The new Kim Stanley Robinson novel looks as if it's been scientifically calculated to irritate me.

KSR's often touted as a utopian, but one who tends to realism. But it's that 'realism' which betrays utopianism. A rehashed post-WW2 international liberalism of institutions won't save us.

Or, if you want to hold onto the meaning of utopian as naively clinging to the wildly improbable, it's this realism which is actually utopian.

Or, to say it another way, literary realism is incompatible with political realism because the latter, confronted by this world, must necessarily be fantastically utopian.

(The book may grapple with this, of course, but there's a hope in progress, reason, science and democracy in KSR I can never get on board with)