Green Planets Read Online Free PDF Page B

character” in the novel (467n.11).
    12 . Miéville, Kraken , 116. Future references to this work in this section will be given in parenthetical citation.
    13 . A subgenre mixing SF , fantasy, and horror, as discussed by Roger Luckhurst; relevant authors include Peter Ackroyd, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair, and M. John Harrison. See Roger Luckhurst, “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn,’” Textual Practice 16, no. 3 (2002): 526–45.

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    QUIET EARTHS, JUNK CITIES, AND THE CULTURES OF THE AFTERNOON

Afterword
    Still, I’m Reluctant to Call This Pessimism
    GERRY CANAVAN & KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
    GC ► What is the relationship between ecological science fiction and crisis? Are there other categories beyond “crisis” available to us in SF today? Or is crisis the only relevant category if we want to think seriously about the future we are creating for the planet?
    KSR ► The coming century will bring to one degree or another a global ecological crisis, but it will be playing out at planetary scales of space and time, and it’s possible that except in big storms, or food shortages, things won’t happen at the right scales to be subjectively experienced as crisis. Of course it’s possible to focus on moments of dramatic breakdown that may come, because they are narratizable, but if we do that we’re no longer imagining the peculiar kinds of ordinary life that will precede and follow them. Maybe to find appropriate forms for the situation we should be looking to archaic modes where the seasons were the subject, or to Hayden White’s nineteenth-century historians, whose summarized analytical narratives were structured by older literary modes, turning them into philosophical positions or prose poems or Stapledonian novels.
    I think even the phrase “climate change” is an attempt to narrate the ecological situation. We use the term now as a synecdoche to stand for the totality of our damage to the biosphere, which is much bigger than mere climate change, more like a potential mass extinction event. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are representing the whole by the part most amenable to human correction. We’re thinking in terms of thermostats, and how we turn them up or down in a building. That image suggests “climate change” has the possibility of a fix, maybe even a silver bullet of a fix. No such fix will be possible for a mass extinction event.
    Lots of words and phrases are being applied to this unprecedented situation: global warming, climate change, sustainable development, decarbonization, permaculture, emergency century, climate adaptation, cruel optimism, climatemitigation, hopeless hope, the sixth mass extinction event, and so on. But maybe sentences are the minimum unit that can begin to suggest the situation in full. “This coming century looks like the moment in human history when we will either invent a civilization that nurtures the biosphere while it supports us, or else we will damage it quite badly, perhaps even to the point of causing a mass extinction event and endangering ourselves.” A narrative rather than words or labels.
    GC ► Is it a problem, then, that our narrative forms (both fictional and political) seem to rely on “crisis” for their internal energy? SF , especially ecological SF , seems to trend toward sudden, apocalyptic breaks that may not reflect the glacial pace of environmental change. Even in your Science in the Capital series (to take one example) you turn to “abrupt climate change” as a way of narrativizing, on human spatial and temporal scales, a complex network of feedback loops that in actuality is almost impossible to perceive at the level of day-to-day perception. Are there other models for thinking about change, and where do you see these at work in your work?
    KSR ► It’s true that I puzzled over how to narrate a