Henry Farrell and Kim Stanley Robinson (2024), “Henry Farrell Talks to Kim Stanley Robinson,” Vector, 299.

Henry Farrell teaches democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction writer whose most recent novel is The Ministry for the Future. Their conversation took place in March 2023 at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, around Tor’s forthcoming June 2024 re-issue of Robinson’s 1984 novel, Icehenge.

HF – How did you come to write Icehenge?

KSR – When I was a kid I loved stories about archeology, including pseudo-archaeology. There were quite a few fake archaeologies about when people first got to the Americas – the Phoenicians; St. Brendan; the Welsh – I read all these with huge pleasure. Everybody got to America, it seemed. I was perhaps 10 or 12.  Whether I was making any distinctions as to whether these were real or not, I’m not sure.  I just loved them so much as stories. 

One of the stories was about the Kensington Stone, which was discovered in Minnesota in 1898. A Swedish American farmer found a piece of stone, with runes carved onto it saying more or less ‘we’re out here, the natives are killing us, mother Mary save us.’ It’s actually quite moving as a prose poem or last testament.  It was dated to 1362, and Hjalmar Holand, a scientist from Chicago, decided that this was a genuine stone and spent his career trying to find an expedition from that era that would explain it. He found that a pope of that time had asked the Danes to find out what had happened to the church in Greenland, and an expedition had gone off to do so, and never was heard of again. Hjalmar Holand said these people got to Greenland, found it abandoned, went up the Hudson Bay looking for the missing Greenlanders, then went up one of the rivers leading southwest, and in two weeks were in the middle of Minnesota, where the locals killed them with arrows. 

You can still go to Kensington Minnesota, where there is a 10 ton, 20 foot high copy of the stone, which was just a little thing. The original stone was displayed in the Smithsonian for a while as evidence of Vikings in America, but many experts in runes were dubious from the start about the language on the stone. They thought it was all wrong, but Holand defended it until he died. A couple of years later, someone noticed that all the runes were multiples of one inch long, suggesting it had been carved with a one inch chisel. It turned out that the Swedish farmer who found it was a country intellectual, who wanted to bother the brains of the learned, as he once put it. He’s almost certainly the guy who did it.   But since Holand had died, he didn’t see it being removed from the museum. 

At that point I began to get interested in hoaxes as such.  The Vinland map was thought to be a hoax, and then was thought to be real, and now we think it’s a hoax again. I was interested in how hoaxes got found out, what the methodologies are and so on. Then in the midst of my reading, they found a real Viking site in Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows. At that point I was 11 years old, so that dates my reading of this stuff.  The news was announced in National Geographic, and I was thrilled. 

So, when I became a science fiction writer, I was wondering what kind of stories to tell. I was young, nothing in particular had happened to me, so I was often telling stories out of books. Then a friend sent me an article in Forbes magazine saying that we could live up to 500 years if we could repair our DNA when it got damaged. I thought, Wow, what if Hjalmar Holand had lived a little longer, and thus saw his entire life’s work knocked down like a house of cards—what would he have said? How would he have felt?  And I thought that would make a story. 

I wrote it through my mid-twenties. At that time I was impressed by Ford Madox Ford and modernism’s chronological tricks. I thought I’d write the story with the scenes all out of order. It would be a jumble you’d have to unsort, like the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury. So I became Benjy in effect; it was like throwing scenes up in the air and collecting them where they fell.

I submitted the story to Damon Knight. He had already bought three stories from me, including my first. He was my editor and my patron, and my teacher. If I owe my sixties as a writer to Tim Holman, as I do, I owe my twenties to Damon Knight. 

So he read this novella and said, ‘Stan, have you listed the scenes for yourself?’ No, I hadn’t done that.  He suggested I number the scenes and then make a list of them both chronologically and in their order in the text; then ask myself why these two were different, and make a pattern of the difference, if I still wanted it. Maybe Edmond Doya was in a present time, he suggested, but remembering things in an order one could see had a logic to it. 

Damon also said that the little ten page version of Emma’s journal was undercooked and didn’t need to be there. I could write it up later on as a separate novella, he suggested.  And he said, if you get this all in a good order, and you make a good revision more generally, I will buy this. Even though it was 100 pages long, maybe 25,000 words. 

So I did all that, and he bought the story, called ‘On the North Pole of Pluto.’ It was the last story in his Orbit series, in Orbit 21. The story’s final words were the final words of the Orbit series, and I am sure Damon did that on purpose. He was my teacher and advocate, and a lovely man. Well, he would laugh at that description; he was a great man.

Several years later I sold The Wild Shore to Ace Books, and they said: we’d like more from you. I said, I could do a three-novella novel like Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which had completely blown my mind. John Clute calls this form the ‘fix up,’ but that’s not a good name.  Many novels are made of disparate stories; no one calls The Sound and the Fury a fix-up.  So I thought I could bulk up the Emma Weil story, and if I put Nederland’s story in the middle, it would work very well as a trio. 

The Emma Weil story was bought by Ed Ferman at Fantasy & Science Fiction as an independent novella. You didn’t have to know anything about the aftermath to appreciate it, although Gardner Dozois noted that the story has a peculiar ending that jags off in a new direction. But whatever—it was published, and it got on the Hugo ballot, which was maybe a first for me. 

My regular editor at Ace, Beth Meacham (Terry Carr was a guest curator), said to my idea for a book, ‘fine, good idea, write the middle novella.’ By that time I was married to Lisa, and things were stable for the first time in my life – this was around 1983, in Davis. So I sat down and considered the problem of my Hjalmar Nederland, who had to be immensely old. His section of course had to be a first person narrative, like the other two. Here I began to recall the Anglo-Irish novelist Joyce Cary, whose books I loved. 

His two trilogies are all first person narratives, and constructed such that first you get the woman’s story, then stories from two men closely involved with that woman. The ‘First Trilogy,’ is Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, and The Horse’s Mouth.  The narrator of To Be a Pilgrim is an ancient, crabby, conservative, often unpleasant lawyer, Tom Wilcher, who is in love with Sara Monday, who is also involved with a crazy artist, Gulley Jimson. Wilcher and Gulley Jimson hardly cross paths, but they both have interesting stories that cast a light on Sara. The ‘Second Trilogy’ has a very similar construction. They’re all great novels, and in six very different voices. 

So I thought to myself, I’ve got that kind of pattern here. Emma comes first, then both Hjalmar Nederland and and Edmond Doya are fascinated by her, even though they never meet her. It’s a literary fascination, but that fit me, because these were to some extent books out of books; bookish stories by bookish me.  Books about reading, in fact, and how that can shape a life, become a quest. Books about falling in love with characters.

So I gave it a try, and I was very surprised to find that Nederland’s first person narrative, stuck in the middle and overdetermined in many ways, was the first time that I wrote something better than I felt I could write. When it was done and I read it over, I was startled. I thought ‘where did that come from?’ 

This crabby old man had tapped into something I had never tapped into before. Up till then, I had felt that it was tough to be a writer when you don’t have a gift for it, but only have the desire. That was a powerful feeling through my twenties.  But by the time I wrote the Nederland novella I was a bit older, I had lived some.  And in the process of filling a gap in my story, something had happened.  It was quite startling to me. 

HF  – I would have guessed that the Nederland novella would have been the first thing to have been written, and that the other two were ancillary.

Read the full interview at Vector