...what has mattered are the moments of exposure to every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes a great man, for a moment; and the choices made in those moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history.

(subsequently anthologized)
A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (in Vinland the Dream) Originally publiKim Stanley Robinsond in Author's Choice Monthly #20 Pulphouse Publishing May 1991. In 1982 he married Lisa Howland Nowell an environmental chemist and they have two sons. Awards
Robinson's novels have won eleven major science fiction awards and have been nominated on twenty-nine occasions.

His work delves into ecological and sociological themes regularly and many of his novels appear to be the direct result of his own scientific fascinations such as the fifteen years of research and lifelong fascination with the planet Mars. Robinson's work has been labeled by reviewers as literary science fiction.