Kim Stanley Robinson: Apprenticeships in Narrative [Hardcover]

This book argues that one of the most striking aspects of Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction is his concern with literary apprenticeship. Engaging with a sub-set of his novels concerned with the composition of a narrative account, this book reads Robinson's fiction as addressing problems bound to narrative, examining its structures, limits, possibilities, and value.The fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson remains among the most progressive bodies of literary work in its critique of neoliberal capitalism. His novels and short stories have mapped the turbulent historical cycles of capitalist violence, economic expansion, and material despoliation, in turn proposing radical visions of social and economic justice through cooperatives, collective agreements, and stewardship of the environment.

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 innovations in literary form. This book argues that one of the most striking aspects of Robinson's fiction is his concern with literary apprenticeship. Reading a sub-set of novels concerned with human and non-human subjects engaged in composing a narrative account, this book positions Robinson's fiction as addressing a complex of problems ultimately bound to narrative, examining its structures, limits, possibilities, and value. In Robinson, the figure of the apprentice writer battles against the limits of their interpretative powers.Introduction

Youth, Writing, and Anxieties of Composition in Three Californias

Walden, Science, and Stewardship in Green Earth

Narrative, Survival, and Structural Anthropology

Learning to Write: Artificial Intelligence in Aurora

Ministry for the Future or, the Novel of the Collective

Coda: Paintingls%