Waterworld
Destroying the world is easy, while making it a better place to live in is hard. Many American writers of fiction took a turn toward the dystopian and the apocalyptic well before November of last year. But already there are novels in the pipeline that find something positive or even hopeful to express in the face of great national uncertainty.
In his previous novel, “Aurora,” Kim Stanley Robinson took his characters to Alpha Centauri and back, emphasizing that humanity’s only real home is Earth and that we had better keep it safe, rather than plan on reaching some suitable Planet B. The author of the acclaimed Mars Trilogy, “Antarctica” and “2312” sets his new book closer to home in place and time but adopts a lighter tone, suggesting that climate change isn’t necessarily a death sentence and that there may actually be healthy alternatives to the current global economic order.
“New York 2140” posits a 50-foot rise in sea levels, which turns the streets of Lower Manhattan into a landscape of canals between the surviving skyscrapers. The consequences of two disasters known as the First and Second Pulse sound familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the inequitable impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Robinson writes: “This remarkable rise had been bad for people — most of them. But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet’s wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world’s wealth. For them it wasn’t so bad.”
Told from multiple points of view and reminiscent of one of Emile Zola’s “apartment” novels in the way it portrays characters from various social strata in one setting, “New York 2140” focuses on the inhabitants of a single, partially sunken apartment building, the old Met Life tower on Madison Square. Two homeless coders, dubbed Mutt and Jeff, vanish from their squat on the building’s rooftop farm. Their mysterious absence comes to the attention of police inspector Gen Octaviasdottir, via immigration lawyer Charlotte Armstrong, a fellow Met resident. They take their concerns to Vlade, the skyscraper’s super. On the lookout for mechanical failures and sabotage attempts, Vlade keeps the building running, but he can’t explain the twohour gap in the security tape at the time of the programmers’ disappearance.
The Met is home to the rich, the eccentric and the disenfranchised. Day trader Franklin Garr sees investment opportunities in the precarious properties closest to the water and uses his hedge fund idea to impress the beautiful woman he wants to date. Watched by millions of viewers around the globe, “cloud personality” Amanda Black transports endangered species to more suitable climes aboard her dirigible, the Assisted Migration, which she moors at the Met. Young orphans Stefan and Roberto are fascinated by the wreck of the HMS Hussar, buried with its treasure chest somewhere beneath the flooded streets, and the boys risk their lives with homemade diving equipment in an effort to retrieve it.
“New York 2140” is indisputably a science fiction novel, but one rooted deeply in history and popular culture. The diverse points of view allow Robinson to riff on various genres, from police procedural to romantic comedy, political cyberthriller to historical travelogue, disaster novel to pirate adventure.
Each chapter is preceded by apt quotations or anecdotes about New York, mentioning personalities as various as Dashiell Hammett, Henry James and Fran Lebowitz. These tidbits of trivia and opinion remind the reader of the city’s endurance and malleability, its inhabitants’ wisdom and craziness. Manhattan has been in trouble before and will be again.
Also contributing to the narrative are helpful dispatches from “the citizen,” a disembodied omniscient figure able to fill in the historical record or comment on the action.
It’s with the “citizen” passages that Robinson cuts loose most freely, ably capturing the voice of the metropolis:
“So it isn’t all that special, this NOO YAWK of ours. And yet. And yet and yet. Maybe there’s something to to it. Hard to believe, hard to admit, pain-in-the-ass place that it is, bunch of arrogant f—heads, no reason for it to be anything special, a coincidence, just the luck of the landscape, the bay and the bight, the luck of the draw, space and time congealing to a history, to have come into being in its moment, accidentally growing the head, guts and tumescent genitals of the American dream.”
By the book’s midpoint, there’s another natural cataclysm headed Manhattan’s way. But the disaster may represent an opportunity for something better for its survivors.
“New York 2140” is a big, playful and thoroughly engrossing book, generous in spirit and very serious about the political issues it raises. Robinson excels at keeping the narrative moving across multiple characters and topics of conversation, maintaining the necessary level of suspense while taking time to investigate intriguing tangents to the primary plot.
One reaches the end of “New York 2140” with a smile and at least the momentary belief that the future might work out after all.
Michael Berry writes the science fiction and fantasy column for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: books@sfchronicle.com.