We’re on a planet here!

HARD ON THE HEELS of his latest science fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future — a blistering near-future vision of climate change — Kim Stanley Robinson has just published The High Sierra: A Love Story. The book is a captivating memoir laced with reflections on history, literature, geology, ecology, politics and psychogeography, all strung on the narrative thread of the author’s lifelong enchantment with rambling and scrambling in a wilderness without trails on a precarious planet spinning in space.

How has the High Sierra influenced your science fiction?

I think it’s been formative, in a really deep sense. I was surprised how many of my texts have some analogue to the High Sierra. Right from the start, I can see when Hjalmar Nederland is wandering around Mars in , it was a Sierra wander. And that kept happening. It was true in my Mars Trilogy. To terraform Mars is, when Genly Ai and Estraven have to make a long trek across the glacier, that’s a brilliant piece of writing, and it has always inspired me.