Where’s the science in science fiction? Where indeed, asks SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the few who work hard to make their stories scientifically sound. All the more scary, then, that the fictional floods that turn Washington DC into Venice in Forty Signs of Rain, the first volume of his near-future eco-saga, have morphed into real-world Gulf Coast floods and hurricanes. And as Liz Else hears, there’s worse to come in the second volume, “Fifty Degrees Below”.
Your latest scenario is awful: before it recovers from the floods caused by climate change, Washington is gripped by a polar winter. Could this really happen?
Many scientists reckon it is feasible. The idea is that during a period of general warming there could be trigger events that throw the North Atlantic climate back into ice age conditions for a while. In the case of the Younger Dryas event about 10,000 years ago, the ice age lasted about 3000 years but took as few as three to set in. It is a real paradigm shift. I researched the Greenland ice-core results and the possible Gulf Stream stall. Now I’ve been in contact with some of the researchers involved, and the Royal Society certainly seems to think it is possible. I think the two things that tipped the society into becoming strong advocates for immediate action in its report to Tony Blair were the possibility that the Gulf Stream might stall and carbon dioxide’s acidification of the ocean, which hasn’t really been considered properly before. This slight change in pH could well destroy the bottom end of the food chain, so we might all be screwed if it went much further.
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The book reads almost like a fictionalised warning from scientists to the current administration.
No, I’m on my own recognisance! It’s more that this environmental science, and the politics interwoven with it, make it the best current topic for a novel. The best novels come out of the most pressing stories of the time. Think of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. People think of art for art’s sake, but it’s an intensely political novel about the Dreyfus case and the privilege and waste of the upper classes. I think the greatest art has this political element.
You’ve got close to real scientists – one of your characters heads the National Science Foundation.
Yes! The ex-head of the real NSF, and the only woman head of it so far, Rita Colwell, has read the book. I met her in San Francisco. She seemed to like the novels and she did tell me about some errors. And she gave me ideas for the third volume. She was like my fictional NSF head, Diane Chang, but different of course. I liked her and hoped to stay in contact.
Your links to the NSF go back a while, don’t they?
The NSF’s Antarctic Sciences Section has an artists’ and writers’ programme, so people apply and go through the same kind of application process that scientists do for their grants. You have to prove that you have a serious reason to go down there. I managed to get on it in 1995 and ended up with a novel, Antarctica, that explicitly uses my visit. They were quite pleased by that, because there have been writers there where it’s all gone wrong – who have turned the NSF into the villain.
Isn’t it hard to make ordinary scientists villains?
Yeah, but the NSF is also the government. My novels show the organisation as it really is – relatively innocuous, a bunch of scientists trying to keep things running smoothly. Later they invited me on the selection panels for the writers’ programme. They are set up exactly like scientific panels. Some of the things I saw made me realise that these panels are just like a jury, no more objective than any other human thing. It should have been obvious, but it was one more lesson for me in how science works.
Did it give you a plot idea?
Suppose you were a programme manager and there are questions about NSF versus private interests and where the money is going to go if something gets invented. Now they have all kinds of ethical rules and constraints, but it seemed to me that you could play them and do things that were ethical in the legal sense but not really ethical. So in Forty Signs of Rain, one of my characters, Frank Vanderwal, decides that he wants to play the system for his own private gain, despite reservations because he’s not really that kind of guy, but he gets sucked in by the neatness of his plan – and this causes all sorts of problems for him subsequently. It was a chance to make a new plot out of the way science really works as an institution – for me, more suspenseful than another car chase.
You’re very keen on accuracy. Does it help having a wife who is a scientist?
If you ask her, “Do you think a researcher would talk about tectonic plates this way?” she will say, “Why are you asking me?” I’ll say, “Because you’re a scientist,” and she’ll say, “Sorry, I’m a chemist.” She’s very precise and doesn’t like to speculate without good grounds. She’ll sometimes see a draft of one of my novels and say things like, “You know, none of us ever says X or Y,” very helpful in keeping the dialogue realistic. As for technical editors, science fiction writers don’t get them, which is too bad. I do get help from scientists, by sending the 10 pages that have to do with their specialism. I’ll ask them to review them, and see whether it reads right to them. It’s very impressive: I’ve never asked a scientist for help and not got it. They feel it’s part of their job, part of the communal feel of doing science.
Have you made mistakes?
Of course! In one of my Mars books, I had some characters powering up batteries by sticking fans over the side of the blimp they were in, but the blimp, of course, would be moving at the same speed as the wind. This was pointed out to me by Donna Shirley, head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Sojourner programme, the little rover back in 1997. It was lovely because she’s such an engineer. And yet in the same breath she showed me a way I could fix it that would be particularly cool in fictional terms – she told me that my characters should put out solar panels to re-power their batteries and could point them both up and down, because in the dust storm they were in, there would be so much reflected light coming off below that you could gather extra light from underneath. All this while driving the LA freeways in a rainstorm, off the top of her head – I was amazed!
“I’ve never asked a scientist for help and not got it”
Is the third volume going to have a happy ending?
Yes, well you know I can’t escape it. I’m a utopian writer and I like happy endings. I think that is what science fiction is for, ultimately. So I’m going to postulate a US president who acts like a modern Franklin D. Roosevelt with his “bold and persistent experimentation” approach to solving big problems. And it will work – as it would in the real world.
Please note: the extract taken from Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest book “Fifty Degrees Below” that appeared in this article has print only copyright so it cannot be used on the web.