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Kim Stanley RobinsonWe all have one: an actor, a band, a novelist, a poet, a painter, someone who makes art in one form or another that appeals to us on such a personal level that it's like they are making the art we would make if we were just a little bit more clever, more creative, more determined, more like our ideal self than we are. Kim Stanley Robinson is that novelist for me.
The main reason I want to promote Stan's books (I take the liberty of calling him Stan because I've actually spoken to him briefly on two occasions: once at Mark Ziesing's old store in Willimantic, CT ca. 1989 & once at a ReaderCon) goes back to the 'only connect' at the beginning of Howard's End. I can't help but think there's a chance that if more people read The Gold Coast or Red Mars or Antarctica we'd have a shared context in which, if the stories move others anything like the way they did me, we'd all be able to connect a little better and perhaps find a way to bring our society a little closer to the communitarian vision of Pacific Edge. Sounds cornball, I know, the thing is though, Stan writes about the human longing to connect with other people and the world around us with such Dalai Lama-esque gentle wisdom that you close the last page of one of his books feeling like you've come out of a deep meditation where some part of the mysteries of the universe were clearly perceptible and making a better society just might be possible after all. Links:
KSR page by c-dog 06.10.2001 |
I want to make a strong, tightly reasoned, irrefutable argument for why you should be reading him, for why you should be excited at the thought of picking up one of his books. Hopefully, as I update and revise this page, you'll eventually find such an argument here. Until then, you've got a mushbrained plea to just trust me; put aside your prejudice against writers who've been labelled with a genre tag, if that's what's been holding you back, and give Robinson a chance.