Move over, dystopians!

From The Atlantic:

Amid the crowded field of artists crying doom and gloom, the science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson has been an anomalous figure in the genre for almost 30 years. He’s made it his life’s work to write books that keep alive the idea that humanity can create a better future for itself. Robinson writes in the rigorous subgenre of hard science fiction, which requires respect for known natural laws rather than flights of fancy. In his books, the scientists are heroes: His Mars is not an alien planet, but a landscape to be terraformed into radical new farms; his Antarctica is a landscape for environmental research and eco-sabotage; and government grants, if applied for, can often save the world. Robinson’s work illustrates both the promise and peril of radical optimism, as well as the habits of ordinary people in extraordinary landscapes.  

“Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines,” Robinson told science fiction short story writer Terry Bisson in 2009. “But utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better.”