Kim Stanley Robinson Quote

When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth’s climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth’s mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North Africa and southern Europe. The dry belt runs more than halfway across the Eurasia-African landmass — a burnt rock landscape, home to the fiery religions that then spread out and torched the rest of the world. Coincidence?

Kim Stanley Robinson

When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth’s climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth’s mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North Africa and southern Europe. The dry belt runs more than halfway across the Eurasia-African landmass — a burnt rock landscape, home to the fiery religions that then spread out and torched the rest of the world. Coincidence?

Tags: religion

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About Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson (born March 23, 1952) is an American writer of science fiction. He has published 22 novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his Mars trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes and feature scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. The Atlantic has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." According to an article in The New Yorker, Robinson is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers."