Earlier today AZCentral.com, the online hub for The Arizona Republic newspaper and Arizona’s 12 News, published a Q+A with Kim Stanley Robinson, a dear friend of Project Hieroglyph, a leading proponent of utopian thinking in science fiction, and one of the speakers at our Hieroglyph launch event in Phoenix on October 22. A brief excerpt:
Q: As a sci-fi writer, what got you interested in writing about the distant past?
A: To me they’re part of the same project, because if you write science fiction, you’re always asking what can human beings become in the future. And to answer that, you have to immediately think, well, what are we now and how did we become what we are now? I have been for a long time interested in looking backward to the Paleolithic, because there are some really extraordinary things that happened in the time. I guess the main one I would describe as a kind of paradox. We lived using, as far as we can tell, pretty much the same tools and the same lifestyle, doing the same things all the time, and yet during that time our brain grew to be like three times bigger than the start of that period. So what we were doing in that period was clearly basic to humanity, because it made us.
Check out the full piece at AZCentral.com, and we hope to see you at the event on October 22! Robinson is also giving a free lecture at Changing Hands Bookstore in Downtown Phoenix on Friday, October 24 on the Chauvet Cave paintings and exploring the minds of our Paleolithic ancestors.