Catastrophizing in style

Look, let’s just officially transfer all the duties of punditry over to the science-fiction writers. It’s they who’ve really spent some time and mental energy working out what might be in store for our civilization. Their constituencies tend to include fewer of the deep-pocketed power brokers and more of, let us say, the meek, who are supposed to inherit the earth anyway. Sure, science-fiction writers keep their heads in the clouds, but isn’t that better, in the long run, than up their asses?

Take Davis-based best-selling author Kim Stanley Robinson, of Fifty Degrees Below and the Mars trilogy, among other novels. Here’s a guy who knows his way around the topias—utopia, dystopia, Fruitopia. His talk, “How to Live, What to Do: Thinking With Technology in Environmental Crisis,” happens at UC Davis’ Everson Hall on Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. It’ll cost you nothing ’cause opinions are free.