Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson

Born in Waukegan, Illinois, but raised in Orange County, California, Kim Stanley Robinson loved to play in the orange groves stretching out for miles around his home, but when suburban sprawl began to encroach and the groves were torn out and paved over, the rapid change of modern life hit him close to home. In college, he stumbled on new wave science fiction seeing it as not only the best realism for our time, but an expression of that very sense of rapid change that had made such an impression on him during his childhood. Robinson has since become one of the most well-known and respected science fiction writers in the world, having received 11 major awards from the science fiction field. His Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) was an international bestseller, while his environmentalist work closer to home was the basis for him being named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment” in 2008. He has worked with the U.S. National Science Foundation, and was part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers program in 1995, when he spent two months in Antarctica courtesy of NSF. Robinson has a B.A. and a Ph.D. in literature from University of California, San Diego, and an M.A. in English from Boston University. He taught literature at the University of California, Davis, before becoming a full-time writer and parent.