Exploring a climate of disaster: interview with Erik Assadourian.

• Author: Robinson, Kim Stanley
• Position: Worldwatch Research Associate - Interview

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt, is in the midst of writing a three-part series of novels about the near future--a time in which abrupt climate change has arrived, and the ocean current that regulates temperatures in eastern North America and Western Europe has started to break down. Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below, the first two novels in the trilogy, have already appeared; the third is expected to be released this fall.

Unlike the sensationalist film The Day After Tomorrow, in which the Earth's climate changes radically within a few weeks, Robinson's story more plausibly unfolds over several years. It follows the lives of several "foot soldiers" in the ensuing battle to adapt to a changing world: a scientist at the National Science Foundation, a staff person for a U.S. senator, and a group of Tibetans who have founded a new nation on a low-lying island off the coast of India. These characters work together to create a political environment supportive of making the dramatic changes necessary to prevent ecological collapse.

Worldwatch Research Associate Erik Assadourian spoke recently with Dr. Robinson (who also teaches at the University of California at Davis) about his thoughts on climate change, Hurricane Katrina, and the prospects for human responses to such catastrophes.

EA: What prompted you to write the Forty Signs climate-change trilogy?

KSR: Writing my Mars books gave me an interest in climate change and what you might call global planetary management, and when I went to Antarctica as part of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program in 1995, I met scientists working on global warming issues. As a science fiction writer I am always looking for things that look like they might happen in the future, and it was becoming clear to me that whatever else might happen to humanity in the next hundred years, global warming was likely to be one of them, and [to be] the background and environment in which the rest of history will take place. So that made it very interesting to everyone, not just science fiction writers; but there remained the problem of how to tell a story wherein the main action took centuries. Then the Greenland ice core results and other findings brought to the fore the concept of "abrupt climate change," in which the Earth's climate tips over some kind of balance, so that very quickly we go from one climate...