Lito Kattou, Rain Calling, Tranen, 2022. Photo: Jan Søndergaard.
This interview took place on June 17, 2025 at Tranen, Space for Contemporary Art in Hellerup, Denmark. It has been revised and condensed.
Toke Lykkeberg: Your work has had a deep impact on me and, of course, on so many others. It extends from stories of the Ice Age, to a future New York that has been flooded, to interplanetary civilizations hundreds years from now. You are a leading light in science fiction and in solarpunk, which has a more positive or constructive take on the future, where it’s not just bleak but there are still possibilities and room to maneuver. And you’re also a public intellectual who has played a role in framing and igniting debates. The Mars Trilogy has been hailed as your greatest achievement. It has inspired the likes of Elon Musk, whose enterprise you’ve called a Disney-like endeavor. You’ve said that we shouldn’t focus so much on planet B out there, as on our own planet earth right here.
In 2020 you published The Ministry for the Future, which is now celebrated as the high point of your work. Its original approach to the topic of climate change has been discussed worldwide, from small local reading groups to the upper echelons of society, including governmental bodies. This year is the fifth anniversary of Ministry, and it’s also the year that the narrative begins. It has just been translated into Danish by A Mock Book, a great Danish publishing house, and they are also working on republishing an old translation of your Antarctica from 1997 that I’ve read, and am very impressed by.
My coproducer Morten Grützmeier and I have reached out to you because The Ministry for the Future has been a really important reference point for the space that I direct, Tranen, Space for Contemporary Art. Your work deals with topics that are similar to what we have been dealing with in exhibitions for the past seven or eight years, including themes like speculative evolution, ecological fantasy, the techno-biosphere, Russian cosmism, and more. We are now wrapping up a program that’s been engaged not so much with contemporary art—art that is literally “with-time”—but instead with what I call “extemporary art,” which is out of time in various ways. Time is speeding up, and it’s difficult to make art about a present that is ever more ungraspable and fleeting.
So my first question to you is about the speed of change as documented by various data sets. There’s Moore’s law, about the exponential growth in microchips and computing power, which has been crucial to electronics and AI. Then there’s the Great Acceleration, about exponential growth in the earth system, from CO2 to sea-level rise. Do you think that nature and culture have entered a stage of unprecedented accelerating change?
Kim Stanley Robinson: My short answer would be: yes.
But let me make some distinctions. I think that the Great Acceleration is well-documented and real. But Moore’s law should be called “Moore’s observation.” There’s no law to it in the sense of a natural law of physics. It’s an observation he made. And all of these accelerations, if you graph them—none of them go in straight lines forever. They’re almost all on a curve, which starts kind of slow and flat. Centuries or millennia can pass where nothing much changes. And then there’s a sudden climb: an acceleration of change, which then flattens out again at the top. You reach limits that are physical or mental, but mostly physical limits where you can’t continue to double. We’re not talking about exponential change in terms of powers of ten. Moore’s law is a doubling law. In any case, no matter what the speed of change is, it begins to flatten out. And the question becomes: If we’re in a moment of rapid acceleration, when is it going to flatten out?
In terms of planetary boundaries, a notion from Johan Rockström has become very prominent: Could it be that we’ve already depleted or exhausted certain sources of the acceleration? And what’s interesting, I think, is that you have to de-strand all of these things. These processes are not uniform. So some of them will have topped out already. We have run out of the ability to put fossil fuels into the atmosphere without wrecking things. That’s already happened. Methane bombs in the permafrost are already being released, an acceleration and release of methane into the atmosphere. Can that be stopped?
Instead of being a simple descriptor of our reality, the Great Acceleration is a complete mess. Some things are accelerating, others are already decelerating and falling apart. And this mess is what we call history. It can’t be named simply. That is also the point of your extemporary art, instead of contemporary art: an art outside of time—what I call science fiction. It’s a genre I believe in for the same reasons that you’re looking for something other than contemporary art. The contemporary is this ungraspable thing of multiple changes happening very quickly and hitting walls or planetary boundaries. It’s so messy that to write about our present moment, say June 2025, you have to do it as historical fiction. You have to do it as science fiction. That’s the only way to capture the present moment.
TL: The Ministry for the Future has been called “near-future fiction”—or “very-near-future fiction,” as I would call it. When I look at sci-fi writers from H. G. Wells to Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick to Octavia Butler, they tend to start their novels either in their present or else decades or centuries into the future. But you started yours just a few years into the future. Michel Houellebecq did something similar. Do you see this as a trend? What were your reasons for setting the novel five years into the future?
KSR: Let me start by giving a kind of a definition of how science fiction works and split it into subcategories. If you say that science fiction consists in stories set in the future, the future is gigantic. It could be tomorrow, or it could be five billion years from now. And so the genre looks confusing because it covers such huge temporal ground.
Science fiction, from the very beginning, has been split into three general categories. One of them is the far future. We call it “space opera” in the United States; think of Star Wars, Star Trek. The galaxy is our playground. It’s a kind of a fantasy space because certain magics are evoked there. The size of the galaxy is ignored, there’s faster-than-light travel, instant translations. Well, that’s not so fantastical, but you see what I mean. It’s a fantasy space. You go into the far future and anything is allowed.
Then there’s the near future. There’s been near-future science fiction right from the time of Jules Verne and his submarine. H. G. Wells was a little further out. Between near-future and far-future science fiction there is a middle distance, which I call “future history.” H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov. It’s a hundred years out, two hundred years out. It’s realistic, but it’s very difficult to say what the future will be like.
These are the three zones of science fiction. Near-future science fiction, which started with Verne, came back in America with the pulps of the 1950s, which published both space operas and day-after-tomorrow satires. These would exaggerate the present—for example, the power of advertising. Near-future science fiction is called something different every decade. In the 1980s, it was cyberpunk, and now it’s climate fiction. Near-future science fiction gets named after what you might call the overdetermining situation, or the structure of feeling of the present moment. When you’re doing near-future science fiction, you’re writing about the present with some exaggerations that makes it kind of surreal. I’ve done it a few times in my California novels, and in my Washington, DC novel called Greener. The Ministry for the Future is certainly, for me, the closest to the present, the most concerned with the present. And it contains the least amount of surrealistic distortion. The attempt to do a realist novel but stick it in the near future is not unprecedented; it’s actually quite common in American science fiction, but it isn’t famous the way space opera is.
TL: Ursula K. Le Guin, who was like a mentor to you when you were a very young writer, has this quote where she’s paraphrasing Tolkien. It goes like this:
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
Of course, we all agree that in this very messy world, with Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump, we have to stay engaged. But is there still a case to be made for the relevance of Le Guin and Tolkien’s defense of escapism, with its openings towards other worldviews?
KSR: This is a really good question because it doesn’t have a simple yes or no answer. It’s a question of balance. Le Guin’s point from Tolkien is that capitalist realism is a prison for our minds, because it presents itself as the natural way of things rather than a cultural power relationship. And that needs to be broken. We need to escape from that in order to free our minds to imagine better political futures, and better relationships to the biosphere, and a better spiritual life, as Le Guin would insist upon. And yet, as you said, engagement is necessary. You can’t just go off into the world of fantasy. The generation that has grown up on Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings movies, this feeling you can get that magic works, that good and evil are easy to distinguish, and that it’s okay to chop off the heads of the evil ones—it’s too simple. At that point, you need a reapplication of the reality principle.
I often come back to the definition, which derives from my teacher Fredric Jameson, and from French philosopher Louis Althusser, of ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation. We all have that imaginary relationship, and it needs to be freed from a capitalist realism that dictates that things have to be the way they are. That isn’t true. On the other hand, there is a real situation. The flexibility of mind that comes from escaping capitalist realism has to be coupled with a new reality principle that we live in a biosphere, that the living biosphere of the earth is our extended body, that we have to take care of it, and that magic doesn’t work. Magic is a symbol for power, and power is real, but magic is not. Except … well, I don’t want to be too doctrinaire about it, because I’m thinking of Le Guin. Her ghost is looking over my shoulder. Maybe language is magic. Let’s not be too quick to judge.
Escapism and realism need to be kept in balance. To fall too far off into worlds of fantasy and storytelling without making a connection to things as they are reduces the power of literature. Literature shouldn’t be a game. It’s not crossword puzzles. It’s engagement. It’s the highest form of understanding. It’s an art. Art is our way of comprehending the world in imaginative and powerful ways that allow us to choose what to do.
Continued in Part 2
