Best-Case Futures: Why Science Fiction Is the Genre of Our Time

Humboldt’s Home Essay

Inspired by: Best-Case Scenario by Joshua Rothman — The New Yorker, January 31, 2022

Introduction: A Genre for a Planet in Crisis

When Joshua Rothman wrote about Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, he wasn’t just reviewing a novel. He was offering a reflection on the role of imagination at a moment of planetary crisis. Robinson’s book is unapologetically ambitious: it tries to imagine, in credible detail, how humanity might survive climate change and build a livable future. Rothman recognized the audacity in this. Most fiction narrows in on individuals or communities; Robinson zooms out to the planet, to economics, technology, politics, and even to the cry of glaciers collapsing into the sea. What makes Rothman’s essay resonate so deeply is his insight that science fiction is not escapism anymore. It is the literature of reality. At a time when humanity faces interlocking crises—climate disruption, pandemics, artificial intelligence, mass migration, biodiversity collapse—science fiction has become the genre that mirrors reality’s complexity most faithfully.

Science Fiction as the Genre of Our Time

For most of literary history, realist fiction claimed to be the genre best suited to “serious” life. But the 21st century has upended that hierarchy. We now live in a world where the “realist” novel of manners risks feeling provincial. After all, what is a small-town squabble compared to the Amazon rainforest tipping into savannah? Or the possibility of geoengineering altering the sky over every continent? Science fiction is the genre that can stretch across systems: • It models ecological interdependence. • It tracks unexpected consequences rippling across borders. • It holds multiple scales of time—from human lifespans to planetary eras. • It insists on imagining outcomes, both catastrophic and hopeful. In this way, science fiction does what our moment most requires: it invites us to think like systems theorists and moral philosophers simultaneously. It is the genre that lets us practice seeing the world whole.

Robinson as Humboldt’s Heir

Kim Stanley Robinson occupies a place that Alexander von Humboldt would have recognized. Humboldt believed that nature could not be understood in fragments. He measured volcanoes, mapped ecosystems, charted currents, but he always returned to the larger vision: everything is interconnected, everything is reciprocal. Robinson’s fiction works the same way. His novels weave together economics, politics, physics, psychology, and ecology. The Ministry for the Future is less about individual characters than about systems in collision—markets, governments, movements, and Earth’s physical feedback loops. In that sense, Robinson is not a novelist in the narrow sense but a cartographer of the planetary imagination. Just as Humboldt’s maps helped 19th-century readers grasp the unity of the natural world, Robinson’s speculative scenarios help us see the possibilities of the future as part of one integrated system. Both men turn complexity into vision.

Rothman as Interpreter

Joshua Rothman plays a different but equally important role. He is the bridge between the literary world and the broader culture of ideas. Rothman has a gift for recognizing when a writer is not merely telling a story but proposing a new way of thinking. In Best-Case Scenario, Rothman shows us that Robinson’s climate fiction is not niche but central. He reframes science fiction from “genre fiction” into “the literature of our circumstance.” Just as Humboldt required interpreters and popularizers to spread his ideas, Robinson requires critics like Rothman to explain why imagination matters for policy, ethics, and survival. Rothman makes visible the hidden truth: science fiction is not about other planets or far futures. It is about the present, refracted through possibility.

Imagination as Infrastructure

One of the deepest insights in Rothman’s essay is that imagining futures is itself a kind of infrastructure. Without stories about what survival could look like, societies default to despair—or drift toward disaster without vision. Robinson’s fiction provides scenarios that policymakers, activists, and citizens can debate. Geoengineering, carbon coins, refugee protections, ecological reparations—these are not mere plot devices. They are prototypes, offered to the collective imagination. Fiction here functions as a laboratory for policy and ethics. In this sense, science fiction is not marginal. It is as essential as the Paris Agreement or the IPCC reports, because it allows us to think emotionally and collectively about what abstract data cannot yet make us feel.

The Humboldt’s Home Connection

Humboldt’s Home is a project about interconnectedness—about the ways systems, stories, and people shape one another in unexpected ways. Seen through the HH lens, Robinson and Rothman are doing Humboldt’s work in modern form. • Robinson gives us the planetary narrative, showing the connections across climate, politics, and morality. • Rothman translates that narrative for readers who might otherwise dismiss science fiction as escapism. • Readers and Students are invited into the conversation—not as passive observers but as future shapers, whose imagination and decisions will tilt the balance toward disaster or survival. In a sense, Humboldt’s Home is itself a science-fictional act: it imagines a “clubhouse” where people of all ages can think and act as if the world’s interconnections mattered. That is a fictional scenario—but one we can choose to live into.

Sidebar: The Unexpected Consequences of Science Fiction

One of the joys of tracking interconnectedness is noticing how ideas in fiction ripple into reality. Science fiction has a long history of shaping the possible: • Star Trek’s Communicator → Cell Phones. • Cyberpunk → Internet Ethics. • Geoengineering in Fiction → Policy Debate. • Octavia Butler’s Earthseed → Social Movements. These cases illustrate an HH principle: stories create feedback loops in the real world. Imagining futures is not neutral; it reconfigures what becomes possible.

Classroom Prompts

1. Do you agree that science fiction is the best genre for our time? Why or why not? 2. How does Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future resemble Humboldt’s project of mapping interconnections? 3. Can you think of a work of science fiction that influenced real-world technology or politics? 4. What would a “best-case scenario” for your community look like in 20 years? How might fiction help you imagine it? 5. Is it dangerous to hope? Or does hope—expressed through stories—create the conditions for survival?

Conclusion: Choosing the Best-Case

At its heart, Rothman’s essay reminds us that literature is not ornamental—it is functional. We need stories as much as we need science. Robinson’s science fiction offers one indispensable thing: a best-case scenario that is neither naive nor impossible. To live in our moment is to face cascading crises. But to read and imagine together is to practice the art of interconnected survival. Science fiction is the genre of our time because it helps us build the narrative infrastructure for futures worth fighting for. And perhaps, as Humboldt would have recognized, that is the greatest service a writer can render: to show us that everything is reciprocal, and that the maps we draw in imagination may yet guide our steps in reality.

Sources

• Rothman, Joshua. “Best-Case Scenario.” The New Yorker, January 31, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/31/best-case-scenario

• Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future. Orbit Books, 2020.

• Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” The Writer on Her Work, edited by Janet Sternburg, 1980.

• Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2011.

• Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

• Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press, 2017.

• Kolbert, Elizabeth. “Can Geoengineering Fix the Climate Crisis?” The New Yorker, Nov 23, 2012.

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