Pamela Zoline speaks with Noah Travis Phillips about the Colorado Plateau, recent work, and the science that excites her, ahead of science fiction tribute stories by both authors.
Pamela Zoline is a Chicago-born science fiction writer whose work focuses on speculative fiction, environmental education, and politics. A key figure in the New Wave of science fiction in the late 1960s, she was then living in London, studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, and organizing a utopian space and alternative art center called The Arts Lab. Zoline featured prominently in the avant-garde period of New Worlds magazine alongside contemporaries like John Clute, Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, and Carol Emshwiller.
Zoline’s roots, however, lie in the Colorado mountains. She spent part of her childhood there and returned to the Rockies after her London breakthrough.
She has now lived in Telluride for almost fifty years, where she is actively involved in grassroots and institutional activism.
She is also a painter, most recently creating a mural for the 2024 Telluride Mountainfilm Festival inspired by Diane Arbus’s 1970 photograph A Jewish Giant at Home with his Parents in the Bronx, New York.
Zoline has two upcoming stories set in the Colorado Plateau, including a tribute to Terry Bisson titled “Bears Discover Singularity,” to be published in the 60th anniversary New Worlds anthology.
Noah Travis Phillips spoke with Pamela Zoline about her relationship to the Telluride region, her recent work, and the contemporary science that excites her. On our website, you can read Phillips’s tribute to Zoline, a “cover” of her classic short story “The Heat Death of the Universe.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your relationship with the Telluride region like on the heels of your science fiction adventures in London and meeting your husband, artist and architect John Lifton?
When we returned to the region in the late ’60s, it was a big new chapter in the life of this tiny but dramatic town. This was the period when hippies were moving from cities into the countryside and setting up communes and things, and Telluride was sort of taken over by a flow of very young hippies, mostly incredibly well-educated, who wanted an urbane life and community. And we were hippies enough ourselves, so that was fine with us. These hippies were highly political, ecological, and dedicated. The hippies often get painted in such dumb colors by people. But there was a powerful moral imperative to protest the war, and to transform culture, along with an awakening and radicalization of consciousness. Alas, even though we didn’t fix the world, we did lay a foundation for a lot of the things that are even more progressive now. And I have to say, I don’t think there’s going to be any future that’s not radical.
Today, the situation that we are experiencing, along with most other beautiful places in the world, is that we are totally at risk of being loved to death, and the pressures of gentrification are extreme, and if left unmoderated, the fangs of late capitalism will end up destroying these communities, and the planet. Early on, we co-founded the Telluride Institute, which was called “the world’s highest think-and-do tank.” The Telluride Institute has done many things relating to water, housing, community, and watershed education. We agree with the saying, “if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” So it’s crucial that young people grow up knowing the place in layers and depths, and experientially. Then, they can become natural stewards of the watershed, which is what’s needed. This thinking is guided by [American writer and environmental activist] Gary Snyder, who I think is obviously a living national treasure.
Reviewers often highlight your reflections on entropy in your influential short story “The Heat Death of the Universe.” What recent scientific theories and discoveries are currently inspiring you?
I think we are in a glorious and amazing renaissance of knowledge, at the macro and the micro scales. But I feel like much of the best science is overshadowed by the incredible crisis we’ve cooked up like the smart monkeys we are. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the trade-offs have been bizarre. I mean, I would never have anticipated that in order to have great communication, people would be willing to give up things like community, privacy, and interiority. And I don’t know how many generations you can get into that before it gets much harder to try to recreate them. I mean, talk about a time of the good and the bad.
An important project we’re currently working on is the Clute Science Fiction Library, which highlights the ability of science fiction to aid research into the past, present, and future, and how it shapes and is shaped by the changing world. Science fiction can serve as an engine of prophecy and advocacy. With the future roaring in upon us, what really counts is future-proofing for our next immediate communities. And for us, this library is very important in a utopian vision of mountain and rural towns as nodes in a network of deep resources that hope to be useful to the coming generations. But these challenges are coming, and we’ve got to keep the understanding that it’s a very round table, and we need as much diversity and representation around that table as possible. We can’t have a lot of growth here because there are physical limits, but what we should have is a real community. What happened to us is we ate dessert first, we did the easy stuff first, and now it’s time for the effort and trying our best. I happen to like vegetables, but, you know, it’s not dessert.
