I have to admit to mixed feelings about this year's Clarke Award shortlist. On the one hand, it includes some of my favorite authors, including Kim Stanley Robinson, Nick Harkaway and Ken MacLeod. On the other hand, the Clarke Awards have been criticized in the past for honoring only male authors — and this helps fuel…

Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Red Mars, The Years of Rice and Salt, and 2312, has always vacillated between writing about the future and writing alternate histories. His latest historical novel, Shaman, is as unconventional as his alternate histories have been. He takes us 20,000 years into the past, into the…

Too often, we associate complexity and thoughtfulness with pessimism. But in Kim Stanley Robinson's gorgeous new space opera, 2312, the renowned author demonstrates that hopeful futures can be as complicated as any dystopia. Part eco-thriller, part detective story, this novel rockets us across the solar system inside…

You've seen lots of timelines of "future history" before — but they tend to be mostly drawing from the classics by people like Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. But over at The Awl, Jane Hu has compiled a future timeline, which draws heavily on recent publications like Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 and Paolo Bacigalupi's…

Kim Stanley Robinson is a legend of science fiction. He's best known as the author of the Hugo-winning Mars series (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars), the Three Californias trilogy, and alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt. This year he published one of his masterworks, the novel 2312, about what…

This week on the io9 show, we share our summer science fiction must-read list — so you can escape to other worlds when you hit the beach. We also interview Kim Stanley Robinson about his brand new book, 2312.

You may know Kim Stanley Robinson from magnificent works like the Mars Trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt. Now he's back with a new novel called 2312, out today, which is about colonizing the solar system 300 years from now. But it's also about a lot of other things, like art and family and the place of science in …

Publishers Weekly interviews Kim Stanley Robinson about his "mindblowing" new novel 2312, and some sections that were too lengthy for the magazine have gone up online. Including a great part where Robinson talks about borrowing from John Brunner and John Dos Passos, to use collage and different types of writing to fill…

Science fiction and fantasy books are bigger than ever. A Dance With Dragons and Stephen King's time-travel saga rule the bestseller lists. Literary authors all flock to write about zombies, apocalypses and time travel. And by all indications, 2012 is going to be an even greater year for genre books.

What kind of world are we leaving to our grandchildren? Can we even imagine a world after climate change? Some of the world's greatest authors, including David Mitchell and Kim Stanley Robinson, grapple with climate change and our future in a new story collection. Here's a review by Pauline Masurel from Green Prophet.