Only in US can Kim Stanley Robinson be called a centre-left writer. Just look at Red Mars - the main character is a White Male US Hero directly from The Right Stuff movie, who gets betrayed by a jealous black US man who lost him in career, love and fame and gets the White Male US Hero killed by Arabs.

White Male US Hero's half-Asian son in the later novels is described negatively for wanting to save the pristine landscape of Mars while fighting for its independence for which he dies. In the third generation the White Male US Hero's grand-daughter, now only 1/4 Asian and shown to have more of the character of the late White Male US Hero, is portrayed more positively. It tells a lot about the nature of most of science fiction in US - far-right, right-wing anarchism - that a right-winger like Robinson, who goes out of his way to deny Climate Change (its volcanoes under the Arctic) as a reason for flooding of Earth in the last Mars novel, can appear a man of the left, even if only of the centre-left variety.

In the trilogy now abridged as Green Earth he gave up on the Climate Change denial but out of the US of A he is not a progressive author. A very similar case is David Brin, a man of the centre in United States and moderate right-winger everywhere else.