So I’m going about this backward. I’ve already read and reviewed Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 speculative fiction tome The Ministry for the Future, in which likeable and powerful people grapple with the climate crisis in the near future. Now I’m going back and checking out his 2017 doorstop on the same theme, which is, as the title says, set in New York in 2140. A bunch of mostly likeable and somewhat powerful people are living out their lives in the Manhattan of 120 years from now. Well, what’s left of Manhattan, which is mostly the northern one-third of the island that is still above water. You see, sea level has risen by an incredible 50 feet worldwide since our time, in two major pulses, the first in about 2060 and the second about 50 years later. New York 2140 is an SFF about New Yorkers going about their lives in their reality, which is in some ways radically different from those of New Yorkers of 2020, and in some ways very much the same.
This earlier novel is a bit more conventional in form, though Robinson uses some similar techniques. New York 2140 has a larger cast of major and supporting characters, and has a bit more of a traditional structure, even containing some elements of action adventure and whodunnit. It’s also very much a New York book, filled with places and characters that are quintessentially and recognizably of the Big Apple, even after much of it has been drowned.
The action takes place mostly in and around the MetLife Tower on Madison Square, one of Manhattan’s old-school, early 20th century skyscrapers. Although it’s in Lower Manhattan and many of its lower floors are underwater, it’s safe and stable since it’s one of the towers that was built on bedrock, not landfill. All of Downtown is way underwater; Midtown is in the intertidal zone, sometimes dry and sometimes flooded depending on the tides; and Uptown is still standing, and in fact is now home to a new class of superscrapers (where the richest live and do business) hundreds of feet taller than the tallest buildings standing in New York of 2022.
The main characters, all of whom live in the Met, include Charlotte Armstrong, a community organizer who works for the Householders Union; Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir of NYPD; Vlade Morovich, the building’s superintendent; Franklin Garr, a young day trader and hedge fund manager; Amelia Black, a cloud star who streams her adventures as she works to save wildlife species from extinction by relocating them via her AI-piloted airship; a couple of guys known as Mutt and Jeff, disillusioned, semi-indigent coders and quantitative analysts who live in a temporary shelter on the Met’s farming floor; and finally Stefan and Roberto, two Huck Finn type orphans who surreptitiously use the Met as their base as they scrap and scramble to stay alive while pursuing marine and submarine adventures.
The action, such as it is, revolves around the disappearance of Mutt and Jeff shortly after one of them hacks the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s computer system in an attempt to topple … er, reform, post-Surge capitalism. And at the same time, Vlade begins to notice some subtle signs of sabotage below the building’s waterline. And Charlotte, who also chairs the Met’s co-op board, has to fend off some anonymous attempts to buy the skyscraper out from under our cozy little family of misfits. Interspersed throughout are chapters of commentary by “The Citizen,” who gives more of a birds-eye perspective on the story, from the future looking back at the story and its consequences.
Mostly, though, the plot is just a frame on which to hang Robinson’s real interest, which is waking up today’s world to the dangers that face the next few generations who’ll inherit this cooking planet from us. Even though most of these characters are extraordinarily priveleged compared to most people who don’t live in the financial capital of the world, their lives are still constrained in ways we can’t imagine; and they regularly rub up against many less fortunate. Robinson sees global capitalism and finance as the main impediments to making meaningful efforts to lessen what are already sure to be horrific impacts of ongoing climate change, and in both New York 2140 and The Ministry for the Future he offers up some creative suggestions for removing those impediments.
Robinson is offering two slightly different visions of how the next century could unfold. In New York 2140 we see a world in which people are living with the consequences of the fact that the people of our time did not do what was needed. In The Ministry for the Future we see people beginning to take necessary action in what turns out to be in the nick of time to potentially escape the worst of those consequences. New York 2140 is packed with interesting, more fully developed characters, with action on a scale that I could relate to. The Ministry for the Future takes a more global perspective and is more a novel of ideas than characters and action, although a lot does happen. I found both of them compelling, New York 2140 perhaps a bit moreso. Together they’re a solid and important two-volume package that look the climate crisis squarely in the face.
(Orbit, 2017)
