A Love Letter to the ‘Best Mountain Range on Earth’
Picture a lone human walking across the rocky expanse of a planet, talking to himself as he goes—a lone human alert to signs that this is a planetary surface, to “the speed,” as he puts it, “of the planet rolling under your feet.” This is the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson somewhere high in the southern Sierra Nevada—“the heart of the range”—almost any time in the past 49 years. He could be a sunwalker from his novel 2312, but the planet is Earth, not Mercury, and the California sun won’t incinerate him.
Robinson is hiking off-trail, and—as he writes in his new book, his easy gait is a mode of being: “pedestrian and prosy.” He may be paying close attention to anything or nothing: his plantar fasciitis, a scatter of obsidian chips at a Native American knapping site, the way the mountains “seem to glow from within, to pulse with an internal light, under a sky as dark and solid as
