nanopolitics of this ecological microcatastrophe run deep. Robinson’s little town, crisscrossed by bike paths, is full of artists and scientists. (The guy who works the next garden plot over is a researcher at Monsanto; Robinson says everyone can tell that neighbor secretly threw down some RoundUp to clear a pathway.) Robinson tried to build a perfect ecosystem within the constraints of scientific and political realities. It went wrong. Now, only a polymerization of advanced superscience and hardcore diplomacy will fix it—and ignoring those realities will make things worse.

In other words, Kim Stanley Robinson is living inside a Kim Stanley Robinson novel.

Orbit

His new book, Red Moon, comes out this week. It’s set in the same universe as his last one, New York 2140, but it’s a standalone, a couple-on-the-run thriller set against political unrest in China and among various international colonies on the Moon. That’s the plot; the program is Robinson’s attempt to untangle what a spacefaring future will be like when China is at a peak of its new ascendance. There are car chases, rocket explosions, and philosophical meanderings. Genre, as always, is a good tool for taking big ideas and making them fight.

Robinson has been writing since the 1980s, but it was arguably Red Mars, the first book in a trilogy about the colonization and terraforming of you-know-where, for which he became best known. It came out in 1992, the same year as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash—which I bring up only because it suggests, maybe too conveniently, a crossroads for science fiction. Stephenson’s book was a graduation ceremony for the cyberpunk subgenre, funny and wild, and it assumed that the future would mostly take place inside computers.

Red Mars was different. It evoked the grand, old Golden Age of adventure—rocketships, engineers solving technical problems, a love triangle. But then there were the meetings. So many meetings. The newly minted Martians argued philosophy, created mythologies, aligned into political factions, and in general engaged in the messy work of building what they hoped would be a utopia.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of book Robinson’s mentors and idols would have written, but it wasn’t unlike one, either. He’s a Californian, so his ideas all have the Western tinge that equates frontiers with futures. He spent a month training with Ursula LeGuin at UC San Diego; in 1975 his instructors at the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop included Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delany, and Roger Zelazny—“our gods,” he says. “They were so good. We haven’t matched them.”

Robinson hoped to evoke the warmth and emotion that LeGuin’s writing did, but “a lot of things I was told about how writing worked, I had to unlearn,” he says. The 1980s style sheet called for pulpy action. Exposition and explanation were for suckers—an infodump. “I thought, you know what, these people are cramping my style,” Robinson says. “I’m gonna blow them away with infodumps. If it’s interesting, it’s fucking interesting.”