A Sci-Fi Author’s Boldest Vision of Climate Change: Surviving It

Kim Stanley Robinson spends his days inventing fictional versions of a future where the climate has changed. In his 2017 novel “New York 2140,” sea levels in the city have risen by 50 feet; boats flit over canals between docks at skyscrapers with watertight basements. In 2005’s “Forty Signs of Rain,” an epochal storm called Tropical Storm Sandy floods most of Washington, D.C. It came out seven years before Superstorm Sandy pummeled New York.

The 67-year-old author of 20 books and winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards for excellence in science-fiction writing, Mr. Robinson is regarded by critics as a leading writer of “climate fiction”—“cli-fi” for short. He considers himself a science-fiction writer, but also says that books set in the future need to take a changing climate into consideration or risk coming across as fantasy.

The term “cli-fi” first appeared around 2011, possibly coined by a blogger named Dan Bloom, and has been a growing niche in science fiction ever since. Books by Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver are often included in the emerging category. In general, cli-fi steers clear of the space-opera wing of science fiction and tends to be set in a not-too-distant, largely recognizable future.

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A lot of climate fiction is bleak, but “New York 2140” is kind of utopian. Things work out. What do you think—will the future be dystopian or utopian?

They are both completely possible. It really depends on what we do now and in the next 20 years. I don’t have a prediction to make. Nobody does. The distinguishing feature of right now and the reason that people feel so disoriented and mildly terrified is that it could go really, really badly, into a mass extinction event [for many animal species].

Humans will survive. We are kind of like the seagulls and the ants and the cockroaches and the sharks. It isn’t as if humanity itself is faced with outright extinction, but civilization could crash.

In some sense, [dystopia] is even more plausible. Like, oh, we are all so selfish and stupid, humanity is bound to screw up. But the existence of 8 billion people on a planet at once is a kind of social/technological achievement in cooperation. So, if you focus your attention on that side, you can begin to imagine that the utopian course of history is not completely unlikely.

Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are in the business of making guesses about the future, as you do in your fiction. How do you create something plausible?

I read the scientific literature at the lay level—science news, the public pages of Nature. I read, I guess you would call it political economy—the works of sociology and anthropology that are trying to study economics and see it as a hierarchical set of power relations. A lot of my reading is academic. I am pretty ignorant in certain areas of popular culture. I don’t pay any attention to social media, and I know that is a big deal, but by staying out of it, I have more time for my own pursuits.

Then what I do is I propose one notion to myself. Say sea level goes up 50 feet. Or in my novel “2312,” say we have inhabited the solar system but we still haven’t solved our [environmental] problems. Or in my new novel, which I am still completing, say we do everything as right as we can in the next 30 years, what would that look like? Once I get these larger project notions, then that is the subject of a novel. It is not really an attempt to predict what will really happen, it is just modeling one scenario.