New York 2140

Such a beautiful homage to NYC from past to present to future! If tryouts love NYC, its people, its aura and its history, you will love this novel. I readcit on Audible. The seven readers were outstanding. My favorite was "The Citizen," whose snarky observations and historical factoids have now made me buy the hard copy of this novel, so i can highlight his pages. Also, the style in which it is written, reminds me of a contemporary John Dos Passos, the characters incorporate economics. government, science, influencers, science and climate change, and societal norms. The novel is largely optimistic. New Yorkers have always been resilient people, and this story imagines what that would look like after the oceans rise 50 feet to put Manhattan under water until about 50th street. It does what I always wished the film "Waterworld" could have done; examined society as it adapts to changes. The plot kept me anxious to continue reading about my new friends everyday. It is one of the few books that I finish, and immediately want to begin over again!

After I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy what seems a half a lifetime ago, I didn't read a novel by him until 2312. I did try to read THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT, but after 80 or so pages I couldn't go one any further and put it down, never to pick it up again. I returned to Robinson's work with 2312 and AURORA, skipping SHAMAN, which was not my cup of tea. I eyed NEW YORK 2140 with a sideways glance. I wasn't sure that I wanted to read it, thinking that once again it might not be for me, but man did it sound interesting. The deal was sealed when Robinson appeared on The Coode Street podcast; his descriptions of the book and how he went about researching it and putting it together were enough to get me to pick it up and give it a try. NEW YORK 2140 is not a novel in the usual sense. There is no real plot, although there are several events that are strung through the book that actually do have a beginning, middle, and end. There are also characters that the reader follows from the beginning of the novel to the end of the novel, and their lives do intersect because those previously mentioned events do intersect and overlap. And there is conflict, but not the sort of conflict a reader is used to seeing in a novel that is structured in a typical fashion. Even the title is a bit misleading, as the novel starts in 2140 but ends a few years later after the events that are recounted within are complete. What NEW YORK 2140 does provide, as does 2312, is a snapshot, a snapshot of a few characters within one of the largest and most well-known cities in the world as they - and the city - go about their daily lives. You'd be right to ask "why should a care about New York in 2140?". Well, it's under 50 feet of water. To be fair, not all of it is under 50 feet of water, but most of it is. In fact, the book itself answers the question of why you should care about New York instead of any of the other coastal cities that are under water. Back to this in a bit. Or maybe not. It's really a difficult novel to describe. Structurally, the novel is broken into parts, and each part has subsections that follow individual characters - or, in two cases, a couple of characters. There is also an additional subsection for a character called "The Citizen". Robinson is famously known for liberally sprinkling infodumps throughout his books, and NEW YORK 2140 is no exception. While infodumps are spread everywhere throughout the book - and I'll have to say I didn't mind them in the least, as they were in my opinion well done, informative, and entertaining - the best of the lot come in the sections featuring The Citizen. It is in these sections that the reader learns about the two events - The First Pulse and The Second Pulse - that put NYC and the other coastal cities under water. What's more, we learned how the Pulses came about in wondrous detail that should, but won't, convince any climate change denier that we have really screwed up this planet and we'd better do something about it yesterday. The Citizen doesn't just tell us about how NYC got to be in the state it's in ecologically, he tells us about finance as well, how the Pulses affected the global economy, and how current (to the novel) solutions to the problem are no different than what was done in the past. It's very clear throughout the book that Robinson has done his research. As a side note, and in bits that most readers may not enjoy but I found amusing, The Citizen, a snarky resident of NYC, refers to the text of the book itself, letting his audience know that he knows what he's saying is being read, and is giving those same readers permission to skip these sections if they want to, while at the same time letting them know that they're going to be ignorant of many facts if they skim through his parts. The thing that is fresh about this novel is that while it is a post-disaster novel, it doesn't dwell on the disaster (or in this case disasters). The point is not the disasters - the point is how a subsection of society deals with the nasty hand it's been dealt. Robinson also lets us know that it really is all about money. Yes, there is climate change which will lead to disaster. But money, really, makes the world go around. Nearly all of the characters have either something to do with finance or are affected by those that have something to do with finance. A major plot (there's that word here) point involves how to manipulate the global economy in the aftermath of a hurricane that hits New York. The characters here are secondary. I don't think Robinson means for the reader to be enamored of these characters at all. I don't think there's any character that grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and made me pay attention to him or her - although I did feel sorry for the two kids that continually did stupid things and got into trouble for them. This, like 2312, is a story about ideas, but ideas based in reality, ideas that we could find becoming a reality if we're not careful. Back to one point I made earlier, about why we should care about New York and not any other coastal city. Don't skip The Citizen sections. And don't skip any of the rest of the sections either. They're too good to pass up. This is the first audiobook I've listened to that has more than a couple of narrators. There are seven of them, and they are all wonderful. While I haven't taken the time to learn which narrators performed which sections (although it's a safe bet that the female narrators did the sections centering on the females, and the same with the males of course), I'm really partial to the guy that performed The Citizen. This was a great cast performing a great book.

This book caught my eye because it seemed to be an interesting story about New York in the future. I like his world building about the ‘SuperVenice’ that was the flooded Nee York and the each character was interesting and had a good story to tell but there was no real tension or central plot it seemed. Everyone seemed to have challenges that they talked about but never really seemed to be changed by. Anytime a central character wants something to happen, they’re almost always successful with no serious difficulty. The author seems to gloss over otherwise major events in the book without really diving into them or setting up tension for them. The natural disaster which occurs in the book appears pretty much out of no where and the subsequent events in the book don’t seemed earned or fought for. The entire world economic system changes at the periphery of the storyline and the mystery that sets up the book kind of just ends. I thought it was a very ambitious book but it could have been a lot longer. The characters were interesting enough for me to want to get to know them better and have them interact with each other in more substantial ways. Overall, an ok book that seemed to have been too edited to be great.

Anyone who says SF isn't literature hasn't read anything by KSR. In his usual style, this book has everything you Gould want in a 'main stream' novel. A great story line, a raft of interesting and well drawn characters all with rich histories, New York City in its many past, present and future clothes, and a view of all of humanity as seen from the perspective of regular people. There is plenty of 'hard' SF in how people have adapted to the inevitable flooding from Climate Change as well as wonderful pictures of ways future solutions might also mirror the past. You can care about these people and see how these events change their lives as well as how they understand themselves and those around them. Plus there's history, and politics not to mention lots of economics: another great 'character' in the story. I envy you if you are a KSR newbie. There are lots more books by him just as good waiting for you.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, New York 2140, presents a grim vision of the impact of a warming global climate. I’m sure Robinson could have easily conjured up a world like that in the lauded, 2016 movie Interstellar, where America’s farmland is sufficiently fried to create a new Dust Bowl and the only solution for humanity is to use gravitational propulsion to escape to a distant galaxy through a recently detected wormhole near Saturn. But instead, a writer who ironically is best known for his own space-escape yarns such as The Mars Trilogy, has set himself a more difficult challenge. Robinson visualizes a world where mankind can’t avail itself of improbable technological advances or convenient astronomical discoveries, and instead must struggle to adapt to a barely recognizable planet. The first and second “pulses,” sudden and violent surges of water from melting ice, have already flooded the low-lying land and the great coastal cities. New York, or more correctly Manhattan, has survived by reinventing itself as a modern-day Venice, with canals and skybridges and bacinos connecting the old skyscrapers, now protected from rust and corrosion by a diamond film coating (OK, somewhat improbable, but easier to accept than warp-speed rocket ships and wormholes in space.) The cityscape may have been immutably altered, the mayor (and the President) may be female, and muskrats may now outnumber sewer rats, but New Yorkers are much the same. Police deal with the criminals, petty and otherwise, social workers tend to the homeless and the dispossessed, and the latest iteration of greedy bankers and hedge fund managers speculate on the trend of real estate prices in the intertidal zone. As always, living space comes at a premium so the 1 percent live in soaring new towers built on higher ground, those in the middle make do with crowded, communal coops in older apartment buildings and converted offices, while the fringe elements do their best to survive in rickety, water-logged walk-ups. And for tenderhearted animal lovers, the Assisted Migration blimp is always airborne, its perils-of-Pauline hostess continually broadcasting to a rapt audience as she does her shtick while transporting endangered species to safe environments from threatened ones (e.g. a half-dozen ferocious but cuddly polar bears to Antarctica.) All is well until Hurricane Fyodor bears down on the city, threatening to envelop it in turmoil and destruction worthy of Dostoyevsky himself. And then all is well again, in love and anti-capitalistic politics if not in climate. Robinson’s conception of New York a little more than a century hence is powerful, and he deserves kudos. I just wish I loved the book unreservedly. Unfortunately, the characters tend to be flimsy, the prose is often turgid, and the plot is difficult to decipher. But I accept its flaws for its triumphs. It is what fiction should be at its best—a willful act of imagination. It is also a stern warning for those of us around today. The year in the title shouldn’t lull us into a false sense of security. All the “bad stuff”, like the apocalyptic pulses, happens between now and 2140, during the lives of our children and grandchildren, if not our own lives. For that reason alone, Robinson’s novel is arguably not science fiction but a powerful social protest novel in disguise. It certainly does what a social protest novel is meant to do, dramatizing the effect of a prevailing social problem—climate change—on its characters, and thereby attuning readers to the depth of the problem, and motivating them to do something about it. It doesn’t matter that the social problem is speculative and its effects are in the future. The speculation is based on scientific fact. Moreover, the social problem for potential readers is not speculative. We’re too complacent about what the planet might look and feel like in the not so distant future if we don’t begin to take radical measures now. Sadly, it’s not for the publishing world to recognize this larger message and market New York 2014 to a broader audience than science fiction fans. Perhaps they feel that Robinson can’t escape his reputation as a sci-fi master. Perhaps they feel that the quality of his writing can’t charm readers outside the genre. Perhaps they’re cowed by the current administration’s denials about climate change and threats to purveyors of “fake news.” Perhaps they feel that science fiction sells and social protest never will. Perhaps they don’t know how to market social protest any more. In any case, the potential audience for an important work becomes limited. Case in point is how the New York Times dispatched the novel with a brief, multiple-title write-up in the Sunday Book Review. New York 2041 was lumped in with Volume 7 of the continuing saga of two warring, galaxy-spanning civilizations, an anthology of djinn-themed short fiction, and a police procedural about the hunt for a mass murderer potentially related to the appearance of a grotesque and deadly extraterrestrial fungus. When the reviewer finally got around to Robinson’s novel, she snarkily observed that “in an age when local real estate agents already toss around terms like ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘flood zone’ over brunch, its audacious futurism arrives feeling a bit obsolete.” Actually, in these perilous times for our country and our planet, what feels passé to me is the attitude that prevails in the lit biz. Why do they continue to overlook—or is it deny?—that fiction, like art of any kind, can be and should be a powerful engine for social change?

New York 2140 (Hardcover) by Kim Stanley Robinson Wowzers what a book! So well written, and oh so timely! Interestingly enough, you could say that the city itself was a character in this book, always there, lurking about, changing constantly and yet always the same. then you get to the real characters, and what a set of characters it is! We get to live thru several different stories, and from several different view points. The writing is at it's best when these stories collide, and interweave, then separate again. Who really drives the storylines? Were the characters really in charge, or were they reacting, or trying to be proactive? Well, yes... and no. That's the fun of this tall tale set in the sort of near future. As someone who has gone to NYC a handful of times, I enjoyed the geography, and history (both past and future) and the many different ways that NYC is NYC. Some fun technical hiking combined with some basic character flaws, and oh yeah let's try to not get dead along the way make for a great book! Go read it now, you will thank me later!

This is my second KSR read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s very much a platform for KSR’s environmental and political agendas but that does not lessen the storytelling in any way for me. He really is an excellent storyteller and the depth of detail and character development is first rate. I previously read Aurora which was so good I hated to finish it. At the end there was a description of this book 2140, and I really wasn’t excited about the plot summary but gave it a try and am very glad I did. I am a Kindle Unlimited subscriber and now after paying for two KSR books I can see a big difference in quality between this author and many of the others who do participate in Unlimited. I grew up on Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Niven, etc and have not found many modern authors that tell a story as well as those masters, but KSR is very much a modern master of storytelling. Not saying there are not many good authors who are on KU program but there is a very noticeable difference in the overall quality of KSRs books compared to many others on kindle. Time to pick a new book from KSR and happy to pay for it too…

“New York 2140” is an interesting look into a planet besieged by a fifty-foot rise in sea levels caused by generations who were too late in taking climate change seriously; that message is clear enough as told through this disparate group of characters that make watery adjustments in the Big Apple. It’s a well-written tale, but it has some major flaws that keep it from being as powerful as it could be in a time when we still might be able to prevent the cataclysmic alteration of the coastlines as described in the book. To begin with, considering the main thrust is the environmental damage we inflicted on ourselves, there really isn’t any talk of how this world over a century in the future might have invented methods to thwart further destruction or even reverse their effects of global warming. These characters, and the world they live in, just seems to accept their lot, which doesn’t send much of a message to readers today. Speaking of today, if it weren’t for the title and occasional reminders that the story takes place in the 22nd century, you’d never know you were 120 years in the future at all. There are no great leaps in technology outside of 300-story “superscrapers”; people zip around in boats and airships and sport wristpads no more advanced than today’s Apple watches. Characters speak in contemporary dialogue, and the only scientific advancements seem to be chemicals created to stop leaks in submerged portions of buildings. Stranger still, much of the text is devoted to economic and financial concerns. It’s so bogged down with Wall Street-like jargon that it becomes hard for the average reader to follow. It’s as if the central theme – the effects of climate change – almost becomes secondary to the intricacies of the global economy and its associated politics. While the many different vantage points and voices of unrelated characters is jarring at first, thankfully this diverse group of people do eventually converge into a cohesive story, even if it takes a little too long to get there. What’s odd is that so much of the overall tale is episodic – major arcs, such as the long-term kidnapping of computer hackers and the discovery of an 18th century shipwreck, have very little in the way of payoff or repercussion. In fact, the final push for a worldwide financial revolution has a rather “off-screen” climax, disappointing since this storyline drowns the exploration of climate change as much as climate change drowns NYC. And what exactly does the author have against Denver? It’s disparaged several times by more than one character, and for no perceptible reason. Jealousy because the Mile High City was unaffected by sea level rise? “New York 2140” is an intriguing premise written by the winner of the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus – which is what makes it so perplexing that his story goes up and down like the tide of his inundated shoreline.