Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable

The late William J. Burling (1949–2009) was an English professor at Missouri State University. He put in twenty years of 17th and 18th century studies, publishing four books and more than 50 articles. Recent essays have appeared in Utopian Studies and Kronoscope.

Table of Contents



Preface and Acknowledgments     

Introduction     



PART I. UTOPIA AND ALTERNATIVE HISTORY

1. Witness to Hard Times: Robinson’s Other Californias

(THOMAS P. MOYLAN)     

2. “If I Find One Good City, I Will Spare the Man”: Realism and Utopia in the Mars Trilogy

(FREDRIC JAMESON)     

3. Falling into History: Imagined Wests in the “Three Californias” and Mars Trilogy

(CARL ABBOTT)     

4. Remaking History: The Short Fiction

(JOHN KESSEL)     

5. The Martians: A Habitable Fabric of Possibilities

(NICK GEVERS)     

6. Learning to Live in History: Alternate Historicities and the 1990s in The Years of Rice and Salt

(PHILLIP E. WEGNER)     



PART II. THEORY AND POLITICS

7. The Density of Utopian Destiny in Red Mars

(CAROL FRANKO)     

8. Falling into Theory: Simulation, Terraformation, and Eco-Economics in the Mars Trilogy

(ROBERT MARKLEY)     

9. Chromodynamics: Science and Colonialism in the Mars Trilogy

(ELIZABETH LEANE)     

10. The Theoretical Foundation of Utopian Radical Democracy in Blue Mars

(WILLIAM J. BURLING)     

11. The Politics of the Network: The Science in the Capital Trilogy

(ROGER LUCKHURST)     

12. Living Thought: Genes, Genres and Utopia in the Science in the Capital Trilogy

(GIB PRETTYMAN)     

13. “Structuralist Alchemy” in Red Mars

(WILLIAM J. WHITE)     



PART III. ECOLOGY AND NATURE

14. Ecological Newspeak

(ALAN R. SLOTKIN)     

15. Murray Bookchin on Mars! The Production of Nature in the Mars Trilogy

(SHAUN HUSTON)     

16. The Mars Trilogy and the Leopoldian Land Ethic

(ERIC OTTO)     

17. Dead Penguins in Immigrant Pilchard Scandal: Telling Stories About “the Environment” in Antarctica

(SHERRYL VINT and MARK BOULD)     



PART IV. INTERVIEW AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

18. A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson

(IRVING F. “BUD” FOOTE)     

19. A Select Secondary Bibliography

(WILLIAM J. BURLING)     



About the Contributors     

Index