Fiction Addiction - Stan and Ursula

 What makes Ken McLeod and Stan - Kim Stanley - Robinson still worth reading long after most of the SF on my bookshelf no longer holds my interest?

My best guess is that they care about people, about people's lives, about how people interact with each other within an environment, and how that interaction of real people shapes history. And, in Stan's case, he cares deeply about how we interact with our biological context.

Frank Herbert shared a little of the same interest in how people lived on a planet - Dune was a whole planet with an ecology - but the books devolved into the politics of hierarchy. 

Larry Niven is another who has given the topic of humans and their planet some serious thought. His future Earth, overwhelmed and shaped by the sheer numbers of people, his Ringworld, his Fleet of Worlds,  all follow a plausible logic, assuming some magical gadgetry. The most carefully crafted of all his creature/planet combos might be Mote Prime, a collaboration in conservative philosophy with Jerry Pournelle that had the blessing of Robert Heinlein. 

There are many good writers and a few giants in speculative fiction but Robinson, in my estimation, is the one who sees that our path as a species is dependent on seeing our world as it is, seeing ourselves as we are. He offers us, if we pay attention, the possibility of reshaping our interactions with each other to avoid the worst of our possible futures. 

Paper copies of his Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars sat among the housewares and fast fashions on our local free table for a week and no one took them. Even the poetry collections found new homes faster. Why? Is it because people crave the fantasy that Robinson's anti-fantastic work refuses to deliver?

Did Philip K. Dick - with his drugs and paranoia and alienation - see our world more accurately? Or did Norman Spinrad, with his societies shaped by mass media and his portrayal of fascist fantasy foresee more clearly where we find ourselves now? The deeply insightful Ursula LeGuin thought so half a century ago: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/1/leguin1art.htm

More: https://longnow.org/talks/02018-stanley-robinson/

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