The Planetary Society
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Kim Stanley Robinson  –  science fiction author
Click for larger image " ...creativity and inspiration for me is not a matter of one big moment of vision (though sometimes that can happen) but more a ceaseless application of effort to matters of detail. "
       
 
How were you motivated to choose your particular field?
  When I was a child in Orange County, California, it was still mostly orange groves,and I spent a lot of time wandering in them, imagining that I was a contemporary of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Then as I grew up the groves were ripped out and replaced by the freeway–and–condominium social nightmare that exists there now. I witnessed this without comprehending it or knowing what I felt about it, until I was in college and discovered science fiction, at which point I said to myself, "This is what life feels like –– the rapid change, the constant mutation of our way of existing, and so on." I began writing stories myself, and they were always science fiction. Looking back now I would say I lived through a powerful example of "future shock," and I found science fiction to be the literature of this shock, a sort of acceleration of history. Nowadays I think we are all living in a science fiction novel that we write together, so I am working in the right genre.   Click for larger image
       
 
What can you share about your creative process?
    Stories begin for me as images or ideas, often quite vague or fragmentary. Translating those beginnings into finished works of art is a matter of hard work over the long haul. Because I work with words and sentences, I must always focus on that level; not so much the big picture, as making a particular sentence spark an image in the reader's mind. So I often begin before I am ready to begin, and write in ignorance, doing my best sentence by sentence, and then when I've gone through the story once I go back and revise, time after time, and only late in the process does the vision I am trying to convey come into focus. So I would say that creativity and inspiration for me is not a matter of one big moment of vision (though sometimes that can happen) but more a ceaseless application of effort to matters of detail. That too is creativity.  
       
 
What ideas do you have for a future human community on Mars?
  My experience in Antarctica made me very aware of how much time the first Martian colonists are going to have to spend indoors, and how hard that can be to endure. I would therefore try to make sure that the first habitat includes many spacious views: perhaps the entire station could be placed on the rim of one of the great canyons, or occupy the top of a tall mesa, or be within sight of one of the great volcanoes. This gift of spaciousness and landscape will be very important to the colonists; they will be working hard in dangerous conditions and frequent confinement, so at all costs we must make sure there is a lot of daily beauty in their lives.  
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