[Plura-list] Talking with Kim Stanley Robinson about "The High Sierra"; Kim Stanley Robinson's "The High Sierra"

[Cory Doctorow]

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Today (May 25), I'm giving a virtual keynote at the ABC Copyright Conference (University of Western Ontario/London):

https://abccopyright.com/conference-schedule-2022/

Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/25/the-wild-places/

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Today's links

* Talking with Kim Stanley Robinson about "The High Sierra": An interview for Fatherly Magazine.

* Kim Stanley Robinson's "The High Sierra": A love story.

* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

* This day in history: 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

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🚌 Talking with Kim Stanley Robinson about "The High Sierra"

This month, the great Kim Stanley Robinson published "The High Sierra," an odd combination of memoir, natural history, mountaineering guidebook, and environmental manifesto. At one point, Robinson told me it would be his last book. Thankfully, he changed his mind, but I can see why he'd think of this as a career capstone.

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/kim-stanley-robinson/the-high-sierra/9780316306812/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/25/the-wild-places/#ksr

I'm both an ardent admirer of Stan's work and an old friend of his, so I was delighted to get the chance to interview him for *Fatherly* magazine, as a feature in their Outside issue:

https://www.fatherly.com/entertainment/kim-stanley-robinson-cory-doctorow-climate-crisis

Given the magazine's parenting focus, much of our interview was concerned with going outdoors with children. Stan says that conversations with kids about wilderness and the climate shoouruld start with a personal connection: "50% of the DNA inside your body is not human DNA. You yourself are a forest. You are an amazing collaboration between literally millions of individuals and thousands of species."

He says that this sense of connection is the key to environmental advocacy, that nurturing the idea that the wild places are you, and you are part of them, is how we bring these issues into focus for kids.

But he also has a lot of practical advice for bringing kids to the wild places - especially his beloved Sierras. He is part of the minimalist camping movement, venturing out with supplies weighing in at 10% of his own body-weight on his back (no tents - just a tarp and a groundpad!). This lightness makes moving and scrambling through the high country much easier, including for kids.

He counsels buddying up, bringing another family or several families, so you - and your kids - have some playmates when you make camp. He says that even the most screen-loving kids will, if left to their own in the wild country - start to make up games, take themselves on explorations, and deepen that connection.

Stan thinks that connection can create hope, by which he means *resolve*. As he depicts in his 2020 novel *Ministry for the Future*, there are paths through the climate emergency: difficult and fraught ones, but there to be sure. Those of us in wealthy places will be the last ones swept up by the worst crises and we have a moral duty to use that extra time to fight for a sustainable future.

As he says, "Whatever can be done must be done — and the sooner the better."

Robinson's own life was transformed by wilderness. He describes his boyhood in "a white bread, scrubbed-of-all-traces-of-personality town" in Orange County, where swimming 20 yards out into the ocean transformed his life into adventure, as "Mother Nature tried to kill me." Years later, as an undergrad, he took LSD with a couple friends and hiked into the Sierras "and never came down."

He counsels parents to bring their kids on these hiking campouts, not car camping ("the worst of both worlds," where you do what you did at home, but badly, "in a little tenement of people in other cars nearby"). Bring your kids to the mountains for four days, so they end it thinking, "Damn, I could have used more."

Being outside is a big part of Stan's approach to life. He told me that for 16 years, he's worked under a tarp in his backyard, rain or shine: "There’s a lot of people who know it’s fun to be outdoors because they’re carpenters and they’re outdoors all the time, and they like it. Farmers too. But writers, not so much."

He's right. A couple years ago, we hung a hammock under the eaves of our house in Burbank and I have barely left it since. I have a shade umbrella and a power cable, and mosquito spray for the bug-months. My Zoom colleagues love it, but they've insisted that I stop rocking on calls, because they get seasick."

Stan quotes Leopold: "What's good is what’s good for the land.' It’s a deep moral orientation — like a compass north...It becomes a rubric you can follow all over the place."

If you'd like to read my interview with Stan, it's here:

https://www.fatherly.com/entertainment/kim-stanley-robinson-cory-doctorow-climate-crisis

and my review of *The High Sierra* is here:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/25/the-wild-places/#sierra-people

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🚌 Kim Stanley Robinson's "The High Sierra"

One of the last friends I got to hang out with before lockdown hit was Kim Stanley Robinson, an enormously talented writer and incredibly kind and smart person. Stan told me that he'd just finished a major novel, maybe *the* major novel of his life, called *Ministry for the Future,* and that next he was going to write his "Sierra book," a book about the Sierra Nevada mountain range. He said he thought it might be his last book.

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/kim-stanley-robinson/the-high-sierra/9780316306812/

Not in a morbid sense, you understand. Rather, I got the impression from Stan that if once he'd published *Ministry* - a book that plots a plausible course through the climate emergency and out the other side - and the Sierra book, he'd have said everything he *had* to say, written all of us all the letters he needed to write to tell us all the things he wanted us to know.

*Ministry* was a triumph, as I knew it would be. Stan is an incredible novelist and a profound and insightful environmentalist. He'd been circling the themes in *Ministry* for decades and this is the book where he lands his bullseye. It's a book that's making a difference in the world. He's just come back from India, where he met with the Dalai Lama to discuss its messages.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#ksr

*Ministry* is brilliant, in a way that I entirely expected it to be, because I know the part of Stan Robinson that produced that book pretty well. But I didn't know what to expect of the Sierra book. I knew Stan was wont to disappear into the Sierras for weeks at a time, and I knew those trips informed the lyrical - even transcendental - pastoral passages in his fiction. But I'm not much of an outdoors person. I like the wild places, visit them when I can, but it's a rare thing for me to get up and wish I was in the wilderness.

Months ticked by. Years. Lockdown, pandemic, wildfires, uprisings, political upheavals. *Ministry* blew the windows out. Stan and I chatted from time to time. I learned that he'd been at the bottom of the Grand Canyon when lockdown hit, didn't even know about it until he emerged from the wilderness to learn that the world had forever changed. I learned that he had changed his mind about being done with novels. It was a genuine consolation amid all the chaos and worry.

Then, the Sierra book showed up at my mailbox. *The High Sierra: A Love Story,* an oversized book as fat as a brick, or as one of the Mars trilogy, weighing in at 530 pages. I read it over the span of weeks, savoring it, thinking about what I was learning from it. It's hard book to describe - now I understand why Stan just called it "The Sierra Book" rather than "my nature book," or "my memoir," or "my hiking guide." It is all of those things, and it's a unique and profound piece of western literature, but it's also very, very hard to describe.

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/kim-stanley-robinson/the-high-sierra/9780316306812/

I think the key is in that subtitle: "A Love Story." I knew Stan loved the Sierra wilderness, of course, but love is complicated and hard work, and if you asked a writer as talented and thoughtful and empathic as Kim Stanley Robinson to tell you the true, whole story of why and how he loved his wife or his kids, you might get a book like this.

A true love story is complicated. It's about physical features. It's about feelings - the feelings of the person you love and the feelings they provoke in you. It's about history, long history - the person your love made of you, and the person your love was before you came along. It's a collection of moments. It's a collection of instructions - to yourself, to get along with your love (which not always easy) - and to others, who, you hope, will treat your love with care.

That's what Stan's Sierra book is: a love story. It's a memoir, of how Stan came to be a Sierra person, starting with a reckless adventure in the mountains while tripping on LSD, wildly unprepared but young and vigorous and lucky. It's not Stan's life story, not exactly - more like the impressionistic vignettes a lifelong couple might treat as touchstones, that crazy time when, that dramatic time when, that hilarious time when.

It's a love story, so it's a story about the physical being of the Sierra. The Sierra is revealed as the source of Robinson's novelistic pastoralism - the vividness of the Martian hills, of space station interiors, of Antarctica. All of those descriptions are thinly veiled Sierras, like a set of stock characters in a novelist's ensemble cast who are stand-ins for the people in his life.

Captured by a master of science fiction, the Sierras are in eminently qualified hands. Robinson's lyricism is countersunk by his scientific enthusiasms, and the chapters in this book that describe the evolution of the rocks and the planet have the technical precision of a geologist's paper at a learned conference, and the poesie of a love poem or a watercolor.

It's a love story, so it's a story about the problems of the Sierras. The colonialism. The genocide. The place-names honoring the monsters of history, butted up against names commemorating heroes and lovers of the place, some settler colonialists, some First Nations. The ecocide, going back to the drowning of the Hetch-Hetchy basin, not just to create a reservoir but to demoralize the advocates for nature and wilderness, scatter them so powerful men could continue to seize and destroy wild places. The ecocide of today, the glacial retreats that Robinson can personally attest to, year after year.

It's a love story, so it's a story about living with the Sierras. Robinson recounts the history of the summer settlements - the places were First Nations people would come, year after year, for centuries, for fellowship and interchange and ritual. He tells the tale of the Sierra Club, the men - and especially the women - who loved the Sierras and whom the Sierra loved back. Robinson tells you how to camp like he and his friends camp - not with huge backpacks (he calls them "SUVs") and heavy gear from outdoor stores, but with highly specialized gear weighing no more than 10% of your body weight, all in.

The gear chapter is as science fictional as any technical passage out of a Neal Stephenson novel, an absolute geek-out *revel* in material science, biomechanics, praxis, and, above all, the *feeling* of being nearly unencumbered in the high, wild places, where the sky and the ground sometimes swap colors and the stars are thicker and brighter than any place you've ever been, and you sleep out under those stars, not even bothering with the tarp you use instead of a tent.

Even for a love story, this is a book with an odd structure. A short chapter on geomorphism. Another on big horn sheep. Another on John Muir - whom Robinson defends passionately, with a palpable fury at the misplaced and ahistorical attempt to paint Muir as a monster and an advocate for genocide. Another on Robinson's first marriage. Then a technical chapter on "scrambling" - hiking up or down loose terrain with your hiking sticks turning into forward appendages, so you can "go quadruped."

The tale bounces around in time, back to the early history of the Earth's landmasses, Robinson's boyhood as a surf-rat in a soulless Southern California beach town, his time as a faculty husband in Zurich, the early days of the Sierra Club, the events at California bookstores to commemorate the publication of an anthology of Sierra writing.

At first blush, it feels a little... unstructured. But as much as Robinson is an ecologist and a Sierra person and a father and a husband and a teacher, he's also a *novelist* and whether deliberately or accidentally, he has given his love story a narrative arc. This love story is a tale, and it has rising tension and urgency, a climax, a denouement. It's an arc that's only visible in retrospect, like the true character of the folded and rocky lands he traverses, only comprehensible from the high ground, when you turn and look back on where you've come.

I've taught with Robinson, at the Clarion workshop at UCSD, which we both graduated from, back when it was at MSU. I took Robinson out with my students one year, on the walk to the La Jolla cliffs that I drag them to every night for sunset, because, as busy as they are, I want to impress on them that their bodies are not inconvenient meat-robots that lug their brains around.

On that walk, Robinson told us of his grad-school years at USCD, and how he moved out of the dorms at one point and lived in a cave on that very cliffside. It was a marvellous story, of course, and it impressed on me how different the people you admire can be from your own self. I love the idea of sleeping in a cave and have no interest in ever actually doing so.

Being on the periphery of Stan's Sierra adventures - running into him at conferences just before he disappeared into the high country or just after his return - I assumed that the Stan's Sierras were like his grad-school cliffside cave. That it was something Stan loved and I loved to know about, but would never want to try.

But Stan's love story changed my mind, the way a love story can. Stan made me fall in love with a place I've never been, and miss it even though I've never known it. I've just had both my hips replaced, and I've never been much of an athlete, but despite all that, I find myself wanting to go to these places and capture the feelings Stan describes so vividly. I don't claim to know how it feels to be Stan in the Sierras - if there's one thing this book impresses on the reader, it's that a successful relationship with the Sierras is numinous and irreducible - but I think I understand the *intensity* of that feeling.

I had a wild place, once. Not too wild, but still. A co-op-owned education center on an island in eastern Ontario where I went to summer camp and then volunteered and then joined its board. It wasn't untamed or ancient the way the Sierras are, but it was a place where I felt something I never felt anywhere else, not before or since. We lost the island in one of the economic crises of the early 1990s, and had to sell it off, and I've been back twice since. Just thinking about it makes my chest ache a little, the way it does when I think of old loves lost and old friendships that didn't make it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/travel/places-to-go-canada-2017-writers-authors.html

Robinson still has his love, and he wants you to love it too. His love story is, thankfully, not the end of his books, but honestly, I can see why he would have said that he might end them here. The Sierras made Stan, and *The High Sierra* is like a key that unlocks his entire body of work, tracing its origins and inspirations. For millennia, the high Sierra passes and valleys and basins have made new kinds of people out of their visitors - Sierra people. Stan wants us all to be Sierra people, I think, at least a little.

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🚌 Hey look at this

* Donate to encounters between traumatized people and nonhuman dads for Father's Day https://www.gentlebarn.org

* Atwood responds to book bans with ‘unburnable’ edition of Handmaid’s Tale https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/24/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-unburnable-edition

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🚌 This day in history

#15yrsago Map of a notional LA subway based on the London Tube https://web.archive.org/web/20070528045805/https://thetransitcoalition.us/ConNP01.htm

#15yrsago Breaking DVD DRM is legal in Finland https://web.archive.org/web/20070528062421/http://www.turre.com/blog/?p=102

#10yrsago Fox sues Dish over commercial skipping, claims copyright infringement https://web.archive.org/web/20120527004526/https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-fox-sues-dish-network-over-adblocking-feature-20120524,0,3654685.story

#10yrsago Google publishing data on all copyright takedowns it receives https://www.techdirt.com/2012/05/25/odd-that-microsoft-demands-google-take-down-links-that-remain-bing/

#10yrsago NYC lawyer loses $100K suit over healthclub that stopped supplying yogurt and cereal http://www.loweringthebar.net/2012/05/lawyers-defective-breakfast-suit-is-dismissed.html

#5yrsago Colombian biologist won’t go to jail for 8 years for sharing a scientific paper (probably) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/diego

#5yrsago 90,000 young Britons register to vote in one dayhttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/22/boost-jeremy-corbyn-90000-young-people-register-vote-just-one/

#1yrago We promised this vaccine waiver 20 years ago https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo

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🚌 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* Some Men Rob You With a Fountain Pen, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. Friday's progress: 525 words (7687 words total)

* The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a nonfiction book about interoperability for Verso. Friday's progress: 519 words (4272 words total)

* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Yesterday's progress: 508 words (92849 words total) - ON PAUSE

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EXPERT REVIEW

* Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION

* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FINAL DRAFT COMPLETE

* A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause."  FINISHED

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues."  FINISHED

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: About Those Killswitched Ukrainian Tractors: https://craphound.com/news/2022/05/19/about-those-killswitched-ukrainian-tractors/

Upcoming appearances:

* ABC Copyright Conference keynote (University of Western Ontario/London), May 25
https://abccopyright.com/conference-schedule-2022/

* OpenJSWorld (Austin), Jun 8
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/openjs-world/program/schedule/

* UK Competition and Markets Authority Data Technology and Analytics conference (London), Jun 15-16
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-registration-308678625077

* A New HOPE (NYC), Jul 24
https://www.hope.net/

Recent appearances:

* The Sci-Fi Feedback Loop: Mapping Fiction’s Influence on Real-World Tech
https://csi.asu.edu/calendar/events/the-sci-fi-feedback-loop-mapping-fictions-influence-on-real-world-tech/

* Privacy is the New Celebrity
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1806101/10643084

* Revolutionizing Activism — The Power of Utopia (Center for Artistic Activism)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TBlSc3PNUA

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

Upcoming books:

* Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics, Beacon Press, September 2022

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