Kerry Lengel

The Republic | azcentral.com

Kim Stanley Robinson is the award-winning author of the Mars trilogy%2C %222312%22 and %22Shaman.%22

ASU hosts him for two events talking about Paleolithic humans and optimistic futures.

In this in-depth Q%26A%2C he talks about cave paintings%2C alternative history and the future of gender.

In an age of cynicism about the past and paranoia about the future, science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson is proud to be one of an endangered species, a utopian thinker.

The owner of three Nebula and two Hugo awards (the dueling top trophies in sci-fi), he is best known for the trilogy of "Red Mars," "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars," a 200-year epic about the colonization of the fourth planet by idealistic scientists. It is currently in development as a television series by Spike TV.

In another trilogy, dubbed Three Californias, Robinson imagined parallel futures for Orange County, where he grew up. And in "The Years of Rice and Salt," he rewound history to 1400, killed off all of Europe with the Black Death and let us watch a clash of civilizations between China and Islam through the eyes of three characters reincarnated through the centuries.

His most recent novel is last year's "Shaman," about the Paleolithic humans who created the astonishing cave paintings at Chauvet in southern France.

Robinson will be in Phoenix for a pair of events sponsored by Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination. The first is a panel on "Stories and Visions for a Better Future," presented under the aegis of sci-fi author Neal Stephenson's Project Hieroglyph, on Wednesday, Oct. 22, at the Crescent Ballroom. The second is a talk on "The Chauvet Cave Paintings and the Human Mind," on Friday, Oct. 24, at Changing Hands Bookstore.

Robinson, 62, spoke with The Republic by phone from his home in Davis, Calif.

Question: You must have seen "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," Werner Herzog's documentary on Chauvet.

Answer: I loved the Herzog film, but he likes to interview eccentric people and put them on film. As a documentary maker, that's what he does, and it's wrecked some of his movies, like the Antarctic movie ("Encounters at the End of the World"), where he didn't find the interesting eccentrics. Everybody in Antarctica is eccentric. I've been there and I know. But he just found the first ones that he dragged into the studio, as far as I can tell, and they weren't interesting. And the same was true in France. With the cave paintings, you'd really want to talk to Jean Clottes and the other real scientists about how did they make the paintings, where were they living, what did they eat, these kind of things. And instead he had, you know, a perfume maker sniffing the ground and a scientist who talked about his life as a unicyclist in the circus. It was a waste of an opportunity. The movie is good, but it could have been great.

Q: As a sci-fi writer, what got you interested in writing about the distant past?

A: To me they're part of the same project, because if you write science fiction, you're always asking what can human beings become in the future. And to answer that, you have to immediately think, well, what are we now and how did we become what we are now? I have been for a long time interested in looking backward to the Paleolithic, because there are some really extraordinary things that happened in the time. I guess the main one I would describe as a kind of paradox. We lived using, as far as we can tell, pretty much the same tools and the same lifestyle, doing the same things all the time, and yet during that time our brain grew to be like three times bigger than the start of that period. So what we were doing in that period was clearly basic to humanity, because it made us.

Q: Before "Shaman," you wrote "2312," a space-operatic mystery about a solar system filled with genetically modified humans and possibly sentient artificial intelligences. You think very seriously about what the future could be like, yet it's conventional wisdom that science fiction is really always about the present.

A: I'm not amongst that crowd that would say science fiction is just a metaphor for now, like it's just symbolist poetry, because I think that's a little chicken, and it also cuts out something very interesting that science fiction is trying to do, which resembles prophecy. And prophecy is a very ancient form of storytelling: If you do this, then this will happen. So what I say is that science fiction is like one of those sets of stereo glasses that you wear to see 3-D movies. One lens is really trying to imagine the future, which is super difficult and maybe you could even say impossible, but we try anyway. The other lens is indeed the metaphorical lens of trying to show the present by exaggerating certain features.

Q: Three Californias ended with a utopia. It's sort of the "Star Trek" project of trying to imagine the best possible future despite all the problems we face in the present.

A: I do think of myself as a utopian science-fiction writer, and there aren't very many of them. The utopian-dystopian divide are two sides of the same coin. They can't be removed from each other. They speak to each other. Dystopias are always saying things are going to hell, but dystopias also say it could be better than this lousy thing that we're building for ourselves. There's a satirical edge. Dystopias come out of satire, which is a very ancient literary genre, but the flip side was always utopian thinking. Well, if it could be better, what could it be, and then people described that, starting with Plato. And so the utopian tradition is very ancient also. It's been harder to make it into a novel. To make a narrative that takes place in the utopian space has been seldom attempted. "Star Trek" fits into that vibe.

Q: You write a lot about the arts, especially music, in "2312" and elsewhere. You are a Beethoven fanatic?

A: My mom was a piano teacher. I've played as an amateur through my life. I'm not good at it, playing trumpet and then melodica, but I enjoy it thoroughly. And while I'm writing I usually do play instrumental music, so the words don't distract, but I kind of try to choose in advance the mood I want the scene to express, and then I'll very carefully soundtrack that scene with music that gives me that mood. Beethoven's late string quartets are like the sound of thinking as far as I'm concerned, very beautiful, very serene but emotional. So I soundtrack my writing experiences, and I'm fully convinced that if people could hear this music while they're reading my scenes, there would be multimedia awesomeness, but it's not really possible because of the pacing problems involved.

Q: In "2312" you also invent future artistic genres.

A: I followed Andy Goldsworthy, who makes art out of landscape that's temporary, and then Marina Abramović makes art out of performances and human bodies, also temporary. So I made their names into common (lowercase) nouns. I've been become acquainted with Abramovic, because she feels an affinity for Swan (the main character), as you might imagine. She's fond of my work and has read "Shaman," and she's interested in shamanism as part of what her art form is. So these art forms are feeding back into what I do, and "Shaman" is very much about the origins of human art, how did it start, what was it for.

Q: Most of the characters in "2312" are genetically modified to be some mix of male and female. Is gender a primary concern in your work?

A: That is one of those combinations of prophecy and metaphor that I was talking about before. I live near San Francisco, and I've become well-acquainted with the array of gender possibilities that are being explored today, including transsexuals in both directions. It's an old science-fictional idea that you could be any gender you wanted. It's kind of a radical thought, and one of the reasons I foregrounded it in "2312" was I wanted people to remember that 300 years from now is a long time, and by then people might be shocking us with things that they do.

I have to add, I myself, because I am a writer and my wife is a chemist, I was a home parent. I was what I called Mr. Mom, from the great movie. And I loved it. So being a "mom," in social terms, was for me a profound experience and one of my favorite experiences as a human being. So gender roles I am deeply aware are not inherently tied to our sex. Sex and gender can be quickly split off from each other, and that I think this book helps people to think a little bit, like Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness," which is still the classic in this area.

Q: "The Years of Rice and Salt" is my favorite of all your books. What was your inspiration?

A: It was an early science-fiction idea amongst many others that I had, so it goes way back into the '70s. Alternative history is one of the main science-fictional subgenres, and Philip K. Dick had done quite a wonderful one in "The Man in the High Castle." So I was aware of the possibilities of really making you think hard about history and how it happens.

I think the game in alternative history is to make the maximum amount of change that you can with one event that doesn't completely blow history off the rails so you can't do comparisons at all, like in Harry Harrison, where dinosaurs evolved to become intelligent civilizations instead of humans. You can't really play the history game at that point.

So I just one day had this idea: What if all the Europeans died in the Black Death? If you say when Europe is gone that things get worse, then you're just being kind of racist in the typical European way. If you say Europe being gone makes things better in world history, then you're being kind of politically correct.

Q: How did the metaphor of reincarnation affect the way you approached character building?

A: It was mind-boggling to think about do I believe in fundamental character types, do I believe that you're born with a certain character. And, of course, after I had my sons and watched them grow up, I thought, "Well, yes, I do believe that." And if you accept the conceit of reincarnation — which is also a good metaphor for us moving through our own lives, you know — I just thought about what I thought were fundamental distinctions. So I had kind of the firebrand and the mellow, positive one that keeps on going.

Q: It occurs to me that we get kind of another reincarnation of those characters in Swan and Wahram in "2312."

A: Yes, because these thoughts keep coming back to me. The theory of the temperaments of the Greeks that Michelle, the character in the Mars trilogy, explains is scientifically deducible; that's actually my idea from reading "The Oxford Companion to the Mind." Reading about "extrovert and introvert," and then you cross that with "stable and labile," and you get the four temperaments in a semantic rectangle. So that's my own idea, and I don't have very many ideas.

I'm not an inventor or a scientific thinker with new theories. I just write what I see and tell stories that people tell me. So I feel like I'm kind of a bricolage artist or a raconteur, just a telephone operator like in one of those old-fashioned telephone banks where you have to plug in different voices. I let the voices speak, and I'm kind of just their channeler. But that one I thought was a good idea, because it showed that the ancient Greeks were showing such close attention to character patterns that they had seen something that we now know can be quantitatively shown to be true, by our own measurements. And so Swan and Wahram, what I did was take it even further into the astrology.

Q: The saturnine and the mercurial.

A: The saturnine and the mercurial. And that strikes me as going way too far. That strikes me as bogus but also hilarious.

Q: It was a fine joke that I have to admit a friend of mine had to point out to me.

A: The start of the entire novel was making that joke. I had to have a civilization where somebody could be from Saturn and from Mercury. I was kind tweaking Adam Roberts, this British science-fiction writer who's very smart. He wrote a review of my "Galileo's Dream," and he said, "This guy Robinson, he's overimpressed with the theory of the four temperaments." And it made me laugh, because it's true. And then I thought, "Well, I'll double-down on him and write about the astrological schema." And also it makes for a very funny partnership because mercurial and saturnine, they're an odd couple.

Q: Obligatory last question: What's next?

A: I have just finished a novel about a starship going to Tau Ceti to try to colonize one of the planets there. So that's another big science-fiction novel that will be out next May. It's called "Aurora," like the goddess of dawn, which is what they name the planet there. It's actually what Isaac Asimov named the planet that he has around Tau Ceti in his great novel "The Naked Sun." So it's a little tip of the cap to Asimov.

Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.

Project Hieroglyph Presents 'Stories and Visions for a Better Future'

What: Presentation by writers Kim Stanley Robinson, Madeline Ashby, Karl Schroeder, Kathleen Ann Goonan, James Cambias, Kathryn Kramer and Ed Finn, director of ASU's Center for Science and Imagination.

When: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 22.

Where: Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix.

Admission: $27.99, includes copy of "Hieroglyph" anthology.

Details: 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.

Kim Stanley Robinson: 'The Chauvet Cave Paintings and the Human Mind'

When: 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 24.

Where: Changing Hands Bookstore, 300 W. Camelback Road, Phoenix.

Admission: Free.

Details: 602-274-0067, changinghands.com.