Reading again Kim Stanley Robinson

In a tentative to move back to a mode where I do not work (so much) on week-ends, I started reading again the books by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I like a lot. After re-reading my all-time favorite Mars Trilogy, I am currently reading again "Forty Signs of Rain", hoping to move later to the other tomes of the "Science in the Capital" serie, which I did not read before (I read "Forty Signs of Rain" when it came out, and did not have the time to follow up after). As always with Robinson's work, I strongly identify with the scientist character (I loved "Saxifrage" in Red Mars), but feels very close to the anthropologist views of the "Frank" characters in both books ("Frank Chalmers" in the Mars trilogy, and "Frank Vanderwall" in the "Science in the Capital" serie). On the second reading I am getting quite a distinct perception of the book: this is in part because I am now much more familiar with global warming news and science (in great part thanks to the first reading of the book), but also because I got much more bitter about the academic environment, and feels more touched by pessimistic stances such as the following one:

People plugging away in the same old ways, trying to do things according to the plan, even a flawed plan: normal science, in Kuhnian terms, as well as in the more ordinary sense. All so normal, so trusting that the system worked, when obviously the system was both rigged and broken. How could they persevere? How could they be so blinkered, so determined, so dense? Kim Stanley Robinson, voicing Frank Vanderwall in "Forty Signs of Rain"

I was so stricken by how Robinson put in words my exact feelings, that I had to stop reading and copy this quote in my notes, where it joined another one from another book of Robinson:

How be optimistic, when there was so much wrong, with so much? In a world coming apart it had become a kind of stupidity. Kim Stanley Robinson, voicing an "active optimist", in Antartica

Don't be misguided by the negativity in those two statements: Robinson is a very positive writer. In all his novels, some of the characters are very cynical and critics of the system in which they operate, yet they always work hard to change it (little by little, through sweat and constant effort, not using magical, punctual solutions) and better it. I feel deeply stirred by such stories: it put words on my actions in a way that only a writer (which I am not) could have.