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Hardcover (Trade)

Published February 2020
Hardcover (Trade) price: $30.00
Weight: 1.77

ISBN-13: 978-1-61037-340-1
ISBN-10: 1-61037-340-5
Page count: 316
Book Size: 5-1/2" x 8-1/2"

Stan's Kitchen

A Robinson Reader

This text relates to the 1st edition • Hardcover (Trade)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

This is a Boskone book by the Boskone 57 Guest of Honor. We have numbered each book and Stan has graciously signed them all.

This hand-signed edition is limited to 600 lettered or numbered copies (A through J and 1 to 590 respectively). Unfortunately, 17 numbered copies were destroyed in shipment. Therefore, with the permission of the author, an additional 17 copies numbered 591 to 607 were added to this edition.

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the most well-known SF writers in the world, applauded in non-SF circles for his grasp of vital ecological and political issues. His Mars trilogy, his Science in the Capital trilogy, and his recent novels 2312, Aurora, New York 2140, and Red Moon are all modern SF classics, each exploring directions in which our world may be heading.

In this book, Stan offers you a rare treat, a selection of his favorite pieces of his own writing, which offers a unique view into important ideas within many of his areas of interest. Stan has chosen examples of his entertaining fiction, including a band disaster, an exploration of the idea of whether Vinland existed or not, how a curveball might work on Mars, and his final Mars story.

Also included are insightful and wide-ranging essays on Gene Wolfe, Cecelia Holland, Joanna Russ, Stanislaw Lem, George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, and Chip Delany that should make you want to run out to find and read more of their works.

You’ll read of some of his optimistic and naturalistic visions of our world in essays on predicting the future, on utopias and dystopias, on his Antarctic adventures, on hiking experiences in the wild, and on the fight to name a mountain. This personal collection of prose and poetry is the next best thing to sitting in Stan’s kitchen, sharing a cup of coffee and conversation with the master.

Dust jacket illustration “Isosceles Peak from Dusy Basin” ©2012 by Tom Killion Dust jacket design by Matt Smaldone

Table of Contents

  • What’s in My Pocket
  • Stan’s Kitchen An Introduction by Michael Blumlein
  • The Part of Us That Loves
  • “A Story,” by Kim S. Robinson
  • Notes for an Essay on Cecelia Holland
  • An Introduction to The Female Man by Joanna Russ
  • Lem in California
  • Animal Farm in 1992
  • An Introduction to Ubik by Philip K. Dick
  • Happy Birthday Ursula
  • Delany Considered
  • Vinland the Dream
  • Six Poems from If Wang Wei Lived on Mars:
  • Crossing Mather Pass
  • Invisible Owls
  • Tenzing
  • The Red’s Lament
  • A Report on the First Recorded Case of Areophagy
  • Two Years
  • Discovering Life
  • How to Predict the Future
  • What Can’t Happen Won’t
  • Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars
  • Dystopia/Utopia
  • Enough Is As Good As a Feast
  • Source of the Peach Blossom Stream
  • Six Day Poems by the Widow Kang
  • Prometheus Unbound, at Last (And None Too Soon)
  • The Worst Journey in the World Revisited
  • Introduction to In the Sierra: Mountain Writing by Kenneth Rexroth. 223
  • Somewhat Lost
  • Naming Mount Thoreau
  • Kistenpass
  • Zürich
  • Oral Argument
  • Seven Shaman Songs
  • The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, April 1942
  • Pippilouette’s Story
  • Acknowledgments
  • Sources
Edited by David G. Grubbs
Cover art by Tom Killion
Cover design by Matt Smaldone

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