Review - New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

New York 2140
Kim Stanley Robinson
Orbit, 16 March 2017
HB, 613pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

"The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever"

wrote Louis MacNeice in Bagpipe Music

"But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather."

Despite the efforts of well connected denialists to break the bloody glass, the weather rolls on, unstoppable. And authors are now addressing the reality of climate change (perhaps only fiction can convey the reality of this inconvenient truth). A couple of years ago, Adam Nevill used its horror as both a background for and an essential strand of Lost Girl. Last year,  Jonathan Strahan gave us dispatches from the near future in Drowned Worlds.

Now, Kim Stanley Robinson presents a lyrical, beautiful yet chilling warning from 2140, where New York is up to its armpits in water and hustling hard to survive. It is an ambitious book, making real that old cliche that in this book, the city itself is the most important character.

But not the only important one. Robinson employs a device that must have made the book a nightmare to write, telling the story through multiple viewpoints which don't overlap or run in parallel but pick up from one another sequentially.  So we hear from "Mutt and Jeff", two hard up quants living in a garden who plot reform of the world's financial laws. There's Gen Octaviasdottir, the police Inspector who runs much of south Manhattan. Franklin, a trader and deviser of an all-important index which is powering an investment bubble. Vlade, building manager for the old Met Life skyscraper, now standing 50 feet deep in water and converted to provide accomodation, power and - via its farm deck - food. Charlotte Armstrong, social worker and leader of the Met Life co-op. Stefan and Roberto, two children of the waves who have a line in treasure hunting through the drowned streets. Amelia Black, cloud TV star who pilots an airship and films her attempts to save threatened species from the waves.

And, yes, the city speaks through the voice of "a citizen" whose account is the only one to really break the chain of narrative as it discourses on New York history (some of it, to us, still in the future). Sometimes this is immediately relevant, sometimes you only see the point 50 pages on.

And everywhere there are quotes: quotes from New Yorkers, quotes from those experiencing the city for the first time, quotes about famous citizens, geology, history... an awesome amount of research must have gone into this book but it's worn lightly, it all serves to set out the character of that extraordinary city and portray what it might come to after another 120 years of rising waters.

Because, in 2140, this is a city under siege.

From the waves which have drowned half the land, leaving the inhabitants living in the taller buildings, commuting by boat, trying to house the myriad of refugees arriving from even less fortunate places, running rackets, politicing, trading: being New York.

But also under siege from the uptown gentrifiers who like what's been made of the edgy intertidal and want in. The attempts of Charlotte and her allies to fend off one such attempt - and perhaps, to take back a little control from the world of finance and speculation - form most of the book's plot, together with the fate that befalls Mutt and Jeff when they offend those same gods of finance. It's almost beside the point, though, as the main action here is the city's endurance, deep rooted in its past, of all that Man (-made climate change) can throw at it. It is, as I said above, a beautiful book, Robinson playing with the paradox of a global disaster that still brings new possibilities, that draws out the best - and worst - in us. His characters defy not only the elements but the speculators, crooked financiers, a Mayor who sides with the rich. if it was a book about London I'd call it the Blitz spirit: perhaps for New York it's the 9/11 spirit? I don't know.

It is, in all ways, an immersive book. It's sweeping in scope - as Robinson points out many times, his city is a microcosm of the world, it shouldn't be taken as typical but it stands for many places and enables him to tell the story of the melting Antarctic and the shocks that it causes, as well as of financial crisis upon financial crisis in which the people have to bail out reckless capital and then suffer for having done it. There's perhaps an implicit comparison between those two manmade system-disasters. It's a great long chunky doorstop of a book, not a quick read but a read that rewards you with multiple views of the same thing, with many incidents and episodes that shed light on the characters, all told in subtly different registers suiting their protagonists (for example, the mildly comedic episodes featuring Amelia Black or the self-absorbed thoughts of Franklin Garr).

I could, really, waffle on all night about why this book is brilliant but really I'd do a poor job at conveying its genius compared with your just reading it so. I'll leave you with an extract:

Then comes September and the sun tilts to the south. Yes, autumn in New York: the great song of the city and the great season. Not just for the relief from the brutal extremes of the winter and the summer, but for that glorious slant of the light, that feeling that in certain moments lances in on that tilt--that you had been thinking you were living in a room and suddenly with a view between buildings out to the rivers, a dappled sky overhead, you are struck by the fact that you live on the side of a planet--that the great city is also a great bay on a great world. In those golden moments even the most hard-bitten citizen, the most oblivious urban creature, perhaps only pausing for a light to turn green, will be pierced by that light and take a deep breath and see the place as if for the first time, and feel, briefly but deeply, what it means to live in a place so strange and gorgeous.

Drowned Worlds

Image from http://www.jonathanstrahan.com.au/

Drowned Worlds
Anthology, compiled by Jonathan Strahan
Solaris, 14 July 2016
PB, 336pp
Source: Advance e-copy via NetGalley

Reminding us that science fiction should confront the big ideas and issues (as well as doing lots of other stuff, obviously) this new anthology from Jonathan Strahan explores climate change, in particular, rising sea levels and the loss of land under water. Strahan notes in his introduction that the city where he lives, Perth, is slated for abandonment in a few decades due to the stresses of climate change.

With this in mind he presents 15 stories meditating on the process, impacts and potential outcomes. This is not a book about heroic scientists finding solutions: it's about what happens next (in some cases, for very long values of "next"). The stories are uniformly excellent: like scenarios drafted by a crack team of futurologists, they help to make real the threat that we are under. Predictions of so many degree warming or so many metres sea level rise, of x hundred million displaced people or y square kilometres land gone, are much harder to understand than these dramatisations of the human impact.

That said, these aren't worth stories by any means and they are not without a degree of solace - whether it's the weird beauty of flooded Boston, tribute paid in Antarctica to what has been lost, or the possibilities of science to change us in order to preserve something of the old world.

This is strong and serious stuff, but they are great stories and as ever Strahan's themed anthologies are an excellent way to sample works by all those super authors you may not have tried yet! It's invidious to pick favourites, but the stories I enjoyed most were Brownsville Station by Christopher Rowe and Who Do You Love? by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

In Brownsville Station, set in a linear, cylindrical city hundreds of miles long somewhere on the Florida coast. We meet a Senior Engineer and a Junior (train) Conductor. Both are caught up in a sudden disaster which brings their settled lives to a juddering halt. Is the city in the far future, post inundation, and the catastrophe just the last stage in mankind's fall? Or is it a different reality experiencing its first calamity? "I don't think it was fast - I think there were signs" says one character - which could stand for everything in this book. As in our world, the protagonists find that the rulebooks and procedures don't cover the scenario they're facing. But there is still hope, in a story which reminded me of EM Forster's The Machine Stops. 

Who Do You Love? is a strange, haunting story, of generations living on the Florida Keys as they are submerged and destroyed by ever more violent storms. Aphrodite and her (husband? lover?) Emile have a plan to preserve the dying coral communities, but Emile can't face what it means for them. As in other stories in this book, something is saved but utterly transformed at the same time.

Full fathom five thy mother lies;
Of her bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were her eyes;
Nothing of her that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange...

The others also range widely across the world and explore many different situations. In Elves of Antarctica (Paul McAuley) Mike is employed as a helicopter pilot working on the burgeoning Antarctic eco-projects. The story describes his encounters with enigmatic monuments, carved in a mysterious script. What do they mean? What's special about their locations? In placing these markers across the Antarctic wilderness, McAuley catches perfectly the tension between the desire to restore what has been lost to the rising floodwaters and the promise of creating something new on an ever changing planet - a dilemma that Mike has to confront himself.

In Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit – Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts (Ken Liu) Asa, a wealthy former trader, has retired, Thoreau style, to a little cabin but it's not in the woods: there are no woods any more: she's living in a spherical refuge craft afloat over old Boston (so not that far from Walden Pond). Here she's bothered by crass tourists coming to dive the beauties of drowned Harvard - and they are beauties: rare corals which transmute the poisons left behind by industry into vibrant colours, shoals of fish slitting through abandoned libraries. The question is posed: can good, beauty, life survive and come out of this apocalypse?

Venice Drowned (Kim Stanley Robinson) follows two days in the life of Carlo, a boatman making a living despite everything by ferrying tourists - Japanese tourists - around the ruins of Venice. Again we see beauty from destruction and marvel at the human spirit that keeps trying in the face of ruin and destruction. Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy (Charlie Jane Anders) is the story of Pris, who runs away to join the Wrong Headed commune.  This is in many respects a familiar story of a well intentioned West Coast alternative community and the tensions and conflicts under the idyllic surface.

The Common Tongue, the Present Tense, the Known (Nina Allan) is a mysterious story. Why was the narrator sent away to live with "the Severins in Strasbourg", with only faint memories of her parents - but an obsession with her uncle, living in his abandoned cottage, and why is she so upset at the mess it was in? There's a hint that the story of her and her friend being in Helston to observe fish is just a cover - for what? Against all that the ravaged of climate change seem almost secondary. Allan's name caught my eye as I'm currently reading her book The Race which is itself set in a poisened and ruined world (though less of a drowned one). What Is (Jeffrey Ford) moves away from the watery margins to the hot, dusty inland of Oklahoma where a small community survives among the second dustbowl. Here a tragedy is played out that, in miniature, echoes the ruin of the world as a whole. This story is one of only a couple  that describe the parched inner lands rather than the drowned coasts

In Destroyed by the Waters (Rachel Swirsky) Zack and Derek are mourning the loss of their son Noah in one of the catastrophes of the 21st century and decide to revisit flooded New Orleans, where they took their honeymoon decades before. The story personalises the grief of climate change, focussing on a very specific loss but also on the love that may help us to survive and continue. The New Venusians (Sean Williams) is a story of a time far in the future, when rebellious young Natasha is teleported to her eccentric uncle's laboratory / shed floating high above Venus. She is meant to learn a lesson, and she does, but it's more about change, responsibility and the future than about not being rude to island diasporas.

Inselberg (Nalo Hopkinson) is a bizarre and chilling story in which a tourguide in future Nigeria, accompanying a load of visitors to see a Mr Fish, takes them to a very dark place indeed.  Only Ten More Shopping Days Left Till Ragnarök (James Morrow) is a bizarre story of how the feedback loop promoting cynicism about climate change might be broken with the help of a narwhal, copious amounts of peat lager and a mystical chant. In Last Gods (Sam J. Miller) a girl with no arms serves as shaman in a primitive community, post apocalypse. Why were her arms removed? Do the "Gods" who are seen at play have real power or do the taboos they represent simply protect humanity from further foolishness? We never really learn.

Drowned (Lavie Tidhar) is a lyrical, almost fairytale account of coming to a Land, in contested alternate versions, speculations and contradictions. A young girl is killed in a rock pool: or kills herself, and releases something that may in time evolve and grow. The Future is Blue (Catherynne M. Valente) is a sad and haunting story of a girl who lives on a floating mat of rubbish. Subject to unending abuse she has apparently saved her community yet only gets blame. Perhaps this is the global warming prophet's role in microcosm...

I'd strongly recommend reading this book, as a warning, as an example of FS doing just what it should - and as a cracking example of storytelling.

Review - Lost Girl by Adam Nevill

Adam Nevill
Lost Girl
Pan, 22 October 2015
PB, 448pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

"Lost Girl" is the story of a missing child, and a father. As the world goes to hell, he focusses on his search for her. At any cost, whoever dies, whatever pain he has to suffer, he will find her.

Two years ago, Penny disappeared. She was playing in the garden by herself: her father, who should have been watching her, was upstairs, flirting by email. Is that why he is so driven to trace her, get her back? Is it guilt? Is it an attempt to atone, to flee from the empty life that's left after she was taken? Nevill doesn't quite tell us, preferring instead to communicate the simple fact of the father's drivenness, amplified by the fact that we never learn his name: throughout the book he remains, simply, the father.

This singleminded hunt is heightened because of the background to the novel. It is 2051, and runaway global warming has taken hold. The summers become hotter every year, crops are failing even in relatively buffered Britain, forest fires and droughts sweep the globe and India and Pakistan are on the verge of war over the declining rivers. A mass movement of refugees crosses Europe ("more and more coming in every day in great noisy leviathans of motion and colour and tired faces") and the population of the UK stands at 90 million (or 100, or 120... the Emergency Government isn't sure). Nationalists, jihadists and crime syndicates strut their stuff. Disease sweeps the globe (it's like the Four Horsemen have found a new partner,and enabler in climate change). Nobody has time or attention for one missing four year old. Except the father. Has he the right, we wonder, to pursue his own crusade like this? But if he doesn't who, who will?

It turns out that there are few like-minded souls who are happy to cooperate - or perhaps, one might think, use the father for their own ends, threatening sex offenders and imposing a kind of wild justice. It's a murky area and he'll take any help he can get - from the woman he only ever hears on the phone (except once...) and who he calls Scarlett Johansson, from the man who becomes Gene Hackman. They support the father, arm him and supply information - but can they really control what they've created?

Nevill's two most recent books, No One Gets Out Alive and House of Small Shadows have been unequivocal horror, albeit of a special kind: not so much spooks and spirits as the despair to be found in a dusty, abandoned country house or a rundown inner city terrace full of rustling plastic sheets and sticky, unwashed crockery. Here he maintains the emphasis on the seedy - as the world winds down, the father inhabits a string of decaying B&Bs, living off processed soya and Welsh rum.  For normal people the world is going to rack and ruin. Only the super rich, or the criminal gangs, have any normality left. But the supernatural? The horror? Well, you'll have to decide, and you can call this a near future thriller or SF if you want, but for me, the horror (the horror!) is rather more stark because it is a credible portrait of what might actually happen, not a piece of fantasy. Perhaps we need more horror like this to shock us into action.

So while this book is not quite what I'd come to expect from Nevill, it is, I'd say, quite properly a horror story and the writing is superb (perhaps a little info-dumpy in places, maybe a few too many lists) but haunting, eloquent and deeply troubling: "...a never-ending carousel of flame, black smoke, glass-strewn streets, bodies under tarpaulins, riot shields glittering in sunlight, placards, aerial footage of felled buildings in other countries, churning brown water moving too fast through places where people had once lived, trees bent in half, tents and tents and tents stretching into forever..."

And that's before we even get to the nihilistic criminal cult of King Death, which is rooted in the decay of our civilization and seems to want nothing but darkness and chaos, but also to be a symbol of it. While the climate change is human caused, the book seems to say, it is still assailing our civilization from outside - and we can, with concerted effort, repel it, plan, allocate, rebuild, confront it. But the enemy we can't defeat, because it is internal, is the human will to death, the selfishness, stuff-you-I'm-alright which is at its purest form in the crime syndicates and the gated communities of the rich, hoarding, thieving, fencing out, killing - a microcosm of what went wrong to cause the disaster in the first place, carrying on as normal, learning nothing.

This is a chilling vision of the future. And normally one might gain some relief from a horror story when the book closes and the bad things end, on closing this, my thoughts were rather that they might only be starting.