FALLING INTO HISTORY:
THE IMAGINED WESTS OF KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
IN THE “THREE CALIFORNIAS” AND MARS TRILOGY

CARL ABBOTT

California science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has imagined the future of Southern California in three novels published 1984–1990, and the settlement of Mars in another trilogy published 1993–1996. In framing these narratives he worked in explicitly historical terms and incorporated themes and issues that characterize the “new western history” of the 1980s and 1990s, thus providing evidence of the resonance of that new historiography.

RED MARS IS KIM STANLEY ROBINSON’s highly-praised science fiction novel published in 1993. 1 Its pivotal section carries the title “Falling into History.” More than two decades have passed since permanent human settlers arrived on the red planet in 2027, and the growing Martian communities have become too complex to be guided by simple earth-made plans or single individuals. The section centers on John Boone, an explorer-hero (“the first man on Mars”) and charismatic co-leader of the first one hundred settlers. As he spends three years wandering and visiting scattered settlements, he finds that Martian society is outgrowing his capacity to comprehend and direct.	1
He had been on the road for years now . . . cutting ribbons at the opening of one thing or another—a town, a well, a weather station, a mine, a mohole—and always talking, talking in public speeches or private conversations, talking to strangers, old friends, new acquaintances . . . and all in an attempt to inspire the people to figure out a way to forget history, to build a functioning society. To create a scientific system designed for Mars, designed to their specifications, fair and just and rational and all those good things. To point the way to a new Mars! And yet after every year that passed, it seemed less likely . . . events were out of control, and more than that, out of anyone’s control. 2
Robinson is a novelist who takes history seriously. The fall into history is the transition from the carefully controlled circumstances of a single contingent of first-comers to the intractability of multiple groups, peoples, values, and agendas. It is the collapse of the open-ended possibilities of a new place into the constrained situations of historicity—the concatenation of habits, hopes, and vested interests that characterize any society. In the words of critic Robert Markley, Robinson imagines a situation in which utopian schemes are inevitably “undone by the distance between the idealized operations of a frictionless system and the wear and tear of embodied, historical experience.” 3	2
. . .