Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson (born March 23, 1952) is an American writer of science fiction.

He has published 22 novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his Mars trilogy.

His work has been translated into 24 languages.

Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes and feature scientists as heroes.

Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award.

The Atlantic has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing."

According to an article in The New Yorker, Robinson is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers."

Robinson was born in Waukegan, Illinois.

He moved to Southern California as a child.

In 1974, he earned a B.A. in literature from the University of California, San Diego.

In 1975, he earned an M.A. in English from Boston University.

In 1978 Robinson moved to Davis, California, to take a break from his graduate studies at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego).

During this time, he worked as a bookseller for Orpheus Books.

He also taught freshman composition and other courses at University of California, Davis.

In 1982, Robinson earned a PhD in English from UC San Diego under the direction of Donald Wesling.

His initial PhD advisor was literary critic and Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson, who told Robinson to read works by Philip K. Dick.

Jameson described Dick to Robinson as "the greatest living American writer".

Robinson's doctoral thesis, The Novels of Philip K. Dick, was published in 1984 and a hardcover version was published by UMI Research Press.

In 2009, Robinson was an instructor at the Clarion Workshop.

In 2010, he was the guest of honor at the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Melbourne.

In April 2011, Robinson presented at the second annual Rethinking Capitalism conference, held at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Among other points made, his talk addressed the cyclical nature of capitalism.

Robinson was appointed as a Muir Environmental Fellow in 2011 by John Muir College at UC San Diego.

Sheldon Brown described Robinson's novels as ways to explore how nature and culture continuously reformulate one another; Three Californias Trilogy as California in the future; Washington DC undergoing the impact of climate change in the Science in the Capital series; or Mars as a stand-in for Earth in the Mars trilogy to think about re-engineering on a global scale, both social and natural conditions.

Virtually all of Robinson's novels have an ecological component; sustainability is one of his primary themes (a strong contender for the primary theme would be the nature of a plausible utopia).

The Orange County trilogy is about the way in which the technological intersects with the natural, highlighting the importance of keeping the two in balance.

In the Mars trilogy, one of the principal divisions among the population of Mars is based on dissenting views on terraforming.

Colonists debate whether or not the barren Martian landscape has a similar ecological or spiritual value when compared with a living ecosphere like Earth's. Forty Signs of Rain has an entirely ecological thrust, taking global warming as its principal subject.

Robinson's work often explores alternatives to modern capitalism.

In the Mars trilogy, it is argued that capitalism is an outgrowth of feudalism, which could be replaced in the future by a more democratic economic system.

Worker ownership and cooperatives figure prominently in Green Mars and Blue Mars as replacements for traditional corporations.

The Orange County trilogy explores similar arrangements; Pacific Edge includes the idea of attacking the legal framework behind corporate domination to promote social egalitarianism.

Tim Kreider writes in the New Yorker that Robinson may be our greatest political novelist and describes how Robinson uses the Mars trilogy as a template for a credible utopia.

His works have made reference to real-world examples of economic organization that have been cited as examples of alternatives to conventional capitalist structures, such as the Mondragon Corporation and the Kerala model.

Robinson's writing also reflects an interest in economic models that reject the growth-oriented basis of capitalism: Robert Markley has identified the work of Murray Bookchin as an influence on his thinking, as well as steady-state economics.

Robinson's work often portrays characters struggling to preserve and enhance the world around them in an environment characterized by individualism and entrepreneurialism, often facing the political and economic authoritarianism of corporate power acting in this environment.

Robinson has been described as anti-capitalist, and his work often portrays a form of frontier capitalism that promotes egalitarian ideals that closely resemble socialist systems, but faced with a capitalism that is maintained by entrenched hegemonic corporations.

In particular, his Martian Constitution draws upon social democratic ideals explicitly emphasizing a community-participation element in political and economic life.

Robinson's works often portray the worlds of tomorrow in a manner similar to the mythologized American Western frontier, showing a sentimental affection for the freedom and wildness of the frontier.

This aesthetic includes a preoccupation with competing models of political and economic organization.