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Kim Stanley Robinson’s “New York 2140”
- cryptoz 10y agoReally excited to read this book! I live by the Mars Trilogy, and by 2312, and I'm currently in 40 Signs of Rain. I'll add this to the list! Note that there's a key typo in the introduction, suggesting the setting is 2040, and that made for a confusing first few minutes, but really, the book is set in 2140 indeed. Can't wait!
- mozey 10y agoOne of my favourite authors. I like how optimistic his books are, reminds me of the Culture series.
- squires 10y agoThis is a surprising to me since, of Robinson's work, I've only read Aurora. One of the primary impressions it had on me was the overwhelming bleakness of the universe and the futility of space exploration/colonization. Perhaps I should muster the courage to try some of his other work.
- peterbraden 10y agoAurora was his worst book, IMHO, and definitely shouldn't dissuade you from his other work.
- mathewsanders 10y agoI've enjoyed 5 of his other books: Mars trilogy, 2312, and Aurora (Aurora I enjoyed so much I've read it twice). But I'm struggling with 2140 (just checked and I'm 41% of the way through). Despite living in New York and having a lot of fun with the description of a venetian New York it's just not grabbing my interest yet. I'm going to keep plodding through it but at this stage I'd rather just start re-reading Red Mars again.
- arethuza 10y ago"futility of space exploration/colonization." You definitely won't get that from the Mars trilogy (or indeed Antartica which is pretty much "White Mars"). I have to say I rather liked Aurora though - I thought the Ship character was well done.
- andyjohnson0 10y agoI thought Antarctica was pretty good. Optimistic but tempered by realism about how change happens in human societies. Not a particularly fast moving story, but it held my attention and I've re-read it a couple of times since.
- monkey88 10y agoAurora was extremely disappointing due to that bleakness. Do read the Mars trilogy, which has strife, but also hope.
- cscheid 10y agoThe unfortunate part about Aurora is that it is "optimistic" only in the context of all of the Red Mars trilogy, and 2312, and really only in the last chapter, where... SPOILERS below the characters go "well, eff it, I guess we have to make it work here on Earth". It seems to me that, in the arc of KSR's work, Aurora is the effective acceptance that humans will have to make Earth work for them, for better or worse, even as they collectively wrecked the planet. And that seems a nice segue into New York 2140.
- EthanHeilman 10y agoAurora is also told from the PoV of characters that are extremely anti-extrasolar travel. SPOILERS below Note however at the end of the book cryo-sleep is developed. This technology removes the main moral argument and technological difficulty against extra-solar travel as presented in the book. It is even noted in the book that a new wave of human colonization is taking place. KSR seems to be making both arguments at once but only telling one side of the story.
- cscheid 10y ago(more spoilers) You do make an interesting point which I didn't emphasize: Aurora also makes a moral argument against generation ships. But I think things get more complicated still. If you accept the book's argument, accept cryogenic sleep, but also accept that Earth is something like the biggest generation ship we have, then where do we stand? If we accept that cryogenic sleep solves that part of the moral argument, then we kind of walked into Woody Allen's plot for Sleeper (that is, why not sleep right here on Earth until things improve?) These are really tough questions to consider. Needless to say, I think Aurora is the deepest, most introspective work that KSR has produced.
- SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago> This technology removes the main moral argument and technological difficulty against extra-solar travel as presented in the book. Not quite. The other difficulty presented is the sparsity of places suitable to settle at. And what you do then if you're not very lucky on arrival.
- sharkjacobs 10y agoI was devastated when I first read it because I was expecting it to be like Red Mars for a colony generation-ship, but after I had some distance my impression is that it is super optimistic about how Earth is. It's a relief to think that even if we do fuck up Earth in ways which seem like they may be very likely to happen, it is still such a good place for humans to live, ie better than any other planet we know of, even with serious terraforming efforts.
- rrdharan 10y agoRelated, this is a fun tool to play with - well if your idea of fun includes enacting disaster fantasies anyway: http://gothamist.com/2015/10/13/nyc_climate_change_map.php http://gothamist.com/2015/10/13/nyc_climate_change_map.php
- peterbraden 10y agoI read it already and really enjoyed it. It's a mixture of the quiet descriptiveness of the science in the capital series with the forward thinking genius of his earlier scifi, interspersed with some serious nerding out over the economy and it's role in the world. Thumbs up.
- arethuza 10y agoNitpick about New York 2140 - did KSR mix up neap and spring tides at one point?
- rodionos 10y agoThis is great, I want to see a whole series of these scifi books for other cities of interest around the globe.
- panglott 10y agoThere's at least one scene that's similar to the premise of this book in one of the Mars Trilogy books—but set in London, where the Thames is flooded.
- metricodus 10y agoHere's a higher res copy of that nice cover art by Stephan Martiniere (http://www.martiniere.com/ http://www.martiniere.com/): https://fsmedia.imgix.net/6c/17/d1/3e/0a61/470f/a3e8/85c1e775f036/robinsonnewyork2140-hcjpg.jpeg https://fsmedia.imgix.net/6c/17/d1/3e/0a61/470f/a3e8/85c1e77... (Looks slightly upscaled, but probably from a better source than in the posted article.)
- kbenson 10y agoVery cool. The one thing about this picture is that I imagine there would be a lot more sky bridges in a situation like that. Perhaps that's covered in the story. I guess I'll have to find out. :)
- metricodus 10y agoIt would make the picture too cluttered, I think.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoVery nice cover...and looks like a cool place to visit.
- kbenson 10y agoI took a graph of a map of Manhattan and of the greater New York region and U.S. Geological survey’s print then looked at the streets and the contour levels and I simply marked the 50-foot intervals to see what kind of an island was left, what kind of a bay. And then I walked around town with a tourist-map version of that that I had altered so that I could have a smaller version of that. I wandered around and I looked at the terrain and I looked at the streets running from like Fifth and Sixth avenues between the Empire State Building and say 20th — there’s a 10-foot drop there that would [in a 50-foot sea-level rise] be the tidal zone that is actually several blocks of the wetland at low tide, but underwater at high tide. Even though it would be the shallows with waves breaking. That actually sounds incredibly fun. Taking pictures and photoshopping in water at the appropriate levels would be pretty cool too. I have to say, not having been to New York and having nothing on the line, that actually does sound like an incredibly cool setting.
- johan_larson 10y agoWould it really be remotely cost-effective to take a skyscraper and refit the bottom three stories to be underwater? Sounds like a stretch. It would probably be cheaper to abandon low-lying areas and demolish the buildings there.
- kbenson 10y agoGiven that skyscrapers seem to describe buildings of 40+ floors, losing 3 is less than 10% of the total floors, possibly a little more of the total floor space given that upper floors may not have the same dimensions, offset by possibly fewer elevator shafts beyond certain points. If the bottom can be retrofitted to be very secure in water (extra concrete?), then I don't see why you would abandon it. It's not like you're constructing a whole new building and have to forego three floors, it's already existing and it's just a matter of putting the work in to make sure it's still usable. These things are all anchored into bedrock anyway, so it's not like you should have to worry about the material under the foundations shifting or eroding.
- myowncrapulence 10y ago
- csneeky 10y agoLove this, from one of the answers the author gave: > "You can indeed become enormously wealthy and still be a good person just playing the game. That point needed to be raised because, as Orson Welles once pointed out, everybody has their reasons. Very few people are thinking as a sociopath might think, that nothing matters to me." Glad to see this sentiment is a driver in this book's dystopia. A little slice of healing for our political climate.
- myrandomcomment 10y agoIt seems more likely they would go damns and dikes then let the water over run the city. Manhattan surrounded by a wall where the ground of the city is were it always is, and a 50ft wall around it.
- samirillian 10y ago>"why neoliberal capitalism is the only real villain of the book" I doubt that neoliberal capitalism will be "the real villain" 100 years from now. Capital is in the process of being superceded by information (a further rarification/reification of social relations). Either way, it's hard to imagine neoliberalism making a good sci-fi villain. At all.
- jacquesm 10y ago> Capital is in the process of being superceded by information Sometimes I really can't follow comments on HN for technical jargon, this one I can't follow because I have no idea what you're on about. How do you see capital being replaced by information?
- L_Rahman 10y agoI'm not the GP but here's an example of larger trend that they might point to in support of their argument: Excerpted from Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-04/hacienda-hedges-and-unicorn-votes https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-04/hacienda-... > One simple story to tell here is that globalization and technology have shifted the bargaining power between entrepreneurs and providers of capital. These days, if you want to start a social-media company, you don't need to raise a lot of money from investors to build a factory. You just need a dorm room, and your parents are probably paying for that. And if your social media company is a success, it can go global instantly with near-zero marginal costs. (Yes, I know, this does not exactly describe Snapchat, which is focused on developed economies and which has weirdly enormous costs, but still.) The path to being a gigantic profitable company is paved relatively more with ideas, and less with capital: Vivek Wadhwa, a distinguished fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering, says the “winner-take-all” culture in which a few tech companies emerge as hugely profitable from among a far-larger number that fail encourages investors to give tech executives more leeway. Meanwhile the same forces of globalization and technology mean that there are a lot more people with capital. U.S. tech companies can raise money from China, or the Middle East, rather than limiting themselves to New York and San Francisco. Globalization opens up new markets, which makes good business ideas more valuable, and new sources of capital, which makes those ideas easier to fund. So winning entrepreneurs are more valuable, while capital is less valuable and less scarce. Of course the bargaining dynamic between the people with ideas and the people with capital has shifted. You'd expect to see some of that playing out in price -- investors paying billions of dollars for unprofitable social-media companies -- but at some level, if you are a young billionaire entrepreneur, you don't really need any more money. You might as well bargain for more power, or more freedom.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoI have lived in his small home town of Davis for a decade, and I still haven't bumped into Kim Stanley Robinson. From his writing, I was sure I'd run into him at Delta of Venus café one day. No such luck.
- camillescott 10y agoHe even mentions a "Delta of Venus" in 2312; however, his preferred spot seems to be Mishka's.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoInterpreting personality from books to predict hangouts is a funny endeavor, but I can see how Mishka's would be his choice. If it isnt the good coffee, tea, and pastries, Mishka's is filled with college students and professors, many of whom are scientists. Obviously scientists play a central role in his writing. Delta of Venus attracts the more alternative crowds, as well as english lit students and the like. The people there have edremind me of some of the characters and settings in Green or Blue Mars. In any case, these are just passive musings. I frequent Delta of Venus because I like the patio.
- ilamont 10y agoI haven't read Robinson's book, but the interview is intriguing ... many speculative worlds based on the premise of man-made ecological catastrophe are positively grim (On The Beach, Jem, etc.) but Robinson's NYC is (apparently) coping quite well. JG Ballard tackled a somewhat similar scenario in 1962 with The Drowned World. (1) It was London, not NYC, and the catastrophe was still progressing, which would lead ultimately to human extinction or the triumph of the reptiles. The beauty in the book was Ballard's language, the evocative descriptions of the world, and the sad main character living out his remaining days in a skyscraper penthouse. Worth reading (and comparing with Robinson's book). 1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10273413/Will-Self-on-JG-Ballards-The-Drowned-World.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10273413/Will-Self-...
- jhbadger 10y agoYes, I love Ballard's catastrophe novels. But of course as prophetic as the The Drowned World seems to us today, Ballard wasn't writing it as a serious prediction of the future -- he just liked writing about the world ending in weird ways -- water, fire, a mysterious wind, etc.
- Pamar 10y agoMy theory about most of Ballard's "sci-fi" was that he just liked to throw his characters in (or immediately after) some world-shifting event (mostly in the sense of "catastrophe") and see what kind of neurosis or madness would emerge from the new environment. So the external environment was mostly a backdrop for the development of the characters' mental maladies. It's pretty rare to find a character in Ballard's stories who acts "rationally" and usually (at least in my experience) the few that do tend to look alien/mad because they are still using human logic and common sense in a world that has obviously moved in a totally different direction.
- obstinate 10y agoShip Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi is another candidate. In that post-ecological catastrophe, things are a good deal worse than they are today, but life isn't hopeless. Well, for many it is, but is that so different from our reality?
- soared 10y agoVery intriguing article - I'm going to get the book. A major nitpick that made me stop reading the article though.. >To truly spoil the end of the book... You've just convinced me to buy it, and now I can't read further in your article. I don't know if its safe to keep reading, and I'm not going to tempt spoiling the book. Even if it is tongue-in-cheek, how would I know that for sure?
- Uhhrrr 10y agoThe spoiler is pretty general, but if you've already decided to get the book, the rest of the interview can be skipped. They don't reveal the contents of the Voynich manuscript or anything.
- mortenjorck 10y agoIt's a tonal spoiler, I guess you could say. It mostly spoils whether the book ends on an upbeat or dim note, although I guess there's also some vague detail as to a large event that results in this ending. I read the paragraph and still want to read the book.
- stagbeetle 10y agoKnowing the ending may make you want to read it even more.[0] I know, atleast for me, it can help influence what I should consume when given time constraints. [0]http://pages.ucsd.edu/~nchristenfeld/Publications_files/Spoilers.pdf http://pages.ucsd.edu/~nchristenfeld/Publications_files/Spoi...
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoI know that, when I read/see a surprising or exciting twist in a story, I get a thrill of excitement and delight; if I knew it was coming, though, it's replaced with, at best, a duller sort of "yep, there it is" sensation. Knowing that I've missed out on that thrill is upsetting. Relatedly (because I have actually had people argue with me about this before) I really don't get why so many people (like these researchers) feel the need to tell me that those sensations I just described are invalid or imaginary.
- Florin_Andrei 10y agoI've very mixed feelings about KSR. His ideas are interesting and worth thinking about, but I've always found his writing style unbearably flat and boring. I really wanted to read the Mars trilogy, but gave up after the first volume, the writing was so dull and lifeless. So here we go again - a book that seems like it's focused on interesting ideas, but is that worth plowing through acres of arid prose?
- lreeves 10y agoI found the same thing but would also recommend checking out Aurora, one of his later books; he's definitely less dry when it's a self-contained story.
- mikenew 10y agoI got through about 2/3 of Red Mars and put it down a few years ago. Even though it was fascinating and unbelievably well researched, it just felt like work to read it. A few years later I decided to try again and ended up reading the whole trilogy. And loved it. I think you have to adjust your expectations a bit and look at his writing for what it is; an exploration on "what would it really be like if X happened". Most sci-fi is a narrative set in some kind of technologically-different universe. His is more like a serious meditation on what that universe would be like if it really did exist.
- MrMember 10y agoI put down Red Mars around 2/3rds of the way through a few years ago for the same reasons. Maybe I'll give it another shot.
- simplicio 10y agoRed Mars has kind of a weird rhythm to it. I think Robinson was trying to make a sort of "fake history", so plot lines and characters kinda peter-out or go no where in a way that happens in real life, but not in most fiction (GRR Martin is the only other author I've read with a similar style). I really like the technique, but I can see why its not everyones thing. The later books in the series slowly take on a more traditional structure, with focus more on a smaller cast of "heroes" about whom most of the action takes place.
- rl3 10y agoThe cover has a similar asthetic to SimCity 2000's box art: http://agentpalmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/SimCity-2000-Box-Cover-Art.jpg http://agentpalmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/SimCity-20...
- Apocryphon 10y agoAny thoughts on KSR's thoughts on hacks? > What I wanted to say with that part of the plot is you can’t hack the system, you have to legislate the system. Because hacks are reversible and they are too secret and they’re kind of like a desire for a technical, silver-bullet solution like you might get out of Silicon Valley people but in fact these are laws, global laws. So what you really need is legislation to change them and Piketty-ing the tax code.
- l33tbro 10y agoI didn't understand that point. Wouldn't legislation be more reversible than hacking (eg, healthcare, USDA, EPA, etc at the moment due to change of government)? I must be missing something.
- caio1982 10y agoFunny, he really seemed interested in drowning NYC in his book 2312 (very good novel). I suspect he wanted to expand on the topic, besides the drowned city just being the setting for a few situations in the book. It might be worth comparing both descriptions of NYC to see what changed after his research.
- nicostouch 10y agoAll the bitcoins will be mined
- malyk 10y agoLots of interesting ideas in the book spread out through a really mundane story. The best part of the book for me is the chapters with the New York Citizen telling us the history of the city and how it got to be to where it is in 2140. The story itself has some highlights, but overall it was mostly a slog to listen to.