Kim Stanley Robinson: Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson (1952- ) began writing SF stories in the 1970s, publishing about ten stories before gaining his Ph.D. in English in 1982. His dissertation was later published as The Novels of Philip K. Dick (1984). He became a famous SF writer in 1984 upon the publication of his first novel, The Wild Shore, an excellent post-catastrophe SF novel in the Steinbeckian tradition of George R. Stewart's Earth Abides. It had the bad luck to be published in the same year as William Gibson's Neuromancer, to which it came in second for major awards. Worse, it allowed Robinson to become a symbol of the opposition for the adherents of the Movement, Cyberpunkcs official name in the mid-80s. (Readers in search of more are referred to Michael Swanwick's essay, "A Users Guide to the Postmoderns.") He did win some major awards, and was nominated for more. But the discourse surrounding Robinson's major works of that decade -- the Orange Country trilogy: The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast (1988), and Pacific Edge (1990), and the novels Icehenge, Memory of Whiteness, and Escape from Katmandu (1989) -- was contoured by literary politics.

Then in the 1990s Robinson mined his 1985 novella "Green Mars" for what became his Mars trilogy -- Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1994), Blue Mars (1996), all award winners and nominees -- a standalone novel, Antarctica (1997), and a collection, The Martians (1999). The Mars trilogy is generally recognized as one of the SF masterworks of the decade and confirmed him in the front ranks of contemporary SF writers. The trilogy also moved him very publicly into hard SF, especially due to the wonderfully detailed settings, and in the portrayal of scientists as characters doing the daily work of science. He said in a Locus interview: "Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. The whole process of science is wildly under-represented in science fiction because it's not easy to write about. There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It's slow, tedious, inconclusive, it's hard to tell good guys from bad guys -- it's everything that a normal hour of Star Trek is not." His interest in themes of frontier life and of colonization marks him politically as a North American. But Robinson also injects large doses of politics and political discussion, left wing, communitarian, and socialist Utopian ideas into the Mars novels, an unusual spin for hard SF.

Robinson's Mars books were among the first in what became, as one reviewer put it, the "millennial wave of Mars exploration tales." In a time when it was fashionable to explore notions of virtuality, Robinson remained steadfastly loyal to actuality as the true origin of stories. Rather than exploring the multi-layered worlds of virtual reality and uploaded minds, he took on the task of imagining what it would be like if people colonized Mars, and how they would get along there. Not the SF trope Mars, the easily habitable planet, in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series, Stanley G. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey (1934), Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles (1950), or for that matter, Philip K. Dick's Martian Timeslip (1964), but the real place as described by NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration. While to some extent, his approach to Mars comes out of Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity (1953), his approach is not so much world-building on the planetary scale, as a faith in powerful settings to tell powerful stories.

This story, from The Martians, of how baseball is played on Mars, is hard SF with a light touch. It explores the physics of baseball, in the persona of a sports fan trying to adapt the sport to a radically changed environment.