The war on science is here. Kim Stanley Robinson says it’s just the beginning
Widely regarded as the greatest living sci-fi writer, he’s spent decades crafting visions of the future. Now, he warns that a real dystopia is unfolding.
Can science survive politics?
Not without a good fight, according to Kim Stanley Robinson.
Widely regarded as the greatest living sci-fi writer, Robinson creates fictional futures shaped by environmental and political upheaval, where societies navigate the struggle between catastrophe and change — through economic shifts, scientific breakthroughs and the slow, uneven work of rebuilding.
In a seminar at UCLA last Thursday, he had a clear message: the fight for the future is real, and it’s happening right now.
His talk, titled “Optimism, Optopia and Climate Change Stories,” discussed economic levers that could force a global energy transition, the fallout of defunding scientific research and why surrendering to cynicism is the greatest risk of all. Robinson’s words come at a time when the stakes are high. Science shapes the future, and cutting it cuts lives, he said.
“There’s genocide. There’s ecocide. And now, futureside,” he said. Futureside, he explained, is the calculated destruction of possibilities — policies and decisions that erase the chance of a livable future.
Robinson says the toll on human lives isn’t abstract — it can be quantified. “The damage done in the last six weeks to the National Institutes of Health means that all of us, on average, are going to have a shorter lifetime. There’s eight billion people on the planet. If each has lost a month, that’s eight billion months erased from human lives.”
Robinson, whose novel The Ministry for the Future has become a touchstone in climate policy circles, argued that the war on science has evolved. While anti-science rhetoric has long existed, modern attacks on science are wrapped in media distractions and misinformation, making them harder to counter.
“Let’s remember that a lot of that is soap opera. A lot of that is reality TV. A lot of that is what an earlier decade would have called the society of the spectacle. We look at the spectacle, and say ‘oh my God, it blows my mind.’ But what’s really going on?” Robinson stated, noting that it isn’t just about budgets or deregulation — it’s about power, ideology and the fear that progress is a threat to those with the most privilege.
But an even greater threat, Robinson warned, is the quiet surrender already taking place. Under political pressure, major federal science agencies have begun self-censoring by removing climate-related language from their websites, reportedly in response to administration policies and potential funding threats.
“This is a bad response,” Robinson said, adding that tossing in the towel this early does no one any good. “A dog will turn up their belly and bear their throat and say, ‘Look, I lose. Kill me if you want, but you don’t have to, because now I’m yours.’ Some animal behaviorists call this preemptive capitulation. And I don’t think we ought to do that.”
Robinson cautioned against defeatism, stressing that optimism isn’t naive — it’s a bold and necessary way to imagine the future.
Alex Hall, director of UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, introduced Robinson at his seminar and framed it simply. “If we can’t imagine that future, we’ll never be able to build it.” Robinson’s novels provide that imagination. But his talk made it clear that imagination alone isn’t enough.
“The cross chop — wicked as it is — can’t stop us,” he said, leaving the audience with the image of a river’s surface in chaos, but the current underneath moving steadily forward.
The event was co-sponsored by UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the UCLA Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies and the UCLA Department of English.
UCLA IoES has made his full seminar available on YouTube. Watch it here.
Video filmed and edited by Scott Gruber.
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