“We’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write.” Kim Stanley Robinson
Fire by Alexis Rockman from a new show of his paintings.
He applies paint with abandon, using tools such as turkey basters, eye droppers, toothbrushes, and sponges. He depicts landslides, waterspouts, hurricanes, crumbling Arctic ice, and other weather-related phenomena. The paintings look like Abstract Expressionist works, save that along the edges he applies his talent for realist rendering, adding oil derricks, swimming pools, and mountain shacks, tiny in scale alongside the daunting forces of nature.
“This is the aftermath of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ ” Rockman says, looking around the gallery at the Rose. “It’s a response to the seven years I worked on that piece. I was so sick of painting a very specific building. . . . I wanted to get the same kind of content, but not as much information.”
That content has a pointed political agenda about global warming, a longtime subject for Rockman.
“I’m very worried,” he says. “My feelings have changed over the last 10 years. I’m cautiously hopeful about culture shifting to take it seriously. I’m skeptical that corporate America will do the right thing.”
Weather – visually operatic, so affected by climate change – was the perfect next step. “I want to paint about alchemy and intuition, which you can’t do when you’re painting architecture,” he says.
From The Boston Globe
Bestselling, award-winning, author Kim Stanley Robinson continues his groundbreaking trilogy of eco-thrillers-and propels us deeper into the awesome whirlwind of climatic change. Set in our nation’s capital, here is a chillingly realistic tale of people caught in the collision of science, technology, and the consequences of global warming-which could trigger another phenomenon: abrupt climate change, resulting in temperatures… When the storm got bad, scientist Frank Vanderwal was at work, formalizing his return to the National Science Foundation for another year. He’d left the building just in time to help sandbag at Arlington Cemetery. Now that the torrent was over, large chunks of San Diego had eroded into the sea, and D.C. was underwater. Shallow lakes occupied the most famous parts of the city. Reagan Airport was awash and the Potomac had spilled beyond its banks. Rescue boats dotted the saturated cityscape. Everything Frank and his colleagues in the halls of science and politics feared had culminated in this massive disaster. And now the world looked to them to fix it. Whatever Frank can do, now that he is homeless, he’ll have to do from his car. He’s not averse to sleeping outdoors. Years of research have made him hyperaware of his status as just another primate. That plus his encounter with a Tibetan Buddhist has left him resolved to live a more authentic life. Hopefully, this will prepare him for whatever is to come…. For even as D.C. bails out from the flood, a more extreme climate change looms. With the melting of the polar ice caps shutting down the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, another Ice Age could be imminent. The last time it happened, eleventhousand years ago, it took just three years to start. Once again Kim Stanley Robinson uses his remarkable vision, trademark wry wit, and extraordinary insight into the complexity between man and nature to take us to the brink of disaster-and slightly beyond.
Synopsis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Fifty Degrees Below, from Google Books
BLDGBLOG: I’m interested in the possibility that literary genres might have to be redefined in light of climate change. In other words, a novel where two feet of snow falls on Los Angeles, or sand dunes creep through the suburbs of Rome, would be considered a work of science fiction, even surrealism, today; but that same book, in fifty years’ time, could very well be a work of climate realism, so to speak. So if climate change is making the world surreal, then what it means to write a “realistic” novel will have to change. As a science fiction novelist, does that affect how you approach your work?Kim Stanley
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I’ve been saying this for a number of years: that now we’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write. A lot of what we’re experiencing now is unsurprising because we’ve been prepped for it by science fiction. But I don’t think surrealism is the right way to put it. Surrealism is so often a matter of dreamscapes, of things becoming more than real – and, as a result, more sublime. You think, maybe, of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and the way that he sees these giant catastrophes as a release from our current social set-up: catastrophe and disaster are aestheticized and looked at as a miraculous salvation from our present reality. But it wouldn’t really be like that.
I started writing about Earth’s climate change in the Mars books. I needed something to happen on Earth that was shocking enough to allow a kind of historical gap in which my Martians could realistically establish independence. I had already been working with Antarctic scientists who were talking about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and how unstable it might be – so I used that, and in Blue Mars I showed a flooded London. But after you get past the initial dislocations and disasters, what you’ve got is another landscape to be inhabited – another situation that would have its own architecture, its own problems, and its own solutions.
To a certain extent, later, in my climate change books, I was following in that mold with the flood of Washington DC. I wrote that scene before Katrina. After Katrina hit, my flood didn’t look the same. I think it has to be acknowledged that the use of catastrophe as a literary device is not actually adequate to talk about something which, in the real world, is often so much worse – and which comes down to a great deal of human suffering.
