Karla Nielsen, senior curator of literary collections at The Huntington, added: “This archive opens a window onto Robinson’s working methods. The notebooks he kept consistently for decades document his wide-ranging reading and include notes to self, research from books and interviews, drafts of scenes. The archive also includes large pieces of paper on which he outlined the chapters of many of his novels. These materials show how Robinson’s research and networks informed well-plotted speculative fiction that aims to give readers ways to think about urgent real-world concerns.”
Robinson's writing has received significant academic attention as well as coverage in The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Literary critic Fredric Jameson, Robinson’s dissertation advisor, praised Red Mars as “one of those rare moments in which science fiction and the mainstream novel meet and coincide… now struck and illuminated by History as by a lightning bolt.”
The Robinson collection is currently being processed with the goal of making it available to researchers by 2027.
