An Influential Imagination
Sci-fi writer and alum Kim Stanley Robinson has spent his career creating better futures. Global power brokers have been paying attention.
The year is 2025 and aid worker Frank May has survived a catastrophic heat wave that blanketed India. Twenty million people have died. May is haunted and angry. He wants someone in power to understand the horror of his experience—and to do something to prevent the next climate disaster. But how?
May is one of the main characters in Kim Stanley Robinson’s best-selling novel The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020). The stories of bureaucrats, diplomats, refugees, scientists, and economists intertwine as Robinson (GRS’75) charts their creative attempts to tackle climate change. May is desperate to contribute, but what difference can one person make? He’s one of eight billion people on Earth. Even if everyone has an equal share of power—which they don’t, he thinks—his voice doesn’t carry much weight. Then he considers an analog in nature that gives him hope: “There were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.” Robinson shares one trait with his protagonist: He wants policymakers to listen to individual voices.
“Science fiction is the realism of our time,” Robinson says. “You get a sense of this moment that we’re living right now, as the past of some future civilization that’s looking back at us.” He has published 21 novels, many of them about how humanity might solve present-day problems. He calls it utopian science fiction. Readers in search of a galaxy far, far away should look elsewhere.
Over four decades, Robinson has built a sterling reputation. In 2013, the New Yorker called him “one of the most important political writers working in America.” With Ministry, he achieved something grander than a rave review: people in power embraced his work. Former President Barack Obama listed it as one of his favorite books of 2020. Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres, who led the United Nations negotiations that produced the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, interviewed Robinson on her podcast. By his own count, Robinson has done about 520 events related to the book. “The number of governmental and nonprofit international organizations that have wanted to talk to me is startling,” he says. “The Ministry for the Future has truly blown up my life.”
Robinson’s Ministry for the Future is a fictional intergovernmental body formed at the 2024 United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP), established to enforce and implement the very real 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. After reading the book, Nigel Topping, the United Kingdom’s High Level Climate Action Champion, invited Robinson to the 2021 COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, and gave him a red pass, granting the author entry to any room at the conference.
Why ask a science fiction writer to sit in on high-level climate negotiations? “I have been a fan of his work and the way it provokes us to think about our society today and our choices today,” Topping tells me via email. “A lack of imagination as to what is possible is one of our biggest barriers.”
Space and Time
Robinson, who grew up in Orange County, California, says the books he read as a child influenced how he perceived his world. “I thought that I was in a Huckleberry Finn world, which is definitely not true,” he says. Only later did he appreciate the transformation around him, from orange groves to freeways and suburbs.
In college he began reading science fiction. “It hit me like a hammer,” he says. “This was the way life really felt.” Robinson sold his first sci-fi story during his cross-country drive to Boston University. He sold his second on the return drive the next year, having earned a master’s degree in English in between.
Robinson’s sci-fi has always been more realistic than fantastical. He wasn’t interested in space operas or lightspeed travel. “My imagination just didn’t go that far,” he says. “The solar system was my working story space.” His Mars trilogy—Red Mars (HarperCollins, 1992), Green Mars (HarperCollins, 1993), and Blue Mars (Bantam, 1996)—tells the story of settlers making the red planet habitable. In 2312 (Orbit, 2012) humans create habitats around the solar system, and in New York 2140 (Orbit, 2017) Manhattanites navigate by boat instead of cab.
But those books didn’t make the global call to climate action that Robinson believed needed to be made. “I never really found the right combination of space and time,” he says. “With The Ministry for the Future I was saying to myself, ‘Let’s lay all the cards on the table. Let’s discuss everything that needs to be discussed.’”
Ministry begins in the very near future and addresses the oncoming climate disaster from all angles. The research he’d done for past novels—on terraforming, geoengineering, global finance, and other topics—gave him most of the material he needed. “I hardly did any new research except to check certain things. It just poured out in a rush,” he says. “But I also said everything I have to say. I’m struggling to figure out what comes next.”
Reality as Strange as Fiction
Robinson’s realism has long appealed to the scientific community. In 1995 and 2016, he received National Science Foundation grants to travel to Antarctica, which spawned a story in Smithsonian and his novel Antarctica (HarperCollins, 1997). In 2016, an astronomer named asteroid 72432 “Kimrobinson.”
In 2010, Robinson was invited to an event titled Climate Change, Geoengineering, and Science Fiction at the University of California at Santa Cruz. During one talk, a man sidled up and, as Robinson recalls, said, “You know, there’s a better geoengineering method that isn’t being discussed here.” He proceeded to explain a wild-sounding plan to pump water from beneath Antarctica’s glaciers to slow their slide into the ocean and curb rising sea levels. Close readers of Ministry might recognize the man’s name: Slawek Tulaczyk. In the novel, a fictional version of the UC Santa Cruz glaciologist leads a team to Antarctica. The project—in fiction and in reality—could limit a catastrophic four meters of sea level rise to a more manageable one meter.
As Robinson searches for inspiration for another novel, he’s enjoying a professional detour. He’s finishing a nonfiction book about Antarctica, due out in 2025, that will mix memoir, history, and Tulaczyk’s story. Robinson says nonfiction is easier for him to write, but he’s eager to return to his roots.
“I love the novel as an art form. What I’ve always enjoyed is the idea that the novel still matters to people,” he says. “And Ministry has vastly increased my sense of the power of the novel in people’s minds.”
Answering the Call
Robinson has won multiple Nebula and Hugo Awards, science fiction writing’s highest honors. Although he doesn’t have his genre’s current status symbol—an Apple+ or Netflix series—he has inspired something more gratifying: the Oxford Ministry for the Future (OMF), a network of academics and policymakers launched by Oxford University’s Hertford College in 2024. The OMF won’t have the policy clout of its fictional namesake, but organizers hope to spark creative thinking about climate action and to introduce new voices into the debate, particularly from the humanities and social sciences.
In June 2024, Robinson attended the OMF’s inaugural event in Oxford, United Kingdom, where Tom Fletcher, principal of Hertford, addressed the room full of academics and diplomats by giving his novel the highest praise. “The great books are the ones that make you think, but the greatest books are the ones that make you act,” he said. “How do we make our work, how do we make our teaching, how do we make our research more urgent? More activist? More brave? That’s the challenge that’s been set for us.”
Robinson is bemused that people keep asking him to talk about Ministry four years after its publication. “Everything I know is in my book,” he says. Still, he has influence as a spokesperson for climate action and the urgent need to reform our economies and policies in a sustainable way. He says he’ll serve as an “emeritus, chaplain figure” for the OMF. “I intend to keep my hand in the game and encourage them, give them ideas, ask them to try things.” He wants to fulfill what he views as the obligation of a public intellectual. It’s the reason he went to COP26, speaking at 38 events in 12 days.
Koko Warner, who worked for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the time, met Robinson in Glasgow. She was at COP to help countries reach consensus on issues related to climate change impacts. “It’s nearly impossible for people, let alone complex nation states, to think about the future and what actions we need to take now,” she tells me. “Having the chance to interact with Stan’s ideas has helped a lot of people working on climate action envision a future and prepare differently and hopefully a bit better.”