The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations

The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations 5.1.2020
Kim Stanley Robinson
Read more in The New Yorker

If historical periods have their own “structure of feeling,” then ours has been lagging reality but seems suddenly to be changing with the pandemic. Our “bullshit” economic system of 40 years has ignored reality, but we are now seeing that we can act when we have to, “one of the few reassuring” signs in this century. “If the project of civilization…science, economics, politics, all of it…were to bring all eight billion of us into a long-term balance with Earth’s biosphere, we could do it. A bell is “ringing to start a race. Off we go—into a new time.”

One of the greatest living science fiction writers, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 19 novels and many short stories have won numerous awards. Most of his books have an ecological perspective. The Mars Trilogy is among his best known and The Ministry of the Future is due out this fall.