The Unknowable Now: Passionate Science and Transformative Politics in Kim Stanley Robinson's SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL Trilogy

This article engages with the complex relation between knowledge-formation practices and inchoate socio-political transformations in Kim Stanley Robinson's SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL trilogy. Bringing an eco-critical perspective to the trilogy, and in specific conversation with the new-material turn in eco-cultural studies theory, I argue that the trilogy's depiction of science is intriguingly sensitive to two key concepts: that is, the much-discussed new-materialist theory of "distributed agency" and Donna Haraway's well-known concept of "situated knowledges." As the comfortable humanist notions of objectivity, autonomy, and intentionality are usefully obliterated by these new materialist theories, environmental theorists and activists must be careful not to underestimate the depths of this disruption. In fact, it will be imperative to rethink the contours of knowledge formation practices and their relation to political subjectivity and agency within this new posthuman and postnatural framework. I suggest that critical attention to the character of Frank Vanderwal both his personal transformation coined "optimodality" and the professional shift toward a "passionate science" that he helps to initiate in the novels usefully highlights key opportunities for (and challenges to) reimagining science and politics in the age of climate change. Ultimately, this is a process of reorientation that must unfold within what I argue we might productively term the "unknowable now."