Red Moon

Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR) has never shied away from politic. From my favourite one, The Science and the Capital to Mars Trilogy and from the Shaman to Aurora. His stories are political, full of complex ideas, odd stories, revolutions and catastrophes but also utopian and optimistic in their core. KSR has written science fiction novels in a variety of subgenres, he imagined humanity expanding in through the Solar System, terraforming inhospitable planets, and changing the current social and economic regimes. He talks about the transformative power of science and technology, and of what climate change might do a little bit further in the future. He envisioned possible future in a world after climate change. Sometimes he also looks into our past. Kim Stanley Robinson is a thinker and a visionary. With his books he helps us think about the power of science fiction, about our society and our relationship to science and technology. His books are not for impatient readers; they request our fullest attention.

Red moon_1 (2)Red Moon is a novel of space exploration and lunar colonization but also a historical and political novel. As usual KSR weave together a wide variety of topics. He looks into the origins of Earth and moon and he delves into the history, philosophy and politics of China but from a certain future point- a few decades from now, which is quite interesting. He explores the limitations or the impossibility of total surveillance and the advances on machine learning and quantum computing.

He also returns to the idea of post-capitalism. Political and capitalistic crises are presented as two interlocked events and novel suggests that the future will be defined by the entanglement of both these crises. KSR has explored post-capitalism in many of his novels. In New York 2140, he is telling the story of a revolution that creates post-capitalism to solve the ecological problem. There is a certain amount of resistance or impossibility to The idea of post-capitalism, but if we think let’s say in 200 years for now, and if we manage to survive a global catastrophic risk that will cripple or even destroy modern civilisation (e.g. climate change or a nuclear destruction or a powerful artificial general Intelligence (AGI), the people on earth will not be working in a capitalist economy. No human system is internal, and as capitalism evolved out of feudalism, another system will evolve out of capitalism. And with the rate that the capitalist system using our planet and systemically undervalues the future, the new system could exist in a few decades from now. In Red Moon, KSR explores the possibility of deploying a cryptocurrency “carboncoin”, that is created or validates by taking carbon out of air and can only buy sustainable necessities. It is certainly an intriguing and fascinating idea.

“And a lot of people are taking their savings out of the banks, like the Americans. A lot of them are moving it into a cryptocurrency called carboncoin.”

Red Moon reads as a thriller but the science fiction is strong and the politics revolutionary. There are a lot of loose ends in the story which suggests a sequel, a Blue Moon perhaps.


Small trivia: Fred Fredericks, the shy and geeky engineer in the book, was also the name of a character in The Escape of Katmandu.