Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Novels of Philip K. Dick | 1984 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Buy |
| 2 | Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction | 2014 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Buy |
| 3 | The High Sierra | 2022 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Buy |
Robinson’s non-fiction is relatively small in volume but spans very different subjects. The Novels of Philip K. Dick (1984) began as his doctoral dissertation at UC San Diego, where he studied under Fredric Jameson. It remains one of the more rigorous academic treatments of Dick’s work, examining the major novels in terms of their philosophical and political concerns rather than primarily as genre entertainment. Robinson has acknowledged Dick as a major early influence on his thinking about science fiction.
Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014), co-edited with Gerry Canavan, is an academic anthology collecting essays on how science fiction has treated environmental themes and non-human nature. Robinson contributed an introduction and helped organize the volume around questions about utopia, ecology, and what SF can and cannot do when addressing environmental crisis. It sits alongside his fiction as evidence of his longstanding intellectual engagement with these subjects.
The High Sierra (2022) is the most personal of the three, a book Robinson describes as a love letter to the California mountains where he has spent significant time since childhood. It combines geological history, descriptions of specific routes and terrain, accounts of his own trips over many years, and writing about the ecology of high-altitude environments. For readers interested in understanding what shaped Robinson’s sensibility, this book offers direct access to the landscape that runs through so much of his fiction.