Abstract

The fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson remains among the most progressive, yet still largely understudied, bodies of literary work in its critique of neoliberal capitalism. But if Robinson is readily considered a political author, less attention has been paid to his concern with narrative. As scrupulously as Robinson’s descriptive powers attempt to comprehend the world, and imagine more egalitarian modes of social existence, his writing matters because it extends itself through a series of startingly innovations in literary form. This paper, taken from a forthcoming book, will address one aspect of this: namely, Robinson’s anxieties around narrative composition and nuclear disaster.