that science fiction storytelling, plays a role in how we anticipate and construct the future. All of your material is so thoroughly researched and well-grounded in science, from the politics of it to the sociology, to the brain chemistry -you could have written a great non-fiction book, but yet, it’s a story. What makes story really the best way to get these complex ideas across? Stan: Characters. And then, here’s what readers do when they’re reading fiction. It’s quite magical. It’s two science fiction powers that you’re given by reading fiction. One is time travel. You go to a different time and place, and you’re there. And the other is telepathy you’re in someone else’s mind and you can see how they’re thinking, and that is a rare quality in this life. And of course, both of these are our fictional experiences, but while you’re reading, if the novel has cap-tured you, fictional experiences can be extremely powerful. In nonfiction, you’re always outside it, you’re looking at facts and figures. It can be powerful, but not like fiction, when you have characters that you inhabit from inside. Claire: So that depending on who read the book, they’ll probably gone with something else. And that has its own, for me, complexity and beau-ty, but it’s like system thinking in a story. And the storytelling really does bring the futures to life. Would you say that from your perspec-tive, this particular story, because it’s so now, has it helped people to get more awareness of what it is we really are facing?
U
NITED Nations Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015 as a uni-versal call to action to end poverty and hunger, protect the planet, ensure inclusion, peace, and prosperity, all by 2030. Many people believe that this COVID global pandemic know make this unreachable, and actually, unreasonable. More-over, there are those who believe that this crisis provides an opportunity to reset the pathways, to achieving these global goals in new and previously unimagina-ble ways. What is certain, without active involvement across all borders and boundaries, neither Agenda 2030, nor Agenda 205, as set by the Paris Agree-ment is going to be capable of delivering wide-scale impact and results. So, we need to reach people in new ways that speak to them and offer this knowledge and vision in a form and content that allows them to engage. Enter stage right, Kim Stanley Robinson, author of many science
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fiction books and more important-ly, author of Ministry For The Future, a book that gives us a vision of an alterna-tive way of achieving a planetary, sustainable future. And how it might happen. Claire: I want to begin by saying that I fell in love with this book. How did you arrive at, The Ministry For The Future? Did you start with the science, or the story? Stan: I started with the story. I’ve been writing what you could call utopian science fiction, for almost 30 years. And taking different angles on it. But there were always angles, they were not hitting it head on, like where we are now and where we need to go. So, I thought let’s try that because I tried everything else. I read in the scientific literature, that when temperatures get high enough with humidity, you have what they
call a wet bulb temperature, which is just an index of heat and humidity combined. People can’t survive it, they will die. Even if they’re indoors, even if they don’t have clothes on, even if a fan is blowing on them, their own internal temperature gets too high, and they die. So, you would need air conditioning and sometimes power systems go out when you need them the most. So this frightened me. It really did. I think it’s coming and I’m scared. Well, what can you say? The impulse of fright, the stimulus of fright that we’re headed towards a heat wave, mass death. Combined with an im-pulse of hope that if we did everything right, or if we did most things right, even against resistance, which is important. That you could get to a good place where you weren’t in that situation anymore. So that’s what I tried for. Claire: That is so really powerful. We know
Stan: I think so. Dystopian stories are more common. A story of us mak-ing it through in a realistic fashion, is an extremely rare. And then the title, The Ministry For The Future. Everybody who works for the generations to come, many people in this world already think they are part of some kind of Ministry for The Future. They see that title, they read the book. the response has been really good. I’ve writ-ten, about 25 books. Never have I gotten a response like this one. Claire: It’s like a book whose time was coming. I am actively an advocate for small island developing states (SIDS). There are 55 of them in the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), and, I really want to help advance this conversation on the need for futurist commissions, a real life Ministry For The Future in the SIDS. So, I wanted a scene about SIDS. What would you say about islands? Stan: The novel ‘Green Earth’ I wrote at the start of this century is about refugees from the Bay of Bengal, from the mouth of the Ganges, where their island,
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