In his Mars novels, Robinson uses the Red Planet as a historical tabula rasa, a template for creating a saner, more sustainable, and more just human society. He is also, for my money, one of the most important political writers working in America today. Kim Stanley Robinson is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers collectively, the three novels of his “Mars” trilogy-“Red Mars,” “Green Mars,” and “Blue Mars”-have won all the major science-fiction and fantasy awards. The meta-premise of all science fiction is that nothing can be taken for granted. It is also, I’d argue, an inherently liberal genre (its many conservative practitioners notwithstanding), in that it sees the status quo as contingent, a historical accident, whereas conservatism holds it to be inevitable, natural, and therefore just. And How Things Should Be is the central question and struggle of politics. Science fiction is an inherently political genre, in that any future or alternate history it imagines is a wish about How Things Should Be (even if it’s reflected darkly in a warning about how they might turn out). If they were looking for any indication that we were even dimly aware of the burgeoning global conflict between democracy and capitalism, or of the abyssal catastrophe our civilization was just beginning to spill over the brink of, they might need to turn to books that have that embarrassing little Saturn-and-spaceship sticker on the spine. If historians or critics fifty years from now were to read most of our contemporary literary fiction, they might well infer that our main societal problems were issues with our parents, bad relationships, and death. ^ 1^ When we call literary writers “political” today, we’re usually talking about identity politics. It’s hard to think of any “serious” literary writers in the United States under the age of fifty who engage the big political issues of our time as directly as Boomer authors like Paul Auster (“Leviathan”), Thomas Pynchon (“Vineland”), or Robert Stone (“A Flag for Sunrise”), let alone in the way that muckraker novelists like Upton Sinclair used to. It’s a monoculture, taken for granted, like monogamy, or monotheism, or having one sun.

Sometime in the past couple of generations, capitalism’s victory over our hearts and minds seems to have become complete, in that hardly anyone even notices it anymore.

Mars trilogy