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2022 SPECIAL GUEST

 

Kim Stanley Robinson

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Kim Stanley Robinson is widely recognized as one of the leading living writers of science fiction. The Atlantic called his work “the gold-standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing.” He has published twenty-two novels and is best known for his Mars trilogy Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), Blue Mars (1996), and The Martians (1999). Red Mars won the BSFA Award for Best Novel and the Nebula Award for Best Novel; Green Mars won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel; and Blue Mars won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. He has also won four other Locus Awards and two other Nebula Awards, as well as the Robert A. Heinlein Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his body of work. In 2008, Time named him a “Hero of the Environment,” and in 2016, asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.” His work has been translated into 24 languages. Born in 1952 in Waukegan, Illinois, his family moved to California when he was a child. He received a BA in Literature from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in 1974, an MA in English from Boston University in 1975, and a PhD from UCSD in 1982, with a dissertation on Philip K. Dick. He married Lisa Howland Nowell, an environmental chemist, in 1982, and they have lived in Switzerland and, for four years, in Washington, DC, before moving back to California. At the 2022 Fitzgerald Festival, Kim Stanley Robinson will participate in the “Tribute to Richard Powers” at the Writer’s Center on Friday evening, October 14, and will engage with Richard Powers in a “Conversation about the Art of Fiction” and introduce Richard Powers for the Fitzgerald Award on Saturday, October 15.

'Robinson’s ability to marshal dense scientific and technical detail, economic and political theory and wonkish policy proposals into his fiction has made him a prominent public thinker outside of the sci-fi sphere.
“There aren’t a lot of writers who have tried to take a literary approach to technical questions, and a technical approach to literary questions,” the novelist Richard Powers said.'  from A Sci-Fi Writer Returns to Earth: ‘The Real Story Is the One Facing Us’

"It’s almost as if a science fiction writer’s job is to represent the unborn humanity that will inherit this place. You’re speaking from the future and for the future. And you try to speak for them by envisioning scenarios that show them either doing things better or doing things worse. But you’re also alerting the generations alive right now that these people have a voice in history.”
http://www.bldgblog.com/2007/12/comparative-planetology-an-interview-with-kim-stanley-robinson/
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