New York 2140,

BY KIM STANLEY ROBINSON (2017)

next you’re riding along with an airborne “cloud star” working to relocate polar bears from the Arctic to the Antarctic.

Readers may inevitably find some of these stories fascinating and others tedious. A few, such as a hostile bid to buy the Met Life Tower, simply peter out.

A more central plot revolves around the disappearance of a pair of coders and how it relates to some malfeasance in the midtown Wall Street. Robinson’s has skillfully addressed major issues before; in his Science in the Capital trilogy, he envisions humanity’s efforts to address climate change after its effects become more pronounced. Unfortunately, the critiques of capitalism and greed in New York 2140 can be considerably more heavy-handed.

Although the characters and themes sometimes seem to be drawn a bit sketchily, New York 2140 truly shines in its vision of a future which is both bleak and hopeful. Fans of Robinson will likely enjoy it, but those who haven’t read him may want to start with one of his earlier works. the occasional airship. The finance industry and the city’s wealthiest residents have relocated to towering superscrapers in midtown, while buildings in lower Manhattan tilt drunkenly and occasionally come crashing down.

Most of the characters in New York 2140 hail from the Met Life Tower, a residential building in the intertidal zone which has been shored up and adapted to its new partially submerged existence. They include a police inspector, a hedge fund employee, the building’s super, and a woman who works with the refugees and immigrants who arrive in New York.

Each chapter focuses on a different character or two, which can sometimes lead to jarringly disparate storylines. One moment you’re following two homeless boys in their efforts to recover gold from the long lost HMS Hussar, the

Kim Stanley Robinson might be considered a world-building author of the first order. Indeed, his most well-known books, the Mars Trilogy released between 1993 and 1996, are about the gradual transformation of the Red Planet to Earth-like conditions.

Robinson stays closer to home in New York 2140, setting the novel almost entirely within the bounds of Manhattan. It might seem a little claustrophobic for a writer who previously had an entire planet to work with, but the setting is no less imaginative.

The Big Apple of this future, like many other coastal cities, has been partially swamped after two “pulses”—rapid sea level changes caused by the sudden melt-off of polar ice—left about half of Manhattan underwater. Commuters in the new “SuperVenice” get around via skybridges, water taxis, sporty speedboats, and