Abstract
Kim Stanley Robinson has emerged as one of the most environmentally concerned and political savvy science fiction writers among his contemporaries. His ecological concerns began early and reached maturity in his Mars trilogy, which won rave reviews and science fiction honorifics, as each was successively published. Between 2004 and 2007, his latest trilogy—the “Science in the Capital” series—was released, focusing upon the near-term dangers of global warming and the tendencies toward a kind of surveillance society in the United States spawned by the continuing war on terror. This chapter seeks to spotlight the good, the bad, and the tenuous in the trilogy by exposing Robinson’s Enlightenment assumptions about modern science and the scientific community, his fascination with fast-times scenarios, his license to Science and scientists to utilize terra/terror-forming techniques on Earth’s ecosystem, and his wilderness worship and preference for Paleolithic lifestyles. In the process, it juxtaposes trends in the techno-corporate world affirming precisely the Big Science solutions advanced by Robinson in his trilogy against more difficult, but more promising alternatives emerging from post-Enlightenment responses to global warming as a cultural and political economic crisis emanating from voices from grassroots organizations and postmodern ecological thinkers. The paper’s reads Robinson’s work against its Enlightenment grain to sketch some essential ingredients of a post-Enlightenment approach to addressing the global warming phenomenon.
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Yanarella, E.J., Rice, C. (2011). Global Warming and the Specter of Geoengineering: Ecological Apocalypse, Modernist Hubris, and Scientific-Technological Salvation in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Global Warming Trilogy. In: Brunn, S. (eds) Engineering Earth. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_126
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4_126
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