ROBINSON, Kim Stanley

(1952-)

   US writer who began writing sf stories with "Coming Back to Dixieland" and "In Pierson's Orchestra", both published in Orbit 18 (1975) ed Damon KNIGHT. He has not been prolific in shorter forms, publishing only about 10 stories before gaining his PhD in English at the University of California in 1982. In revised form, his thesis was later published as The Novels of Philip K. Dick (1984); thoroughly researched, at ease withthe protocols of academic writing while at the same time showing an acute understanding of 1950s sf, it remains one of the most useful studies of Philip K. DICK's thorny oeuvre.KSR became widely known with thepublication of his first novel, THE WILD SHORE (1984), released as one of Terry CARR's Ace Specials. The first book of a thematic trilogy set invarious versions of Orange County on the Pacific coast south of Los Angeles, and later assembled with its siblings as Three Californias (omni1995), THE WILD SHORE lucidly examines the sentimentalized kind of US sf pastoral typically set after an almost universal catastrophe. Sheltered from the full DISASTER, Orange County has become an enclave whose inhabitants espouse a re-established US hegemony, but whose smug ignorance of the world outside is ultimately self-defeating. In The Gold Coast (1988), Orange County several decades hence is seen through the lens ofDYSTOPIA; a similar array of characters - similarly related to one another - must grapple with a polluted, corrupt, overcrowded, ecologically devastated world. Under new names the same characters find themselves, in Pacific Edge (1990 UK), breathing the air of UTOPIA. In this world OrangeCounty has benefited from restrictions on corporate size and strict controls over land use and POLLUTION. Although the novel shows the near impossibility of imagining a living utopia, a sense of earned freshness and relief permeates its pages. As a whole, the trilogy may be read as three versions of the same story, each nesting within the other; structurally adventurous and searching, the Orange County trilogy remains at the moment KSR's strongest accomplishment, though the Mars trilogy (see below) will almost certainly come to seem even more substantial.Other novels are varyingly successful. Icehenge (fixup 1984) strikingly conflates three incompatible readings of the significance of an artifact found on Pluto, exploring a range of issues from epistemology to the nature of historical tradition. The Memory of Whiteness (1985) less successfully attempts to suggest analogues between MUSIC theory and the structure of the Universe, while at the same time conducting its musician hero - who is, typically of KSR's protagonists, an almost constantly active character - on a guided tour of the Solar System. Escape from Kathmandu (1988 chap), later expanded as Escape from Kathmandu (coll oflinked stories 1989), set in a stress-ridden mystical Nepal, amusingly exploits KSR's own experience as a mountaineer.Other stories appear in THE PLANET ON THE TABLE (coll 1986), The Blind Geometer (1986 chap; with 1story added, coll 1989 dos) - a later but lesser magazine version won the 1987 NEBULA for Best Novella - and Remaking History (coll 1991), whichincludes all the stories published in the slightly earlier A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (coll 1991 chap), and which was laterpublished as Remaking History (omni 1994), in which version it incorporates THE PLANET ON THE TABLE; Down and Out in the Year 2000 (coll 1992 UK) gathers together The Blind Geometer and A Short Sharp Shock plustales from Remaking History. Green Mars (1985 IASFM; 1988 chap dos) prefigures the long-projected Mars trilogy, which treats that planet as a realistic habitat for the human species; the first volume, RED MARS (1992 UK), which won the 1993 Nebula, ranges magisterially over the early yearsof TERRAFORMING, COLONIZATION and disruption; the sequence as a whole - also comprising Green Mars (1993), which won the 1994 HUGO, and is not textually related to Green Mars; and Blue Mars - is projected to extend over 200 years of civilization on MARS. A Short Sharp Shock (1990) carries its athletic and ultimately clear-eyed protagonist into a soul-defining trek across an endless sea-girt peninsula which is freely symbolic of death, or of the nature of life, or simply of the path a person must follow to fill out a human span.In a somewhat contrived attempt to contrast him to CYBERPUNK writers, KSR has been described as a Humanist; he has himself disparaged as foolishly reductive this use of Humanism as a label. What in fact most characterizes the growing reach and power of his work is its cogent analysis and its disposal of such category thinking. He is at heart an explorer.

   JC

   Other works: Black Air (1983 FSF; 1991 chap); Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (anth 1994).

   About the author: A Checklist of Kim Stanley Robinson (1991 chap) by Tom Joyce and Christopher P. STEPHENS.

   See also: ACE BOOKS; ALTERNATE WORLDS; DEFINITIONS OF SF; HISTORY IN SF; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; JOHN W. CAMPBELLMEMORIAL AWARD; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MATHEMATICS; MESSIAHS; NANOTECHNOLOGY; NUCLEAR POWER; OUTER PLANETS; PHILIP K. DICK AWARD.