Science + Fiction: Kim Stanley Robinson in Conversation with Janna Levin
Sci-fi legend Kim Stanley Robinson and astrophysicist Janna Levin discuss Mars, climate futures, and the audacity required to imagine keeping a planet alive.
Why we picked this
Robinson spent decades imagining Mars in granular physical and political detail — and Levin has spent her career doing the physics that underlies it. The conversation between them is about what imagination and science owe each other.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is one of the few works of fiction that takes the actual science of planetary engineering seriously — not as backdrop, but as the central drama. The question of how you make a dead world breathable, and what that does to the humans who attempt it, turns out to be inseparable from the political and ethical questions of who gets to make those choices and who bears the consequences. It is also, unmistakably, a parable about Earth.
Robinson is joined by Janna Levin, Pioneer Works’ Director of Sciences and a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College, for a career-spanning conversation that moves between the Mars trilogy, The Ministry for the Future, and the question of what science fiction can do that science alone cannot: rehearse futures before they arrive, and build the moral imagination to navigate them. Stargazing with the Amateur Astronomers’ Association follows the indoor conversation.
Pioneer Works’ Science + Fiction series brings together working scientists and writers who traffic in speculation, on the premise that the boundary between the two is more porous than it looks. This installment makes that case with unusual force — Robinson and Levin have both spent careers at the edge of what is currently known, and their exchange promises to be one of the rare conversations where literature and physics illuminate each other in both directions.