Mr. Robinson,

I have read so many of your books, but never delved deeper into your views and life. I just wanted to write quickly and say how your conversation with Ezra seemed to speak so many truths to me and my lived experiences.

From your experiences with psychedelics, love of ultralight backpacking in the High Sierras to allow you to immerse in and connect with the mountains, to your insightful views on economics, climate change, and the human interactions with the world I left the conversation with a deep respect for your thoughtfulness, insight, and character.

I will be reading more of your books, learning more about the world in general, and sharing your insights with my misfit tribe of people I've luckily surrounded myself with.

Hope you have spent time in the Emigrant Wilderness, I'm in Twain Harte, CA for a much-needed summer respite from coastal California.

Thank you for your impact on me, and the world,

Doug  

What still sounded like dreams of the future in the novel "ministry for the future" could actually be the gamechanger for climate policy and be initiated initially within Europe through the climate currency ECO (Earth Carbon Obligation).

We are Jens and Angela Hanson, developers of the Alternative Climate Concept which foresees the introduction of a resource currency ECO, initially within Europe.

It provieds a holistic accounting system for a socially just CO2 pricing, which we bring in as an alternative to CO2 tax and EU-ETS. By limiting, rationing and personalizing greenhouse gas emissions, a social-ecological transformation can take place that is holistic, fair and liberal. The ECO should and must be a major aspect of the public and political debate on stemming the impacts of climate change.

Raising prices, such as the recent carbon tax on consumer goods, will not at once result in drastically lowering emissions. We need a more dependable and – most importantly – an inherently socially fair pricing model that takes our planet’s limitations into account.

The only solution is to make our consumer products greener and more climate friendly instead of relying on voluntary individual renunciation or small - scale savings measures. This is already technically possible. However, it has failed so far due to economic efficiency, because fossil fuels are simply too cheap. There has never been a price tag on what fossil fuels and their processing really cost our environment – a grave mistake at the expense of our children and their children’s children.

Of course, implementing the ECO system is not an effortless enterprise. We are convinced that coping with the impacts of uncontrolled climate change will be far more difficult, and socially disastrous. Meeting our climate goals is a challenge we must rise to together in a collective effort. And only a truly effective blanket concept can master the situation for us now and the generations to come. We must act now. We must act effectively.

Our aim is to open public and political discussions on our climate concept, to hone it, expand on it and implement it in its existing or improved form. Only Nature can create perfection – we are continuously learning and refining our ECO concept. Your constructive ideas are most welcome.

Jens & Angela Hanson
SaveClimate.Earth
We're EU Climate Pact Ambassadors since 2021
 

Article includes comments from Kim:

Daring Mars Rover Landing Has High Stakes for NASA


by Leonard David, SPACE.com’s Space Insider Columnist

Date: 01 August 2012 Time: 11:44 AM ET

http://www.space.com/16847-mars-rover-curiosity-landing-high-stakes.html

Howdy

was wondering if you guys have any links on the site to pro mars colonising websites like Mars-One

Just wanting to find out what was the source for KSR's thinking in defining the ten forms of change in music and physics in the Memory of Whiteness?

I m enjoying this ''science in the capital'' very much... although Frank's considerations are bit lenghty and i felt like something is missing in the 'conversio'.

It might sound odd, but your fiction brings much more reality to the environmental issues than all the serious stuff i may read.
Not so odd you may tell since that's what well writen fiction does...bring in the emotions without which there is no full human experience of reality.
But still odd for I still can feel reality in fact based litterature.

The cause i'm sure is the optimist (or proactive) stance in the novel.
It's too often that my hearing / reading on these issues is hampered by what i feel to be an undercurrent of resentment wishing to resolve in catastrophes.

I had a look at wikipedia concerning the THC slowdown and the little ice age before feeling like to get to know what you would say after what seems like researches telling it might not be, let's say, as big as that... is this article tampered by the ''Climate change does not exist'' afficionados ?

Do you know of any source that is vulgarising on environment without that gilt that sours so many discourses, steaming my glasses.

Regards

I am trying to track down a story about a geographer in ancient Egypt who met a feathered alien spaceperson, all of which led to the Egyptians' religious part man part animal gods, and also in it was the pharos of Alexandria. I think it was by KSR. Does anyone know?

I just finished the first book of yours I have ever read (not the first you wrote as I understand it): Sixty Days & Counting. WOW! That was a compelling read! I liked how you build up each character slowly and how the story was told from various people's perspectives from Phil Chase to little Joe. Fantastic! Can't wait to add more of your books to my personal library right along side David Eddings! Thank you!

I am really struggling with Galileo's Dream. I like the premise and plot ideas, but the "hard science" is way overdone , boring and detracts from the story in my judgment. Galileo is either grouchy and sour or immersed too deep in temporal physics I do not understand and cannot relate to the overall story. Ilike science fiction and read a lot, but I have put this one down halfway through. Too much other stuff to read that I will like better.

I've never read a quartet (including The Martians) twice with the possible exception of The Foundation Series but I'm too old to remember.

I just wanted to thank Dr. Kim for his work. I'm now back to Red Mars for the third time in a year.

It's the next best thing to being there.

David

[quote=Naseem]Hi everybody!
I was recently reading the Aurora book (which, by the way, is AMAZING), and it was mentioning pretty early on that the ship in Aurora is 12 magnitudes smaller than Earth. Since it is hard for the human mind to fully conceptualize the size of our world, I was trying to use Google to figure out how small, exactly, is 12 magnitudes smaller than Earth. I couldnt find anything useful online, so I was wondering if somebody here could help me out with some comparison (My research lead me to believe that 12 magnitudes smaller than earth is the size of bacteria, which it awfully small for a inter-solar space ship).
Thanks! (btw thanks to Science Friday for recommending this book!)[/quote]
Lets look at it by volume.

The volume of the earth is 1.08*10^12 km. So I guess 12 orders of magnitude smaller would leave a volume of 1.08 km. That still seems a small for so many people but in bacteria sized.

Alan

I just finished Gretel Ehrlichs "This Cold Heaven" about her trips to northern Greenland and life among native people there. Climate, landscapes, vegetation and people are all evocative of the KSRs Mars books. The Inuit who (at the time of of writing - late 90s) were still doing subsistence hunting from dog sleds and kayaks trying to stave off a growing market economy, outboard engines and snowmobiles and worried about global warming....Good book! Wonder if KSR read it?

How does he do his research for the science in his books? They re so well researched, I;d love to know how.

Please, how can I contact Kim Stanley robinson?

I have been asking for a while now...

I read with awe the description of the rain in D.C. in Forty Signs of Rain, a 2004 copyright book. I have the receipt from my purchase in May 2011 marking one of the more remarkable features. On Page 362 there is reference to Tropical Storm Sandy.(!?!)
An amazing prediction, on par if not surpassing Nostradamus's prediction of Hitler (Hisler). You only missed by a few miles.

A couple of decades ago I read KSR's story "A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations". Much of it consists of a travelogue around Orkney, and in particular the neolithic village of Skara Brae. Ever since I've had this desire to visit the place, and now I finally did it.

It is hard to describe why I feel such a strong connection to those neolithic sites, but in a way it was like half-seeing the invention of civilization, a cultural revolution that brought about technological and ideological concepts that we now take for granted.

In any case, I'm not sure this is the proper forum for this, and I apologize if it is not, but I wanted to share this. I've put some pictures up (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ml42/tags/orkney/), and a blog post (n Portuguese) http://ml42.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/queen-mary-university-of-london-londr..., so people can have some idea of what I've seen and why it affected me this way.

Dear friends co-fans of KSR I have two questions about the story of Red Mars:
Why John Boon dies in the beginning?
And which is the exact year of the landing - 2027 according to 9 months flight from 21 Dec. 2026 or 2037 according to John Boon's calculation of year M 10 - 2047 when the truck falls?
Thank you!

Hi, my name is Greg. I've surfed the web through and couldn't find any trace of Kim Stanley Robinson. The question is about translation his books into Russian and publishing them in Russia, but still I cannot find neither him, nor his lobbyists. If you can help me somehow, please respond via the e-mail.
Sincerely, Greg.

As an appetiser to Shaman can II recommend 'Spirits of the Mothers' by Cristi Fernández Narvaíza? This pseudo-scientific book highlights the plight of our ancestors 15,000 years ago. The chapters skilfully alternate between a narrative followed by facts, figures and the author's conclusion. I read it in one sitting and wished other science based books used such style. I look forward to Shaman with this little book's knowledge in mind.

hey everyone,
i wanted to buy the mars trilogy, but in amazon there's only mass market paperback versions. anyone knows where can i order not a mass market version?
thanks,

Hi all! I read the Mars series back in college, and was impressed by the way that the technology in Red Mars seemed to be well-researched, based on the technology of the day.

I'd like to ask KSR -- what would he change about that, given the events of the last fifteen years? The retirement of the shuttle program in particular and the unavailability of external tanks to build the [i]Ares[/i] would be an obvious place to start, as would the relative rise of China and India as spacefaring powers.

Does KSR still believe that it's plausible for the first man on Mars to have been born in 1976?