Venice Drowned

Preface

I remember Kim Stanley Robinson as one of the best writers in quite an impressive group of students I taught at the Clarion science fiction writing workshop in the mid-seventies. He was not the one who dismantled the ceiling, though, nor the one who carried around a small bale of marijuana and a glazed expression, nor the one who supposedly had shacked up with one of the instructors, nor the one who liberated the fire hose… unfortunately for me, Stan was just a pleasant, hardworking guy who was mainly thereto write, and write well. Which makes it difficult to do a racy introduction for him. Doubly difficult because he pleads modesty and will only reveal the following information:

1.He did his Ph.D. thesis on the novels of Philip K. Dick (whether in the department of English, theology, philosophy, or pharmacy, he does not say).

2. He teaches at the University of California at Davis.

3. His first novel, The Wild Shore, came out from Ace in 1984.

"Venice Drowned" is a nearly flawless exemplar of a kin of writing that can only be done in science fiction. I don’t know if it has a name — in academic jargon I suppose it would be something like "refractive mimesis" — but it’s that creepy kind of double-vision writing where an imagined world, similar to ours but different in some dramatic particular, is described with such painstaking authority that it becomes absolutely real, to such c extent that the world ceases to be simply background for the story; in a curious way, it becomes the story. Philip Dick was the master of this kind of invention, of course, which doesn’t detract from Stan’s achievement. Rereading it gives me goosebumps.