Green Planets (47 page)

GC
►
2312
in particular seems like a direct attempt to rewrite the situation of your
Mars
trilogy with significantly more pessimism, at least in terms of the Accelerando's uneven distribution over class and species lines. One character suggests that even post-scarcity won't be enough to end the problem of human suffering at all, and that in fact true “evil” might be possible only
after
scarcity: “Before [post-scarcity], it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, altruistic, cooperative, a lover of all…. However you explain it, people do bad things. Believe me.” Another chapter contains a long list of reasons why utopia is impossible, from original sin to greed to “because it probably wouldn't work” to “because we can get away with it.”

KSR
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For me that list is not a list of reasons why utopia is impossible, but rather a list of the shabby excuses we make for not making improvements when they are technically achievable. It was a pretty long list, and yet not comprehensive.

It's true that the situation on Earth in
2312
is presented as somewhat dire. It's very much like the situation we are in now. The exaggeration of three extra centuries of damage merely heightens the representation of now. It's a kind of surrealism, and it could mean that the book describes an impossible future history, in that if things were to go that badly for three hundred more years, they might long before the year 2312 have necessarily spiraled down into something very much worse than what the book depicts. But the way that we live now, in a mixed situation, with some in misery and some in luxury, suggested that we might limp along in a degraded manner for quite a long time. In any case the book's scenario is a distorted image of present reality, in the usual metaphorical way of science fiction.

Given that
SF
novels are always images of the times they were written in, maybe
2312
is somewhat more pessimistic than my earlier novels, even if I myself am not. In other words, it's just the difference between 1990 and 2010. In those twenty years there's been a lot of dithering, and that might seep into the text in unexpected ways. Still, I'm reluctant to call this pessimism.

GC
►
2312
does point to the continued possibility of utopia as you define it in
Pacific Edge
, “struggle forever.” The characters do make an improvement in the situation of the solar system, and the logic of the novel's encyclopedia-like interstitial chapters suggest that, in retrospect, a genuine historical break of some kind has been initiated.

KSR
►
Yes, that part of
2312
suggests humanity will have the means to repair damage to Earth, and also to make a more just society, and that the two efforts are parts of each other. Having started with a metaphorical description of our own time, there is then a prescription for action in the plot, again presented in surreal or symbolic form. Anything we do in reality will surely be messy and protracted, and the “we” will never be a unanimity. What I wanted to suggest is that because we have the ability to do better, our situation eventually will get so dangerous it will force us to do better. The desire will be there, and the tools are there (science and politics and culture), so the struggle is on, starting now and going on for some centuries at least. We don't have to wait until the year 2312 to act, obviously, and it would be terrible if we did. Since we know now that we can greatly improve the situation by what we do, we should start now, and shoulder the frustrations of how long it will take without too much whining or quitting.

GC
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You've said that there won't be a sequel to
2312
—no
2313,
no
2412
. Does this speak to the ultimate unrepresentability of utopia? Would it be possible to set an artistically successful novel in a “civilization that nurtures the biosphere”—or, to paraphrase Tolstoy, are all happy civilizations alike?

KSR
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Well, as we have not yet seen any happy civilizations, the first one to come along should be interesting as a novelty at least. So yes, it should be possible to write an artistically successful novel set in a happy civilization. I would like to try one myself, but if I did, it would not be a sequel to
2312
, as really it should be set much closer to now. It would be a new try at the subject that would follow on my earlier books, but in the way that a train of thought is followed (or not). I think it's well worth coming back to the problem from time to time, as our current situation and its potentiality keep changing. So there is an opportunity to try something different.

The problems that will remain even in utopian futures are big, like death,
or heartbreak; others could be added without straining anyone's imagination. If these big problems still occur in a social context of equality and well-being, might they not become even more acutely felt, as clearly unavoidable losses and sorrows? Doesn't our inescapable biological fate mean the utopia should always shade into tragedy?

GC
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A chapter in
2312
emphasizes the impossibility of a classic science fictional subgenre in which you've never participated: the galactic empire of the space opera, with human beings zipping between stars at supra–light speeds. You note that everything we currently know about physical reality tells us this is simply an impossibility—and further note that if it is an impossibility, Earth becomes tremendously important, the single best place we'll ever know.

KSR
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The only place we'll ever know. I firmly believe this point made in
2312
, that our solar system exists at human distances and constitutes our home, or our potential home—Earth our home, the solar system a potential home—while the universe beyond the solar system exists beyond human distances and will forever remain a backdrop only, to be observed but not visited.

Clearly there is one exception in terms of stories engaged in real possibilities, which is the story of the generational starship. This is a really interesting science fiction subgenre, full of excellent work already, but it is almost always saying a variant of what I said above; we can't get out to other stars and stay sane, as they are all too far away.

GC
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I'm curious, though, as a thought experiment: if we could get beyond the solar system—if relativity were revised tomorrow—would that really change significantly your commitment to environmentalist thinking? Does ecological thought depend in some sense on a recognition of a limited futurological horizon for mankind, or, alternatively, does it draw from other modes of thinking besides the imperial-economic question of how far we can go and how much stuff we can bring back? Given how capitalism has acted on a planet it knows to be finite and limited, one can scarcely imagine how it would act if it genuinely had the entire universe to spread across. It seems to me from this perspective that ecological thinking may become more important, not less, when mankind faces no limitations on its endless expansion. The wall of the solar system almost makes this too easy a problem, by shifting the register from morality to self-interest; we have to protect our environment to keep ourselves alive, not because it's right.

KSR
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If we had the galaxy within reach … but this is something like the land of Cockaigne, which I'm not sure is science fiction. In any case it's not a thought I can follow. I guess the way I come at it is to ask myself: What kind of story
could I tell using this device of the galactic setting, that I couldn't tell by way of a more realistic device? And when I don't find any, as usually happens to me when I think about any fantasy devices, I can't see the point of trying them, or at least, I can't find my own way into them. If a good idea for a galactic story did come to me, I would immediately get much more interested. It doesn't feel like that's going to happen, but you never know. I enjoy reading some writers' space operas, and I've written a time travel novel, a reincarnation novel, a shape-shifter novella; I don't stick to realism on principle, it's just a tendency.

As for having to protect our environment to keep ourselves alive, rather than because it's morally right, that's fine by me; it's probably better that way. I suppose if we had entire galaxies to play in, we could be more careless about housekeeping without killing ourselves. That would shift ecological thinking and morality both, I'm sure. But it is too much of a hypothetical.

GC
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The moment from your work that frames this question for me most directly is the radicalism of the Red Martians from the Mars books, who insist on protecting Mars
simply for its own sake
, even though it has no persons on it at all. Part of the dystopian character of
2312
, in fact, descends precisely from the fact that in that timeline Mars was settled quickly and maximally, with no regard to preservation, and with something like a seventh of the planet being permanently scorched in the process.

KSR
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This brings up the question of intrinsic value, whether places have value in themselves independent of our use of them or even our regard for them. It's a question in environmental ethics, but as Chris McKay pointed out in “Should Rocks Have Standing?”—echoing Christopher Stone's famous essay “Should Trees Have Standing?”—when we speak of “nature” we tend to mean “life,” so that the lifeless rocky bodies of our solar system are not “nature” as we usually mean it. There's slippages all over in our words of course, but this problem of nature's intrinsic value became in my Mars books a way to discuss the possibility of Mars as it is now having a value for us that was greater than its use value; and that if we felt that strongly enough, it would make sense to live there with as little impact on the place as possible, as a visitor almost, or at least an inhabitant that changes almost nothing. It seems like an extreme position, and yet desert lovers on Earth might already feel something like that. Greening a desert might have utilitarian value, but if you love deserts for their look and feel, then an aesthetic is being harmed if you green that desert. In the Mars books the Red position was analogous to that situation, with the added element of Mars's exoticism and otherness, the way it is a very gorgeous rock right now with its own history inscribed on it. It's a very odd special case
in environmental thinking, if you think of it as a lifeless rock (as it may not be), and I'm not even sure it is much use to us in thinking about more general
cases.

GC
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In
2312
something similar happens with the animals—the final utopian reversal of the threatened “mass extinction event” with which our conversation began. So much of debates over animals both in and outside
SF
seems to hinge on the question of whether animals exist as beings in their own right or as something more like that desert, existing (or not) purely to satisfy human needs. I'm struck by Christina Alt's essay on Wells that begins this volume, which finds Wells taking the deliberate extermination of animal life as a marker of
utopian
achievement. So much supposedly ecological thinking seems predicated on an anthropocentrism that denies the possibility of nonhuman values.

KSR
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Nonhuman values I take to mean human values in support of the nonhuman. In the case of animals, it's very clear, I think; they exist as beings in their own right, they do not exist to serve us. We predate on them as food, but that is a violation of their existence. We are such powerful animals that we have even domesticated some other animals to make our predation on them easier, but they still live their own lives, whether enslaved to us or not. I think it's best to consider all our fellow mammals as direct cousins, with mental lives much like ours. I've been learning to think similarly about birds, though these are much more distant relatives; fish even more so. I still feel it's all right to eat them, because animals eat other animals, but that doesn't mean the eaten animals were not existences in their own right, and should be treated respectfully and humanely. I think Temple Grandin's position in these matters is impressive and persuasive.

I think what ecological thinking brings us here is the ability to see better how much we are interrelated to all the other species in our biosphere. If we drive them to extinction we are damaging ourselves too, because we are all part of a functioning network of organisms. There can be an anthropocentrism that acknowledges this physical reality and then goes on from there, continuing to value humanity first, but realizing every other living thing is part of us in a quite literal sense. Also, valuing humanity means valuing sentience, and that exists in other living creatures. So as a matter of self-regard and as a matter of respect for others, we need to care about all living creatures and act accordingly.

GC
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You once told me that you see part of your job as a science fiction writer as speaking on behalf of the people of the future—to ensure they have a voice in a present that is robbing them blind. Do you think much about the people of the future as
readers
of your novels? What might the people of 2100, or 2200, think about a
culture that consumed stories of their radically transformed world as entertainment, while simultaneously refusing to act in the material realm?

KSR
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“Speaking for future generations” is a narrative mode or a rhetorical stance. It's similar to the stance of writing as if from the future; in other words, a fictional position. Both can help to create an effect that Roger Luckhurst called “proleptic realism.”