The real protagonist in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is catastrophic global warming. Robinson is a good writer, and the novel is as entertaining as it can be given this subject matter. 140 pages in, someone observes, looking back from 2140 to out our time, that “a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece.” This thoughtful writer is probably meant to be Robinson, although I wouldn’t describe New York 2140 as lurid. Or maybe it’s not about Robinson but about Paolo Bacigalupi, whose novels are indeed lurid.
I like Robinson’s writing and I’m sympathetic to how he sees the world. Unlike other near-future sci fi writers, his visions are essentially optimistic. Even so, it took me a long time to finish the 613 pages of this book. There are a few plot lines that amount to nothing, so I don’t think it had to have so many pages. There are also a few moments when to story becomes implausible enough to qualify as magical realism. I didn’t mind, but it does mean that this isn’t Robinson’s best novel. Maybe the problem is that climate change doesn’t make for good sci-fi.
You can’t really imagine a catastrophe will hit you until it does. People just don’t have that kind of mental capacity. If you did you would be stricken paralytic with fear at all times, because there are some guaranteed catastrophes bearing down on you that you aren’t going to be able to avoid (i.e. death), so evolution has kindly given you a strategically located mental blind spot, an inability to imagine future disasters in any way you can really believe, so that you can continue to function, as pointless as that may be. It is an aporia, as the Greeks and intellectuals among us would say, a “not-seeing.” So, nice. Useful. Except when disastrously bad.
Nehaveigur 