It has been said that Kim Stanley Robinson is a brilliant writer and a terrible novelist, and having read a good deal of his ouvre, I can attest to that. One recent exception, however, must be New York 2140. For one, it has characters that you follow, chapter by chapter, interrupted only occasionally by pieces outlining the economics or the air currents or the specifics of a city under water. The characters, which include the City of New York, are the pieces of the puzzle that make the entire thing believable.
Best of all, it offers hope for the future.
Like all of us, I am hoping that we can somehow mitigate the effects of global warming, making life in the future both viable and productive. But I also think that human ingenuity can find a way – current casualties of the Hajj and enormous areas of India set on broil notwithstanding – to make a new normal work for them.
In Robinson’s 2140, enormous Antarctic ice shelves have calved off into the sea, creating a world-wide tsunami which then receded into a rise in sea levels of fifty (50) feet or more, making New York City streets into canals, the Venice of the Atlantic. But New York is not a wholly drowned city. Its skyscrapers, rooted as they are in the bedrock of Manhattan Island, still stand and are occupied as island archipelagoes linked by canal boats and suspension bridges. Each island, having become residential coops, has one or more “farm floors,” where produce is grown. Animals thrive there as well. Boats take to the water and sometimes the air to transport New Yorkers to where they need to be – whether for business or family affairs.
In other words, New York dealt with its drowned dead, sealed off its upper floors, got creative and carried on life as New Yorkers. New Yorkers in the Venice of the Atlantic, but New Yorkers all the same.
It’s a fun read, from the water rat teenagers to the slick real estate venture capitalist. Things have changed, but not entirely. Lovely humanity goes on its merry way against all odds. You may not think that’s what should happen, but it cheers me up considerably.
Robinson’s 2312 is another story entirely. Or, to be more precise, not so much a story as a fever dream of the future. There are a few characters, two in particular in which we take an interest, but their movements are relatively far apart and seemingly non-sequential. What is really interesting about this “novel,” is its novel approach to the technology of the future, one in which AI has an important role in that they are instrumental in making asteroids into spaceships. And sure enough, toward the end, we are being asked to worry if AI isn’t the big bad that today’s worrywarts worry about.
All in all, this is a world – a solar system – in which Mars, Venus, and Mercury have been terraformed to a certain extent and settled – as have a couple of the Moons of Saturn - and our heroes routinely zip back and forth between these planets aboard commandeered asteroids that have been hollowed out (AI) and terraformed in various, interesting ways.
Earth is, as usual, a mess.
The story is interspersed with a lot of short chapters that are not so much explanatory as just some stuff that Robinson is thinking about while writing this book. The reader has to have some patience and the curiosity to see what in the world he is on about.
Luckily, I have both. I’m just a little disappointed that I won’t live long enough to take a ride in a repurposed asteroid terraformed into the English countryside of the 19th century on a joy ride around Jupiter.