Kim Stanley Robinson’s Hugo-nominated novel is set in a Manhattan where some of the worst fears of sea-level rise have already taken place.
Don’t expect a Mad-Max-On-Waterskis type of situation though. The year 2140 is far enough into the future that there are plenty of technological advances to keep a 50-foot sea-level rise from getting into the swamped downtown buildings, while still close enough that not all that much has changed. Sure, most of lower Manhattan has water up to the second floor, Broadway is jammed with boats, pedestrians use bridges that stretch from building to building above the waves, and building supers have got to have some kind of diving experience. But for the most part New Yorkers are still doing what New Yorkers have always done: getting on with it.
We’ve got the cloud star, the lawyer, the building expert, the building itself, the police detective, the money man…add the getaway driver and it’s a fucking heist movie.
I’ve been trying to figure out ways to describe the story-telling style of this book, and the best I can come up with is “complicated”. The scope is massive, even if most of it centers around one building in one city.
I could go into detail about the separate stories (two computer coders disappear from their tent on top of the Met Life building, the building super discovers that the lower floors are springing suspicious leaks, while the lawyer in charge of the building co-op is working with a police detective to figure out who’s put a bid on the building, and why), or the quirky characters (two homeless boys having Huck Finn type adventures on their inflatable boat, a hedge fund manager who’s fallen in love, a reality TV star helping endangered animals with the help of her robot-controlled airship). But all of these interweave and fall into the background and sometimes don’t get an actual resolution. A couple of times I wondered why they were included at all. The novel feels like a mishmash of slice-of-life short stories with a little bit of whodunnit mixed in.
What holds all of these separate elements together into one glorious tapestry is the setting. This is Robinson’s grand thought experiment, asking what living in a flooded Manhattan would actually be like.
“New York is New York, Gen. People want this place, drowned or not.”
“Mildew,” Gen suggested.
“Venice has mildew, and people still want Venice. And this is the SuperVenice
New materials coat the underwater sections of buildings, keeping them usable and making for some very interesting subterranean clubs and hideaways. These new materials allow supertowers to be built in the area around The Cloisters (where the bedrock can hold their weight) some of them reaching 300 stories or more. Contrast the view from these skyscrapers with the life of squatters living in the condemned buildings of the Intertidal – the section of the city where the tide is gradually dissolving anything that was built on landfill. People who want something a little more untraditional for their neighborhoods create cities that either float across pontoons or are held aloft by dirigibles.
As fantastical as this is, it all feels grounded in reality, especially with the chapters that are told from a nameless historian’s point of view, giving everyone a little taste of the real, crazy, beautiful life of Manhattan throughout the ages. Plus, it’s all based on established science, and it takes place in neighborhoods that would be recognizable to New Yorkers today.
It would take more than drowning lower Manhattan to make New Yorkers give up on Central Park.
Robinson creates stunning vignettes in his futuristic NYC. Scuba divers access the flooded underground through abandoned subway entrances. The trendiest bars in downtown are all waterfront (usually water-level too), and daredevils surf the incoming tide along Broadway and Sixth (bring some diluted bleach to wash down with afterwards, that water is filthy.) Every building has a garden on the roof and aquaculture pens around the basement. Cloud star Amelia’s chapters are self-narrated with all the breathless enthusiasm of someone speaking for a TV audience, and the imagery of her wearing a flowing red dress and dangling on a swing 500 feet over the treetops, or rushing to a mid-air rescue of a falling skyvillage, almost make up for the ridiculous situations she gets into for very little reason.
“Vlade, can you help us a second here? I’ve got Amelia on the phone, and she’s in a situation on her blimp there, the polar bears have gotten loose.
It’s total immersion in the setting, whether it’s watching the ice of the East River breaking from the top of a skyscraper, watching a superstorm turn the streets into rushing rivers and the side of the Empire State Building into a waterfall, or diving (sorry, the water metaphors are hard to resist) into all the different ways people find to band together (or set themselves apart), trying new methods of art and sports and food production and barter economy, while still having to deal with the evening rush hour and paying the bills.
….which leads me to the part of the novel that will probably be the biggest sticking point for readers.This book is hard sci-fi, and part of that science is climate change, but an even bigger part is involved with science of a completely different kind: finance. The plot (or plots. Or loose collection of kinda related storylines) revolves around the financial system, and trading, and hedge funds, and all the different ways that money is tied into the highest level of politics and affects everyone down to the lowest rungs of society. I don’t think it’s fair to say that this novel is an indictment of Capitalism, but Robinson most definitely has an axe to grind against the very worst that Capitalism has to offer.
The house of cards had fallen again, and the whole world was left standing in the rubble of a crashed economy, looking again at the hapless people running finance and saying Just who the fuck are these guys anyway?
A lot of it is over my head, and a lot more is specifically formatted to make people angry. Hedge fund managers who actually see chaos and disaster as a good thing for the markets. Investment that isn’t tied to anything real, just gambling on the potential value (or potential loss) of debts that no one expects to be paid. Castles in the air made of Ponzi 
scheme-like investments, piling debt on top of debt until the bubble pops, the market crashes, the governments bail out the worst offenders, the taxpayers are stuck with the bill, while the people responsible never really lose anything. And then a few years later it all happens again, not because anyone forgets, but because it’s still the best way to make money. For a few people, anyway; the rest apparently don’t count.
The way the problem is tackled in this book is satisfying, if a little simplistic. Even the author seems to acknowledge that the only way some solutions could ever work is by a really lucky combination of well-timed disasters, a little blackmail, and having friends in high places. And even then you can’t actually call anything a final solution; society doesn’t have a happy ending, since nothing ever actually ends. People keep finding new methods of dealing with the new ways people find to mess things up. Robinson obviously has a lot of love for New York, and he just as obviously wants us to keep thinking about our problems now – climate and financial – instead of doing exactly what we’ve always been doing for the next hundred years, and then wondering how things could have gotten so bad.