Kim Stanley Robinson Event on January 24, 2024

On Wednesday, January 24, 2024, Kim Stanley Robinson, award-winning author of 22 novels and numerous short stories, visited Berkeley to discuss his fiction with a focus on Ministry for the Future (2020). In a 90 minute conversation with the University of California, Berkeley’s Katherine Snyder (English, Cli-Fi) and Daniel Aldana Cohen (Sociology, Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative), the three discussed how climate change politics and fiction imagine and respond to the future in an increasingly precarious world, or as Robinson puts it, in an increasingly "brittle system." Topics ranged from science and capitalism as self-reinforcing yet destructive systems, to instances of scientific innovation in the name of the common good, and to Robinson’s use of the novel as form in his globally acclaimed Ministry for the Future. Ultimately, Snyder and Cohen invite Robinson to share how he retains what he calls an “angry optimism,” an expression of and call to communal action in the face of the immense threat that is climate change.

This conversation was held at the Brower Center, a public center in Downtown Berkeley uniting art, activism, and the environment in a LEED platinum-rated building. The conversation was followed by a Q&A session and a networking reception.

A recording of this event is now available and may be found at this link.

This event was organized by the Berkeley Climate Change Network in partnership with the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, the Graduate School of Journalism, the Rausser College of Natural Resources, th Department of English, the SC(2), and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.