New York 2140
Kim Stanley Robinson
Orbit hardcover £20
***** (5 stars)
review by Christopher Geary
Just like his book ‘2312’
presented us with a cogent picture of post-human futurism in a fully populated
Solar system, this instantly engaging novel scales down SF narrative from
interplanetary concerns to matters with a closer focus on a single city, albeit
one with global renown and vigorous citizens. New York 2140 is a distinctly pro American take
on Ballard’s Drowned World views. Not so much an exploration of eco-regressive
traits, as in Ballard’s London
of 2145, this type of US SF is, ultimately, about escaping from debt as the
modern form of slavery. They don’t own you but you owe them is the message, and
that’s the way they like it... until something changes the system.
Manhattan
is a flooded island, now a super-Venice project becoming a centre for new breeds
and brands of wholly progressive - not recalcitrant - survivalists, and home to
a colourful batch of unlikely heroes with or without political ambitions and
important practical guidance from extended, meta-familial attachments. There’s Charlotte,
the reluctant politico; Vlade, the building superintendent; Amelia, the flying
starlet of a cloud-media circus; Franklin, the rogue trader with a hedged betting
scheme/ scam to burst the cluster-cloistered financial world’s new bubble; Gen,
the big black female police inspector; Mutt and Jeff, a pair of brain-trust ‘brothers’
from nerds-ville; and a couple of crazy kids, Stefan and Roberto, the gloriously
rebellious orphans and chums without a cause that bring Huckleberry elements of
reckless (bight me!) adventure to the solidly pragmatic and watertight drama of
big issues.
Here are tales from the burning edge of edginess and the
waving-not-drowning moral panics of careerist interlopers bound together by
authorial voice of ‘the citizen’ whose chapters provide both insider knowledge relief,
and incisive commentary of a ranking outsider. New York 2140 is not any sort of New Atlantis,
it’s far more grimly realistic, despite a gloomily predictive model of how badly
rampant climate change could very soon devastate coastlines and break economies
around the world. In keeping with previous works, Kim Stanley Robinson
maintains his firmly ingrained, but non-dogmatic, anti-capitalist and
pro-social themes that surge and ebb like tides throughout the storyline and
its numerous historical references. Comedy and tragedy rub shoulders, and nobody emerges
from the murky aftermath of the climate-climactic and catastrophic storm
unscathed.
