To tackle climate change, we need good stories and we need good storytellers. Kim Stanley Robinson is a climate fiction author who has written more than 20 novels, including Ministry for the Future, which was published in 2020. It opens in 2025, with a heatwave that kills millions in India. It’s a grim scene, and what follows is the story of humans striving to cope with an increasingly inhospitable planet — there’s ecoterrorism, high-finance, wild chases over the Swiss Alps. What emerges in Ministry is the a ‘optopian’ roadmap, in which the world gets to grips with the climate crisis and begins to rectify the situation.

In the first of three episodes talking with climate storytellers on Zero, we hear from Robinson about how he crafts a good story out of a desperate situation, what he thinks the limits of climate storytelling are, and how his thinking has changed since publishing Ministry for the Future.

Read more: 

• Kim Stanley Robinson’s columns for Bloomberg Green
• Zero: High hopes for biodiversity, but who will pay? 
• A transcript of this episode

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Kira Bindrim, Todd Woody and Abraiya Ruffin. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit bloomberg.com/green