Review: New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Sun Jan 20 19:10:44 PST 2019


New York 2140
by Kim Stanley Robinson

Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: March 2017
Printing:  March 2018
ISBN:      0-316-26233-1
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     624

About forty years in our future, world-wide sea levels suddenly rose
ten feet over the course of a decade due to collapse of polar ice,
creating one of the largest disasters in history. It was enough to get
people to finally take greenhouse effects and the risks of fossil fuels
seriously, but too late to prevent the Second Pulse: a collapse of
Antarctic ice shelves that raised global ocean levels another forty
feet. Now, about fifty years after the Second Pulse, New York is still
standing but half-drowned. The northern half of Manhattan Island is
covered with newly-constructed superscrapers. The skyscrapers in the
southern half, anchored in bedrock, survive in a precarious new world
of canals, underwater floors, commuter boats, high-tech sealants, and
murky legal structures.

The Met Life Tower is one of those surviving buildings and is home to
the cast of this novel: two quants (programmers and mathematicians who
work on financial algorithms) living in temporary housing on the farm
floor, the morose building super, the social worker who has headed the
building co-op board for decades, a chief inspector for the NYPD, a
derivatives trader who runs a housing index for the half-drowned
intertidal areas, a streaming video star who takes on wildlife
preservation projects in her dirigible Assisted Migration, and a couple
of orphan street kids (in this world, water rats) endlessly looking for
their next adventure. The characters start the book engrossed in their
day-to-day lives, which have settled into a workable equilibrium. But
they're each about to play a role in another great disruption in
economic life.

This is my sixth try for Kim Stanley Robinson novels, and I've yet to
find a book I really liked. It may be time to give up.

I really want to like Robinson's writing. He's writing novels about an
intersection of ecology and politics that I find inherently
interesting, particularly since he emphasizes people's ability to adapt
without understating the magnitude of future challenges. I think he's
getting better at characterization (more on that in a moment). But this
sort of book, particularly the way Robinson writes it, elevates the
shape of the future world to the role of protagonist, which means it
has to hold up to close scrutiny. And for me this didn't.

As is typical in Robinson novels, New York 2140 opens with an extended
meander through the everyday lives of multiple protagonists. This is
laying the groundwork for pieces of later plot, but only slowly. It's
primarily a showcase for the Robinson's future extrapolation, here made
more obvious by a viewpoint "character" whose chapters are straight
infodumps about future history. And that extrapolated world is odd and
unconvincing in ways that kept throwing me out of the story. The
details of environmental catastrophe and adaptation aren't the problem;
I suspect those are the best-researched parts of the book, and they
seemed at least plausible to me. It's politics and economics that get
Robinson into trouble.

For example, racism is apparently not a thing that exists in 2140 New
York on any systematic scale. We're at most fifty years past what would
be the greatest refugee crisis in the history of humanity, one that
would have caused vast internal dislocation in the United States let
alone in the rest of the world. Migrant and refugee crises in Syria and
Central America in the current day that are orders of magnitude less
severe set off paroxysms of racist xenophobia. And yet, this plays no
role whatsoever in the politics of this book.

It's not that the main characters wouldn't have noticed. One is a
social worker who works specifically with refugees on housing, and
whose other job is running a housing co-op. In our world, racism is
very near the center of US housing policy. Another, the police
inspector, is a tall black woman from a poor background, but the only
interaction she has with racism in the whole book is a brief and odd
mention of how she might appear to a private security mercenary that
she faces down. It seriously tries my suspension of disbelief that
racism would not be a constant irritant, or worse, through her entire
career.

Racism doesn't need to be a central topic of every book, and sometimes
there's a place for science fiction novels that intentionally write
racism out as an optimistic statement or as momentary relief. But the
rest of this book seems focused on a realistic forward projection, not
on that sort of deep social divergence. Robinson does not provide even
a hint of the sort of social change that would be required for racism
to disappear in a country founded on a racial caste system,
particularly given 100 years of disruptive emigration crises of the
type that have, in every past era of US history, substantially
increased systematic racism.

In a similar omission, the political organization of this world is
decidedly strange. For most of the book, politics are hyperlocal,
tightly focused on organizations and communities in a tiny portion of
New York City. The federal government is passive, distant, ignored, and
nearly powerless. This is something that could happen in some future
worlds, but this sort of government passivity is an uneven fit with the
kind of catastrophe that Robinson is projecting. Similar catastrophes
in human history, particularly in the middle of a crisis of mass
migration, are far more likely to strengthen aggressive nationalists
who will give voice to fear and xenophobia and provide a rallying
point.

Every future science fiction novel is, of course, really about the
present or the past in some way. It becomes clear during New York 2140
that, despite the ecological frame, this book is primarily concerned
with the 2008 financial crisis. That makes some sense of the federal
government in this book: Robinson is importing the domestic economic
policy of Bush and Obama to make a point about the crisis they bungled.
Based on publication date, he probably also wrote this book before
Trump's election. But given the past two years, not to mention world
history, these apathetic libertarian politics seem weirdly mismatched
with the future history Robinson postulates.

There are other problems, such as Robinson's narrative voice convincing
me that he doesn't understand how sovereign debt works, and as a result
I kept arguing with the book instead of being drawn into the plot.
That's a shame, since this is some of the best character work Robinson
has done. It's still painfully slow; about halfway through the book, I
wasn't sure I liked anyone except Vlade, the building super, and I was
quite certain I hated Franklin, the derivative trader obsessed with
seducing a woman. But Robinson pulls off a fairly impressive pivot by
the end of the book. Charlotte, the social worker and co-op president
who determinedly likes all of the characters, turns out to be a better
judge of character than I was. I never exactly liked Franklin, but
Robinson made me believe in his change, which takes some doing.

Amelia, the streaming video star, deserves a special mention due to
some subtle but perceptive bits of characterization. She starts out as
a stereotype whose popularity has a lot to do with her tendency to lose
her clothes, and I wish Robinson hadn't reinforced that idea. (I
suspect he was thinking of the (in)famous PETA commercials, but this
stereotype is a serious problem for real-world female streamers.) But
throughout the story Amelia is so determinedly herself that she
transcends that unfortunate start. The moment I started really liking
her was her advertisement for Charlotte, which is both perfectly in
character and more sophisticated than it looks. And her character
interactions and personal revelations at the very end of the book made
me want to read more about her.

There were moments when I really liked this book. The plot finally
kicks in about 70% of the way through, much too late but still with
considerable effectiveness. This is about the time when I started to
warm to more of the characters, and I thought I'd finally found a
Robinson book I could recommend. But then Robinson undermined his own
ending: he seemed so focused on telling the reader that life goes on
and that any segment of history is partial and incomplete that he
didn't give me the catharsis I wanted after a harrowing event and the
clear villainy of some of the players. For a book that's largely about
confronting the downsides of capitalism, it's weirdly
non-confrontational. What triumph the characters do gain is mostly
told, narrated away in yet another infodump, rather than shown. It left
me feeling profoundly unsatisfied.

There's always enough meat to a Kim Stanley Robinson novel that I
understand why people keep nominating them for awards, but I come away
vaguely dissatisfied with the experience. I think some people will
enjoy this, particularly if you don't get as snarled as I was in the
gaps left in Robinson's political tale. He is clearly getting better on
characterization, despite the exceptionally slow start. But the story
still doesn't have enough power, or enough catharsis, or enough
thoughtful accuracy for me to recommend it.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-01-20

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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