A couple of days ago I linked to an article by Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt.

In the article, Robinson cogently outlines the connection between striving for global social justice and tackling climate change, going so far as to say that “justice becomes a kind of climate change technology.” What really interests me, however, is the call that Robinson puts out at the end for all of us to close a gap in our collective imagination, to fill in “a blank spot in our vision of the future”: namely, what economic system will succeed capitalism.

Of course postcapitalist theories abound, a few personal favorites being the steady-state economy and post-scarcity anarchism. But the problem here is that they are just theories and models, none of which have been tested in the real world. And, if you believe Robinson, we need to discover which of these theories are viable if we are going to survive the next century. Science fiction offers a great testing environment for extended thought experiments in this vein – Singularity Sky by Charles Stross offers an accelerated vision (pun intended) of the arrival of post-scarcity anarchism in its opening chapters,

and Robinson’s own Mars trilogy offers a compelling narrative of competing postcapitalisms that takes place over the course of decades, applied to the mesocosm of a terraforming Mars.

via the terraforming art gallery.

P.S. Robinson’s favorite band is YES.

Fragile cover art by Roger Dean.