In his Martian trilogy, the politics of this doubled desire lead Robinson to explore the consequences of people struggling 'to yoke together impossible opposites' (Green Mars 229): mind and body, spirit and matter, nature and culture, and biosphere and technoscience. Massive investments of labor, capital, and resources, in other words, offer us enhanced versions of a 'natural,' pre-technological existence (Ihde 76). The 'future primitive' that Robinson envisions both exploits and critiques what Don Ihde has called the 'doubled desire' of technology (75): technology presents itself as a crucial means to empowerment by allowing humankind to control nature and improve the quality of life however, the promises that it offers - pleasure, plenty, and self-actualization - ironically render it transparent. Taken together, though, the three novels demonstrate just how complex a notion 'utopia' can become. In this context, Robinson's Martian trilogy, Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996), constitutes a sustained, theoretically sophisticated attempt to conjure into being a future that resists the romantic dystopianism of cyberpunk, the antitechnological bias of much 'green' literature, and the blanket denunciations of capitalist technoscience that have become popular in some left-wing circles. This 'future primitive,' he implies, can serve as a powerful analytic to reveal - and indeed to gesture beyond - the forms of alienation that structure and are structured by the deep-seated antiecological values and assumptions characteristic of western thought (9-10).

In place of this denatured vision, Robinson urges his readers to explore the utopian possibilities of 'cobbl together aspects of the postmodern and the paleolithic' in a 'future primitive' that might best be described as an ecocentric turn toward holism (11).

In his own novels, as well as in this collection, Robinson offers alternatives to the genre's 'consensus vision' of humankind 'as the last organic units in denatured, metallic, clean, and artificial world' of a cyber-engineered future (9). images, endlessly reiterated, have come to form in our imagination a kind of consensus vision of the future' (9). In the introduction to Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, an anthology of 'green' science fiction stories, Kim Stanley Robinson defines science fiction as 'a collection of thought experiments that propose scenarios of the future.

Stanley robinson mars