Ecocriticism, Genre, and Climate Change: Reading the Utopian Vision of Kim Stanley

Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy

Adeline Johns-Putra

Abstract

This paper calls for a rapprochement between ecocriticism and what it often disregards as

theory. Specifically, it argues for the relevance of genre theory, which explores the dynamic

relations of author, reader, text, and the worlds they inhabit. Texts are locatable within the

environment of a given genre; further, generic environments reciprocally shape, structure,

and determine our sense of the wider environment. This paper offers a generically inflected

reading of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy, in which the representation

of climate change is understood as a complex set of negotiations within the generic space of

utopian science fiction.

Ecocriticism has arrived at something of an impasse with what its practitioners variously call

“postmodernism”, “postmodern theory”, or simply “theory”. I suggest here that ecocriticism

has often been too quick to disregard as theory a range of critical apparatuses that would

allow an interrogation of literary structure and form, and has thus failed to utilise potentially

pertinent critical and theoretical concepts. Among such concepts are those offered by genre

theory; I contend that questions of genre are directly relevant to the questions with which

ecocriticism is concerned, but have often been overlooked in the context of what Dana

Phillips has described as “the ecocritical attack on contemporary theory”. 1

Having set out the context and terms of this proposition, I attempt to show how the

issue of climate change and its representation in literary texts offers one way of appreciating

1
Phillips, 137.
the relevance of genre to ecocritical endeavour. I focus on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science

in the Capital trilogy, whose depiction of climate change is shaped by the author’s generic

inheritance, for Robinson brings to the trilogy his formidable reputation as a science fiction

writer.

Beforehand, however, it is worth considering some basic questions: What kind of

praxis has ecocriticism come to be? In that process of becoming, what is it that has been

designated, even dismissed, as theory? And, of course, why has such a dismissal occurred?

One oft-quoted definition of ecocriticism is that offered by Cheryll Glotfelty in her

introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader: “Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the

relationship between literature and the physical environment”. 2 The simplicity of this broad

claim deceptively suggests an innocence of motive for ecocriticism: to sketch ecocritical

praxis as an impartial evaluation of relations between the literary and the environmental is to

elide its politics. Indeed, some ecocritics have emphasised the material existence of this

praxis over its ideological or political dimensions. For example, Scott Slovic proclaims,

“ecocriticism has no central, dominant doctrine or theoretical apparatus—rather, ecocritical

theory, such as it is, is being re-defined daily by the actual practice of thousands of literary

scholars around the world”. 3 However, further in Glotfelty’s account, the politics of

ecocriticial praxis is simultaneously announced and concealed, announced because it is

explicitly stated but concealed because it is imagined as a default position—notice the work

done by the initial “Just as” phrase. Glotfelty states: “Just as feminist criticism examines

language and literature from a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an

awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism

2
Glotfelty, xix.
3
Slovic, “Ecocriticism”, 161.

2
takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies”. 4 The political position taken up by

ecocriticism, expressed here as “earth-centred”, is a narrowing of the definition of

environment to refer to the natural and non-human (rather than more generally spatial) and a

stated preference for (rather than simply interest in) the non-human over the human.

It is hardly surprising, then, to find ecocriticism actively eschewing humanistic

emphases in literary criticism, particularly structuralist and poststructuralist approaches,

because these read the world as primarily textual, constructed and therefore never “natural”. 5

Glen Love, for example, identifies a schism in literary criticism between what he calls “eco-

consciousness” and “ego-consciousness”, “nature-endorsers” and “nature-sceptics”. 6

According to Love, “the most harmful contemporary version of this ego-consciousness is the

extreme subjectivism of much postmodernism …. Such subjectivism intimates no reality, no

nature, beyond what we construct within our own minds”. 7 Yet, even when one considers that

Love’s is an extreme position, characterised by Lawrence Buell as “first-wave” ecocriticism,

it is worth noting that anti-theory or anti-constructivist impulses are also evident in more

moderate statements. 8 Buell expresses similar concerns about cultural constructivism by

consistently appealing to what he variously terms the existence of “environmental

referentiality” or “environmental facticity” in any given text. 9 Greg Garrard—like Buell,

more even-handed than Love—identifies “postmodern theory” as “mainly inimical to

ecocriticism”. 10

4
Glotfelty, xix.
5
Jacques Derrida’s “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” need hardly be recalled here; Of Grammatology, 158-59.
6
Love, 25 and 8.
7
Ibid., 25-26.
8
Lawrence Buell,, 17 and 18.
9
Ibid., 17 and 32.
10
Garrard, 14.

3
 Still, it is in such a willingness at least to consider the possible relationship between

theory and ecocriticism that the possibilities for rapprochement exist. 11 Garrard notes that the

“challenge for ecocritics is to keep one eye on the ways in which nature is in some ways

culturally constructed, and the other on the fact that nature really exists, both the object and,

albeit distantly, the origin of our discourse”. 12 Meanwhile, Buell envisions “a fruitful,

energizing collaboration” between “theory and ecology”, but one that “build[s] selectively on

poststructuralist theory”. 13 Such a rapprochement, however, would have explicitly to address

and alleviate the kind of theory-anxiety so passionately expressed by Love. It is therefore

worth returning to Love, and particularly to his reliance on writer Edward Abbey’s now

notorious challenge to constructivist attitudes to nature: “to refute the solipsist or

metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head. If

he ducks, he’s a liar”. 14 My response would be, first, to concede the existence of the material

world, expressed in that rock, inasmuch as it impacts against me. However, then, I would

point out that, once I have been hit on the head, the only way to tell of that rock is to

construct it, through language. Moreover, it is the telling, not the rock, that is at the nub of

ecocriticism. Here, I would go further than Buell’s “environmental referentiality” and

Garrard’s recourse to nature as “really exist[ing,] albeit distantly, [as] the origin of our

discourse”. 15 I would suggest that, because the literary critic’s business is to understand how

a given text might refer to the environment or how any given discourse has operated upon

nature, our business is to understand the way in which cultural constructivism works. If, as

Love states, “The great blind spot of postmodernism is its dismissal of nature, and especially

11
Indeed, for a notable recent exception, and an enlightening defence of theory in ecocritical terms, see Estok,
203-25. It is worth pointing out too that postmodernist or poststructuralist theorists have been, in turn, equally
hesitant to engage with ecocriticism. For exceptions in this direction, see Clark and Conley.
12
Garrard, 10.
13
Lawrence Buell, 10.
14
Love, 26.
15
Lawrence Buell, 10; Garrard, 10.

4
human nature”, then the great blind spot of ecocriticism is its dismissal of theory. 16 Or, as

Philips puts it, in his very stringent critique of the movement, “ecocriticism needs to be given

a strong dose of formalism”. 17

With this, then, we arrive at the concept of genre. As soon as I seek to tell of the

environment, of its rocks or otherwise, I rely on conventions with which to do this telling. In

order to gain an immediate understanding from my listener or reader, I am aware of, and

respond to, his or her existing expectations about rocks, and I depend on his or her prior

understandings of other rocks. That is, as soon as we communicate, we behave generically.

Yet, theories of genre are currently little employed in literary criticism, for several

reasons. First, such neglect is, paradoxically, a result of the axiomatic and ubiquitous nature

of genre, for literary scholars and critics often refer to genre, but very rarely draw on genre

theory. Much ecocriticism, for example, considers genre very particularly in treating of

obviously environmentally-centred genres such as nature writing and the pastoral; however,

in ecocriticism and elsewhere, there is often little engagement with the subtler—and

potentially productive—insights enabled by genre theory, even while genre itself is taken for

granted. Second, theories of genre have famously been denigrated as mindless exercises in

categorisation, and—by inference—as doing scant justice to the unpredictability and

ineffability at the heart of literary endeavour. Intriguingly, much of that denunciation has

originated with those critics we might call poststructuralist or postmodernist, which is a

crucial reminder that what is so often designated as theory by ecocritics is really a complex of

theoretical approaches, not all mutually compatible. Thus, Jacques Derrida declaims against

genre as inimical to the originality that marks genuine literature, “putting to death the very

16
Love, 26.
17
Phillips, 168.

5
thing that it engenders”, while Frederic Jameson describes modern-day genre as “a brand-

name system against which any authentic artistic expression must necessarily struggle”. 18

However, such a position against genre misreads the very concept, simplifying genre

as taxonomy and genre theory as a set of regulations put in place to police taxonomic

boundaries. In contrast, contemporary theories of genre recognise that it encompasses the

shared expectations between writers and readers that govern communication and enable

comprehension; they realise that, far from discouraging innovation, genre becomes the

grounds for any innovation. As John Frow states, “No speaking or writing or any other

symbolically organised action takes place other than through the shapings of generic

codes”. 19 For Frow, “genre theory is, or should be, about the ways in which different

structures of meaning and truth are produced in and by the various kinds of writing, talking,

painting, filming and acting by which the universe of discourse is structured”. 20

To frame literary genre in this way, as “a structured complex which has a strategic

character and interacts with the demands of an environment”, is to begin to understand its

usefulness to ecocriticism. 21 Genre theory, in dealing with the meta-textual practices of

authors as they write and readers as they read, and in exploring the links between these

practices, recognises that literary endeavour takes place in the world. Here, rhetorician Anis

Bawarshi’s “ecological view of genres” is pertinent. Bawarshi recognises that any given

genre functions in a way that is akin to an ecological system, for example, in its reliance on

the repetition and typification of forms, and its dynamic of shared and conventionalised

expectations. 22 Bawarshi further notes that, while genres “individually constitute their own

microenvironments—their own social situations, practices, and relations”, groups of genres

18
Derrida, “Law of Genre”, 203; Jameson, Political Unconscious, 107.
19
Frow, 10.
20
Ibid., 10.
21
Ibid., 14.
22
Bawarshi, 71.

6
“interact to constitute [a] macroenvironment”, a so-called “biosphere of discourse”. 23 In other

words, genre’s recurrent codes and expectations exert a familiarising, normalising force on

our perceptions of the environment around us, while any given genre resembles in itself an

environment as those codes and expectations interact with each other and are exchanged

amongst writers and readers; for Bawarshi, then, genres are both “habits” and “habitats”. 24

Barwarshi continues:

even in places ostensibly outside of rhetoric, places we call “wilderness” or “nature”,

we cannot escape the power of rhetoric in shaping how we socially define, recognize,

and experience our environments and ourselves in relation to them. Discourse and

reality are deeply, ecologically, interconnected, so much so that we create the

rhetorical conditions within which we perform and come to understand our

environments, our social activities, and our identities. 25

The critical—and, indeed, ecocritical—application of genre theory that I am advocating here,

then, is much more than a discussion of a text as belonging to a given literary genre, for

instance, pastoral, nature writing or even the urban novel. It requires an understanding of the

habitual dynamics between authors and readers, the shared generic habitats in which authors

and readers situate themselves, and the way in which such generic spaces interact with—that

is, reciprocally shape, structure, and determine—the environment at large. 26

One place in which to explore the possibilities of generically aware ecocriticism is in

the fictional discourse of climate change. The question of climate change, so much more

23
Ibid., 74.
24
Ibid., 71
25
Ibid., 72.
26
Lawrence Buell comes close to practising a generically aware ecocriticism in these terms, 34-44. Yet, while
Buell’s critique of six literary descriptions of trees demonstrates the diversity and complexity with which
literature performs a mimetic function, and pays attention to the broad differences, generic or otherwise,
between the texts, it does not take account of the generic “habitats” in which each text exists, that is, he never
reads diachronically as well as synchronically. He does not consider, for example, the generic game that
Wordsworth plays with picturesque poetry in “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”, or the
private/public negotiations that Thoreau must make in writing within the genre of the journal with Walden.

7
abstract than, say, rocks, and so ideologically charged, allows us greater scope for exploring

the process by which understandings of environment, and, in this case, of environmental

crisis, might be shaped by generic conventions and located within generic habitats. In

addition to Robinson’s trilogy, a number of prominent novels have recently depicted climate

change (or associated phenomena such as rising sea levels and global warming), including

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2005), Cormac

McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Liz Jensen’s The Rapture (2009) and Ian McEwan’s Solar

(2010). 27 As this far from exhaustive list suggests, imaginative narratives about climate

change occupy a wide range of genres. Yet, some notes toward the generic possibilities of

fictively representing climate change can be made here. The dramatic and emotional contours

of climate change have to do with the future, not the past or present, for, although climate

change may be happening now, it is what this changing climate will result in—its predicted

impacts—that are of concern. This leads, usually but not inexorably, to genres that have to do

with future worlds. It explains the reliance, noted by Ursula Heise, on “apocalyptic

narrative” 28. Indeed, one could plot cultural representations of climate change along a line of

imagined present to imagined future, for example, starting with the present day of Solar, to

the less definable temporality of The Road, and on to the much less recognisable world of

The Book of Dave.

One possible appeal in constructions of climate change, then, lies in the way in which

a far-away climate-changed world is imagined. Unsurprisingly, as with Atwood and Self,

some writers are compelled to draw on the strategies of one of the primary genres of futuristic

imagining: science fiction. As Lawrence Buell suggests, “No genre potentially matches up

27
Intriguingly, few literary scholars have risen to the challenge of discussing climate change; scholarly
contributions to the subject of literature and climate change include Clark, 45-68; Heise, 205-10; Kerridge, 65-
86; Middleton, 218-33; and Slovic, Going Away to Think, 118-33.
28
Heise, 206.

8
with a planetary level of thinking ‘environment’ better than science fiction does”. 29. When it

comes to representing a sense of place, science fiction is often, to use Buell’s phrase,

“ecology-lite”, but when it comes to encompassing a sense of planet, and particularly a global

environmental phenomenon such as climate change, the generic strategies of science fiction

are no doubt useful. 30 According to Darko Suvin’s magisterial analysis of the genre, science

fiction is “the literature of cognitive estrangement”, its world-building impulse expressed in

the creation of what Suvin terms a “novum”, that is, a world of “strange newness”. 31

On the face of it, then, it seems logical that the subject of global climate change would

appeal to a major science fiction writer such as Robinson. Robinson is, in science fiction

circles, a “figure who not only deserves but seems assured of a major reputation”. 32 This

reputation is built primarily on the immense critical and popular success of the Mars trilogy,

Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1995), and Blue Mars (1995), in which Robinson creates a

novum extraordinaire, detailing, on an epic scale, the human colonisation of Mars over

centuries. This colonisation is known as “terraforming”, a term that, since its invention by

science fiction writer Jack Williamson in 1942, has given its name to “a science that exists

only as a thought experiment, as the uncertain and arbitrary simulations designed to engineer

a biosphere, sufficient at least for plant life, on Mars”. 33

Nonetheless, as we shall see, in applying science fiction strategies to the depiction of

climate change, Robinson does not simply establish a future, climate-changed novum; indeed,

he compromises its status as a novum in generically challenging ways. It pays to read

Robinson’s texts as generically self-reflexive—for, from the outset, Robinson has been

“keenly aware of the complex intellectual issues he faces as a writer of sf”—and to

29
Lawrence Buell, 57.
30
Ibid., 57.
31
Suvin, 4; original emphasis.
32
Roberts, 320.
33
Markley, 357; see Stableford, 134, and Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change, 1, for the origins of the
term in Williamson.

9
complicate our understanding not just of science fiction but of Robinson’s particular science

fiction practice. 34 Such a generic awareness usefully reminds ecocritics that Robinson’s

fictive world relates not just mimetically to the world in which we live, but to the world-

building impulse of the genre as a whole and thus to the many science fiction worlds that

precede and influence Robinson’s.

Specifically, Robinson identifies himself as a utopian science fiction writer, in a way

that has significant implications for any reading of his representations of climate change. It is

worth understanding, then, the links between science fiction and the utopian, a relationship

much commented on by science fiction critics. For Suvin, the two are inextricably linked: the

utopian impulse is intrinsic to science fiction, which “has always been wedded to a hope of

finding in the unknown the ideal environment, tribe, state, intelligence, or other aspect of the

Supreme Good (or to a fear of and revulsion from its contrary)”. 35 In this analysis, it is worth

noting the difference between the utopian and the dystopian: the fundamental distinction lies

in the relative superiority or inferiority of the alternative world to the reader’s world. 36

However, nuances exist, as with Tom Moylan’s descriptions of “critical utopia” and “critical

dystopia”. These are characterised by their open endings: the former “reject utopia as

blueprint while preserving it as a dream” and the latter “not only critique the present system

but also begin to find ways to transform it”. 37 In short, these more sophisticated forms

recognise the possibility of perfectability while acknowledging the reality of a flawed world.

Thus, critical utopias and dystopias allow the reader to navigate between hope and despair,

whilst what one might term simple utopias and dystopias run the risk of either a bland

happiness or an unrelenting bleakness.

34
Prettyman, 183.
35
Suvin, 5.
36
Wegner, 80-81.
37
Moylan, Demand the Impossible, 10, and Scraps of the Untainted Sky, 190.

10
 In his overt identification with the utopian, Robinson shows a degree of generic nous,

not just because he breaks with late twentieth-century trends in science fiction towards

dystopia, 38 but because he re-defines the form in a way that builds upon the notion of the

critical utopia. Discussing the Mars trilogy, Robinson rejects accusations against “Utopia as

‘pie-in-the-sky’, impractical and totalitarian”, and instead insists, “Utopia has to be rescued

as a word, to mean ‘working towards a more egalitarian society, a global society’”. 39 He has

remarked, in writing the Science in the Capital trilogy, that:

I think of myself as a utopian novelist. … Utopia is a name for one course of history,

a progressive course in which things become more just and sustainable over the

generations. We’re not there now, but depending on what we do, and what our

descendants do, we could still be said to be living in a utopian history, as being on the

path. I prefer to work as if that were the case. And it seems to me the great work

continues. 40

Thus, for Robinson, goodness exists not as panoply, in a simple utopian sense, nor as

possibility, in a critical utopian sense, but as a work in progress. Jameson—Robinson’s

former doctoral supervisor and perhaps the most distinguished commentator of his work so

far—writes of the Mars trilogy that, even in its conclusion, the reader is aware that the

“achievement” of utopia on Mars “must constantly be renewed”, so much so that “utopia as a

form is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather simply the imperative to

imagine them”. 41 Robinson’s definition of utopia is, needless to say, profoundly ideological,

for in his depiction of utopia as a “working towards”, as a “progressive course”, he requires

of his characters not just the ability to imagine utopia but a political commitment to it. The

utopian terraforming of Mars does not simply involve a biological alteration of the planet; it

38
Moylan, “Look into the Dark”, 57.
39
Foote, 56.
40
Szeman and Whiteman, 185.
41
Jameson, “‘If I Find’”, 231.

11
provides a space in which human beings are in turn politically and ideologically transformed,

that is, “in which humans are areoformed—shaped by Mars—even as Mars is terraformed”. 42

Through centuries of conflict, consultation and, eventually, consensus, Martian society comes

to be shot through with what the Mars trilogy identifies as “eco-economics”, a kind of

scientifically-informed, ethically-minded, green socialism. 43

In turning to the Science in the Capital trilogy, then, it is worth not just examining the

extent to which it establishes a novum, in science fiction terms, but exploring, too, how this

novum bears out the progressive politics that Robinson defines as central to his notion of

utopia. First, a brief synopsis is necessary. Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below

(2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007) acquired the informal label of the Science in the

Capital trilogy from the author’s working title for the first novel in the sequence. 44 As with

the Mars trilogy, the three novels are ideally discussed together, as they form not so much a

trilogy but a single text in the style of a Victorian triple-decker, as Robinson has himself

indicated. 45 The Science in the Capital novels depict a scenario that Robinson calls “abrupt

climate change”, after a 2002 report to the National Research Council that reconceptualised

climate change as scientifically possible within three to five years. 46 Unfolding climatic

catastrophe is told from the perspective of a group of scientists and policy advisors in

Washington, DC: biologist Frank Vanderwahl; Diane Chang, his boss at the National Science

Foundation (NSF); his colleague Anna Quibler; and Anna’s husband, Charlie, environmental

advisor to the ecologically-minded Senator Phil Chase. In the course of events, Washington,

DC, experiences extreme floods and record-breaking winters, with this microcosm

42
Frederick Buell, 279.
43
Robinson, Red Mars, 298. For the radical politics of the Mars trilogy, see Burling, 75-96; Markley, 355-82;
Otto, 118-35; and Swidorski, 43-56. However, see Gersdorf, 40, for concerns that the trilogy’s reliance on “the
master narrative of US history” is essentially conservative.
44
Robinson changed the names—his second and third novels were entitled “The Capital in Science” and
“Global Cooling”—when his publisher insisted on more “novelistic” titles; Gunn, 4 April 2007.
45
Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change, 16; Seed, 76.
46
Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change, 6, citing Committee on Abrupt Climate Change.

12
dramatically emblematic of global chaos, climatic and otherwise: “they were entangled in a

moment of history when climate change, the destruction of the natural world, and widespread

human misery were combining in a toxic and combustible mix” (Fifty, 4). Yet, the narrative’s

tone and dénouement are hopeful and happy: the scientists’ lives acquire a spiritual depth

thanks to their friendship with a group of political exiles from the fictional Buddhist nation of

Khembali; lonely misfit Frank finds true—if unlikely—love with a government intelligence

agent enmeshed in rogue secret service operations; and romance blossoms between Phil

Chase and Diane Chang, who end the narrative as, respectively, President and Presidential

Science Advisor. This marriage provides the moral for the trilogy, that only science and

politics in concord will save the day; it is such concord that enables the narrative’s large-scale

scientific interventions, which ultimately mitigate and stabilise the many climate change

disasters.

Already, this summary of the trilogy’s large-scale narrative, character ensemble, and

interweaving plots suggests a generic mixing (espionage thriller or political romance?) that is

provocative and therefore deliberate. Gib Prettyman’s analysis of the trilogy’s “generic

experimentation” takes its cue, in part, from Robinson’s stated penchant for inserting generic

“trap-doors” into his novels. 47 Further, Prettyman reminds us that such experimentation

recognises genres to be “forms of living thought”, their dynamic nature recalling biological

and ecological processes. 48 Yet, any reading of the novels’ generic blueprint also requires an

awareness both of the relevance of utopian science fiction to their structure and of Robinson’s

particular generic modus operandi in this regard, previously established by the Mars trilogy.

It is immediately tempting, but problematic, to read the setting of the Science in the

Capital trilogy in terms of the novum of Mars of the earlier novels. This is not least because

47
Prettyman, 192, citing Kleffel.
48
Ibid, 191.

13
of Robinson’s comments on the extent to which the triumph of eco-economic terraforming on

Mars is a metaphor for successful ecological management on Earth:

It will be easier to live sustainably on Earth than to terraform Mars, but my Mars

novels were written with the idea that they are metaphors describing what we need to

do here, too, and that it’s a matter of attitudes and intentions and individual actions, as

well as global alteration technologies. 49

Indeed, for Robinson, such an interpretation could not have been lost on his readers:

as I wrote my Mars novels it was always present in my mind that what I was

describing as happening on Mars—the conscious and successful management of an

entire planet’s biosphere—might serve as a model for what we will have to do on

Earth too.… I believe part of their popularity is due to this fairly obvious analogy to

our current situation. 50

It is as though, in response to Frederick Buell’s disappointment that the Mars trilogy’s extra-

terrestrial setting is “ultimately so virtual”, and that an “off-world utopia does not provide a

model for earthly ecological reconstruction”, Robinson has decided to literalise his analogy,

and, as it were, ground his terraforming metaphor back on Earth. 51 One could say that

Robinson, long keenly interested in environmental issues, had already written a trilogy on

(Martian) climate change and now wanted to write about it on Earth. Yet, at such an easy

correlation of the novum of Mars with that of Science in the Capital, the reader must give

pause. Robinson may describe the later trilogy as just “more … science fiction”, but,

crucially, he qualifies this. He defines the novels as “day-after-tomorrow novels, a subgenre

of science fiction sometimes called near-future science fiction”. 52 That is, Robinson engages

in world-building in ways that are distinctly different from his construction of the novum of

49
Szeman and Whiteman, 183.
50
Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change, 2.
51
Frederick Buell, 279.
52
Szeman and Whiteman, 181; see also Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change, 5.

14
Mars. His attempt at bringing climate change down to earth (in a manner of speaking) has led

him to utilise the near future, rather than a distant one, and a familiar setting, not an estranged

one. Indeed, Robinson describes his discovery of the phenomenon of abrupt climate change

as the trigger for being able effectively to portray Earthly climate change at all, precisely

because it brings the crisis into the imaginative compass of his readers, both temporally and

spatially:

As a novelist, it’s obvious: you know, if something happens in three years, rather

than five hundred years, you’re better off in trying to figure out a story of how human

beings are impacted and you can just frame the story better. And I’ve been interested

in global warming for a long time, but I hadn’t figured out a story to tell until I heard

about abrupt climate change. 53

And, writing of his attempt to discuss climate change in the novel, Antarctica (1997), which

appeared between the two trilogies, Robinson complains:

in the end, Antarctica is almost as remote from most people’s consciousness as Mars.

Also, sticking with the best scientific understanding of the situation at that time, I

suggested there that although the long-term situation could be catastrophic in the

extreme, it was only happening “fast” in geological time. In individual human time,

which also means ordinary novelistic time, it would almost certainly happen so slowly

that it was hard to imagine or depict what it would mean. 54

In other words, the near-future setting of the Science in the Capital novels enables the

imaginative construction of climate change in a way that is psychologically and—one is

compelled to add—politically and ideologically relevant.

Yet, this raises the question of whether Robinson’s near-future novum is a novum at

all. Certainly, it is on such grounds that Roger Luckhurst discounts the novels as utopian and

53
Gunn, 10 Jan 2006.
54
Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change, 5.

15
even as science fiction, preferring to describe them as belonging to the tradition of realism:

“Science in the Capital not only abandons the scale and alterity ambition [of the Mars

trilogy], but gives us a recognizable contemporary America without any futuristic

enhancements or extrapolated intensifications”. 55 Even though the trilogy’s setting is never

accurately dated—for, as Robinson asserts, “it is crucial never to have a date in a day-after-

tomorrow novel”—Luckhurst reminds us that the action takes place “inside the horizon of

current scientific research”. 56 In Luckhurst’s telling designation of the texts as realist rather

than science fiction, it is possible to read Robinson’s near-future scenario as a significant

gamble in generic terms. For in employing a near-future setting, the trilogy effectively

eschews one of the most basic sources of imaginative appeal possessed by the genre of

science fiction. As Moylan memorably evokes it, science fiction:

works by way of a readerly delight in the thoughtful and thought-provoking activity

of imagining the elsewhere of a given text, of filling in, co-creating, the imagined …

paradigm of a society that does not exist but nevertheless supplies a cognitive map of

what does exist. Such world-building is both the deepest pleasure of reading sf and

the source of its most powerfully subversive potential. 57

In other words, Robinson undercuts a fundamental clause of the generic contract between the

science fiction text and its reader.

Yet, Robinson is subverting science fiction, rather than rejecting it wholesale. In

noting this, I am of course noting too that his representation of climate change—or, more

accurately, of a climate-changed world—is something more than the simple mimesis or

referentiality of nature of the kind often valorised in eco-criticism; it is a sophisticated

revision of generic habit and habitat, a reimagining of the world-building impulse that

characterises science fiction. Robinson’s generic subversion involves world-building of a

55
Luckhurst, 171.
56
Szeman and Whiteman, 181; Luckhurst 171.
57
Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky, 5.

16
sort, but the world that he builds in this trilogy is not of the same order as that of the previous

trilogy—that is, it is not a novum. Certainly, he brings to the Science in the Capital novels the

same techniques of world-building he had previously practised. In the Mars novels, it is

possible to see that Robinson’s world-building occurs on both a textual and a meta-textual

level; that is, by constructing a fictitious world in which terraforming takes place, Robinson

both performs and dramatises the act of world-making. Thus, further, one could say that “the

act of reading becomes a figurative terraforming”. 58 This second-level terraforming is

achieved with the vivid descriptive method that Frederick Buell describes as “lovingly

imagined, thickly detailed, scientific-aesthetic descriptions and evocations of the Martian

landscape”. 59

Similarly, in the Science in the Capital novels, Robinson reproduces “in meticulous

detail the complex institutional and political processes that frame the pursuit of scientific

knowledge”. 60 Not only are the internal workings of the NSF conspicuously laid bare, but, for

example, even the small San Diego bioinformatics company, Torrey Pines Generique, is

exhaustively described in an early chapter in the first novel, although it plays a relatively

minor role in the trilogy’s dramatic events. This “meticulous detail” is followed through in

other respects, with events unfolding in a kind of real-time reportage. For one thing,

conversations sometimes occur as pure dialogue over three or four pages, lacking even such

expected narrative interpolations as “he said” or “she said”. Examples include Charlie’s

telephone conversation with Anna as they assess the enormity of the flood (Forty, 350-2);

Rudra Cakrin’s explanations of Khembali Buddhism to Frank (Fifty, 400-3); and Frank’s

inflight telephone exchange with Wade Norton in Antarctica (Sixty, 356-9). Crucially, this

paring down of reported speech is most obvious in a pivotal exchange between Phil and

Charlie in the third novel, when, in seven pages presented in dramatic format, replete with
58
Gersdorf, 37.
59
Frederick Buell, 278.
60
Heise, 207.

17
parenthetical stage directions, the President sets out his vision of eco-economics for the

nation (Sixty, 347-53). Moreover, physical setting, as well as dialogue, is vividly portrayed,

the result a Joycean psychogeography of the streets of the capital. Frank’s first encounter

with Caroline, for example, evokes a sense of real-time travel, first on the subway, “out to the

prosperous parts of Northwest and Chevy Chase and Bethesda and Rockville and

Gaithersburg” (Forty, 246), and, next, through the metro station: “Through the turnstiles,

then, and along the tunnel towards the big escalator up and out. Then to his surprise she

turned left, into the nook that held the station’s elevators” (Forty, 247). Then, after their

unexpected kiss in the elevator, Frank’s pursuit of Caroline continues as faithful geographical

reconstruction at street level:

They were on the sidewalk flanking Wisconsin Avenue, next to the elevator box and

the old post office. … In front of these witnesses nothing came to him, and she turned

and walked south on Wisconsin … he looked up to see that down the street she was

turning right, onto one of the smaller streets west of Wisconsin.… By now he was on

Woodson, running left and right, looking down all the little side streets and into shop

windows, feeling more and more desperate. She wasn’t anywhere to be seen. He had

lost her. (Forty, 254-6)

Indeed, for any native of Washington, DC, the very spaces and streets of Robinson’s novels

are easily recreated in the mind’s eye. 61 But what, one must ask, is the effect of Robinson’s

insistent world-building in both topographical and institutional terms? If one brings to the

text any science fiction expectations, then, regrettably, apart from the surely limited

enjoyment of recognising scientific realpolitik or of re-experiencing DC à la Bloomsday, the

reader is hardly a “traveller in a foreign culture”, as Moylan describes the typical science

fiction reading experience. Instead, one suspects that the kind of remark made by Heise is the

61
I am indebted to Adam Trexler for this insight.

18
more likely reader response: “such analyses of scientific and political institutions tend to

make for rather dry reading”. 62

Hence, the reader of the trilogy must look elsewhere for imaginative appeal. It is

worth complicating the idea of the novum by recalling Robinson’s generic renegotiation of

science fiction as utopian science fiction, and, indeed, his redefinition of the utopian as a

progressive cause. It then becomes apparent that Robinson’s exhaustive world-building takes

place not simply in order to create a world in meta-textual terms but to convey an impression

of the immense ideological effort that is needed to create that world within the text. And thus

it is not just detail of description but scale of plot that matters. Robinson has said of this

trilogy that “Some stories just need lots of pages to tell right”. 63 The sheer length of the text

as triple-decker (some 1,500 pages), the precision of its institutional and geographical

settings, and the real-time nature of its dialogue, combine actively to involve the reader in the

achievement of the utopian dream. Carol Franko astutely analyses the Mars trilogy as an

exercise in Bakhtinian dialogism, emphasising how the novels “dialogise the concept and

hope of Utopia”. 64 Similarly, the reader of the Science in the Capital trilogy experiences

Utopia in and as progress: one is made aware of character psychology through dialogue, in a

manner that resembles the slow process of getting to know people in the so-called “real”

world; one walks and travels with these characters through the cityscape or landscape; and

one is embedded, like them and with them, in the various milieux in which they work and

live. All this occurs in order to invite and involve the reader. Robinson’s utopia is thus both

progressive and participatory.

Moreover, such an approach to utopia requires a distinctive narrative pattern. Instead

of setting up a structure that locates a protagonist with or against a utopian or dystopian

setting, the trilogy presents us with no obvious hero. Although it is possible to identify Frank
62
Heise, 207.
63
Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change, 16.
64
Franko, 61.

19
as the central character, as do Luckhurst and Prettyman, it is significant that Frank’s

experiences do not come to the fore until the second novel, and that the first novel opens with

Anna and expends much narrative energy on the Quiblers. 65 Indeed, another, perhaps more

obvious candidate for the role of hero is “Unconventional, unpredictable, devil-may-care”

(Sixty, 49; original emphasis) Phil Chase, the Vietnam vet turned self-styled World’s Senator

turned President; yet, even this mercurial character enjoys only a brief moment of heroic

focalisation, when he takes office at the start of the third novel. It would seem, then, that the

inclusive nature of Robinson’s utopian vision requires a corporate or, more accurately,

communal hero. Just as one commentator of the Mars trilogy considers Mars to be the hero of

those novels, Robinson maintains that the Science in the Capital trilogy presents us with the

NSF, or indeed, science itself as hero. 66 This shift of focus from planet to ideology is

significant. If, in the Mars trilogy, it matters both what the novum is and how it comes to be,

in the Science in the Capital trilogy, how seems to matter more than what. In Robinson’s

climate-changed world, the spotlight is on the ideological work of those who positively

terraform it out of the negative terraforming it has undergone over the twentieth century. 67

The inclusive, progressive utopia of the Science in the Capital novels represents one

way of narrating the complex topic of climate change. To consider the efforts of other writers

who have approached the topic is to realise that numerous other generic paths present

themselves, depending on the particular negotiations that take place between writer and

reader, not to mention critic, and that arise between the text and others in a writer’s œuvre or

generic purview. Any detailed analysis of such texts and such differences is beyond the scope

of this paper, but even a cursory acknowledgement of their existence underlines the

importance of a generically-inflected reading of literary constructions of environmental crisis

65
Luckhurst 174 and Prettyman 187.
66
Markley, 368; Gunn, 10 Jan 2006; Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change, 16-17.
67
Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change, 1-2.

20
(or of the environment, in general). An awareness of the complex dynamics that constitute the

generic space surrounding the text takes us a long way to determining the space depicted

within that text. Very often, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate the success with which a text

engenders an awareness of the environment. As Buell remarks, or perhaps concedes, this

success is usually decided by the yardstick of mimesis, that is, how well a text replicates the

world. 68 Yet, for various reasons, which Buell makes abundantly clear, mimetic ability or

“environmental referentiality” is not always the most relevant test of a text’s success, nor is it

necessarily the business of literary criticism to pass judgement on whether such success has

been achieved. I would suggest that what is relevant to literary criticism is an understanding

of how a text makes the attempt at success, and what is relevant to ecocriticism is how a text

makes this attempt in terms of representing the environment. It is genre theory that enables us

to locate that attempt.

This research was enabled by the European Social Fund. I would like to thank Adam Trexler

for his helpful comments.

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