Kim Stanley Robinson books

Anthologies

Capital Code/Science In The Capital Reading Order

Mars Collections

Mars Trilogy Reading Order

Nebula Awards Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Three Californias Triptych Reading Order

Universe Reading Order

Kim Stanley Robinson grew up in Southern California and earned a PhD in English from UC San Diego, writing his dissertation on Philip K. Dick. That literary grounding shows throughout his career: his novels are dense with ideas but also careful about character and place. He began publishing short fiction in the early 1980s, and his debut novel The Wild Shore appeared in 1984 as the first book of the Three Californias Triptych, a set of three novels imagining radically different futures for the same stretch of Orange County coastline.

The Mars trilogy, beginning with Red Mars in 1993, made Robinson’s reputation in science fiction. The three novels follow the colonization and terraforming of Mars across two centuries, treating politics, ecology, economics, and human nature with unusual seriousness. Red Mars won the Nebula Award, and Green Mars and Blue Mars each won the Hugo. After Mars, Robinson continued writing novels on a similar scale, including The Years of Rice and Salt (an alternate history spanning seven centuries), the Science in the Capital trilogy about climate change in Washington DC, and later standalone works like 2312, Aurora, and The Ministry for the Future.

Robinson has also edited anthologies and written non-fiction, including a critical study of Philip K. Dick’s novels and The High Sierra, a personal account of the California mountain range where he has hiked for decades. His short fiction, collected across several volumes, shows the same concerns as his novels: the relationship between humans and their environments, the possibilities and failures of political organization, and the long timescales on which geological and biological change operates.