His supple, thoughtful prose is always up to the challenge, whether exciting us with ideas, thrilling us with spectacle or presenting us with moments of elegy or quiet passion. Robinson can write action and adventure as well as anyone, but in the end this is an ethical fiction about the true purpose of humanity. For Robinson, science fiction is not only a literature of ideas, but a literature whose characters have lots of them. It is always good talk, in which everyone speaks in character. If there is a weakness in Robinson's work, it is perhaps this his characters are so intelligent that they never shut up and often have fascinating conversations for page after page about the engineering of fortifications or the reconciliation of Sufism and Confucianism or, most extendedly, the ways that history works. Even his Great Men (and Women) live in a social context and are bearers, rather than creators, of historical significance. Kim Stanley Robinson has a view of historical process that is refreshingly other to that of much science fiction.
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