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New York 2140 Hardcover – March 14, 2017
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As the sea levels rose, every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city.
There is the market trader, who finds opportunities where others find trouble. There is the detective, whose work will never disappear -- along with the lawyers, of course.
There is the internet star, beloved by millions for her airship adventures, and the building's manager, quietly respected for his attention to detail. Then there are two boys who don't live there, but have no other home -- and who are more important to its future than anyone might imagine.
Lastly there are the coders, temporary residents on the roof, whose disappearance triggers a sequence of events that threatens the existence of all -- and even the long-hidden foundations on which the city rests.
- Print length624 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOrbit
- Publication dateMarch 14, 2017
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.88 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-10031626234X
- ISBN-13978-0316262347
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Relevant and essential."―Bloomberg Businessweek
"Science fiction is threaded everywhere through culture nowadays, and it would take an act of critical myopia to miss the fact that Robinson is one of the world's finest working novelists, in any genre. New York 2140 is a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."―Guardian
"Kim Stanley Robinson envisions a future that's closer than we like to think."―NPR Books
"An exploration of human resilience in the face of extreme pressure...starkly beautiful and fundamentally optimistic visions of technological and social change in the face of some of the worst devastation we might bring upon ourselves."― The Conversation
"As much a critique of contemporary capitalism, social mores and timeless human foibles, this energetic, multi-layered narrative is also a model of visionary worldbuilding."―RT Book Reviews (Top Pick!)
"The thriller Robinson unspools in that flooded city is gripping on its own merits. But it's the radical imagination of the book that makes it so hard to put down."―Business Insider
"Massively enjoyable"―The Washington Post
"Robinson has established himself as the great humanist of speculative fiction."―Village Voice
"A thoroughly enjoyable exercise in worldbuilding, written with a cleareyed love for the city's past, present, and future."―Kirkus
"The tale is one of adventure, intrigue, relationships, and market forces.... The individual threads weave together into a complex story well worth the read."
―Booklist
"In this both heartening and dismaying vision of a peri-apocalyptic world, human greed (of course) is the villain, to which the only counteragent is the tenacity and resolve of the human spirit."―Financial Times
"New York 2140 truly is a document of hope as much as dread."―Los Angeles Review of Books
"A rousing tribute to the human spirit." ―San Francisco Chronicle on Aurora
"The thrilling creation of plausible future technology and the grandness of imagination...magnificent."―Sunday Times on Aurora
"[Robinson is] a rare contemporary writer to earn a reputation on par with earlier masters such as Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke." ―Chicago Tribune on Aurora
"If Interstellar left you wanting more, then this novel might just fill that longing."―io9 on Aurora
"Aurora may well be Robinson's best novel...breaks us out of our well-ingrained, supremely well-rehearsed habits of apocalypse - and lets us see the option of a different future than permanent, hopeless standoff."―Los Angeles Review of Books on Aurora
"Humanity's first trip to another star is incredibly ambitious, impeccably planned and executed on a grand scale in Aurora."―SPACE.com on Aurora
"[A] heart-warming, provocative tale."―Scientific American on Aurora
"This ambitious hard SF epic shows Robinson at the top of his game... [A] poignant story, which admirably stretches the limits of human imagination."―Publishers Weekly on Aurora
"This is hard SF the way it's meant to be written: technical, scientific, with big ideas and a fully realized society. Robinson is an acknowledged SF master-his Mars trilogy and his stand-alone novel 2312 (2012) were multiple award winners and nominees-and this latest novel is sure to be a big hit with devoted fans of old-school science fiction."―Booklist on Aurora
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Orbit; First Edition (March 14, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 624 pages
- ISBN-10 : 031626234X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0316262347
- Item Weight : 1.95 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.88 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #768,660 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,218 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- #9,948 in Space Operas
- #15,933 in Science Fiction Adventures
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. He is the author of eleven previous books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Fifty Degrees Below, Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Antarctica--for which he was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program. He lives in Davis, California.
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I loved the changing perspectives and multiple characters. The audible version is so good! Usually, I buy both the book and the audible, and only use the audible version when I can’t physically read the book. However, I found the readers breathed even more life into these wonderfully developed characters.
The one thing that bothered me at times, was the lack of very much social change. It’s more than a hundred years in the future, but the characters continually made pop culture references to our current situation. I realize this is purposeful to drive the themes, but at times, I could find it unbelievable. But it’s a minor concern because this is really a book about our current times. I can only hope we heed the warnings.
It’s a big book, with big ideas. I recommend it.
NEW YORK 2140 is not a novel in the usual sense. There is no real plot, although there are several events that are strung through the book that actually do have a beginning, middle, and end. There are also characters that the reader follows from the beginning of the novel to the end of the novel, and their lives do intersect because those previously mentioned events do intersect and overlap. And there is conflict, but not the sort of conflict a reader is used to seeing in a novel that is structured in a typical fashion. Even the title is a bit misleading, as the novel starts in 2140 but ends a few years later after the events that are recounted within are complete. What NEW YORK 2140 does provide, as does 2312, is a snapshot, a snapshot of a few characters within one of the largest and most well-known cities in the world as they - and the city - go about their daily lives.
You'd be right to ask "why should a care about New York in 2140?". Well, it's under 50 feet of water. To be fair, not all of it is under 50 feet of water, but most of it is. In fact, the book itself answers the question of why you should care about New York instead of any of the other coastal cities that are under water. Back to this in a bit.
Or maybe not. It's really a difficult novel to describe. Structurally, the novel is broken into parts, and each part has subsections that follow individual characters - or, in two cases, a couple of characters. There is also an additional subsection for a character called "The Citizen". Robinson is famously known for liberally sprinkling infodumps throughout his books, and NEW YORK 2140 is no exception. While infodumps are spread everywhere throughout the book - and I'll have to say I didn't mind them in the least, as they were in my opinion well done, informative, and entertaining - the best of the lot come in the sections featuring The Citizen. It is in these sections that the reader learns about the two events - The First Pulse and The Second Pulse - that put NYC and the other coastal cities under water. What's more, we learned how the Pulses came about in wondrous detail that should, but won't, convince any climate change denier that we have really screwed up this planet and we'd better do something about it yesterday. The Citizen doesn't just tell us about how NYC got to be in the state it's in ecologically, he tells us about finance as well, how the Pulses affected the global economy, and how current (to the novel) solutions to the problem are no different than what was done in the past. It's very clear throughout the book that Robinson has done his research. As a side note, and in bits that most readers may not enjoy but I found amusing, The Citizen, a snarky resident of NYC, refers to the text of the book itself, letting his audience know that he knows what he's saying is being read, and is giving those same readers permission to skip these sections if they want to, while at the same time letting them know that they're going to be ignorant of many facts if they skim through his parts.
The thing that is fresh about this novel is that while it is a post-disaster novel, it doesn't dwell on the disaster (or in this case disasters). The point is not the disasters - the point is how a subsection of society deals with the nasty hand it's been dealt. Robinson also lets us know that it really is all about money. Yes, there is climate change which will lead to disaster. But money, really, makes the world go around. Nearly all of the characters have either something to do with finance or are affected by those that have something to do with finance. A major plot (there's that word here) point involves how to manipulate the global economy in the aftermath of a hurricane that hits New York.
The characters here are secondary. I don't think Robinson means for the reader to be enamored of these characters at all. I don't think there's any character that grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and made me pay attention to him or her - although I did feel sorry for the two kids that continually did stupid things and got into trouble for them. This, like 2312, is a story about ideas, but ideas based in reality, ideas that we could find becoming a reality if we're not careful.
Back to one point I made earlier, about why we should care about New York and not any other coastal city. Don't skip The Citizen sections. And don't skip any of the rest of the sections either. They're too good to pass up.
This is the first audiobook I've listened to that has more than a couple of narrators. There are seven of them, and they are all wonderful. While I haven't taken the time to learn which narrators performed which sections (although it's a safe bet that the female narrators did the sections centering on the females, and the same with the males of course), I'm really partial to the guy that performed The Citizen. This was a great cast performing a great book.
Top reviews from other countries
Comment résoudre ce problème?
Reviewed in France on December 24, 2020
Comment résoudre ce problème?
___Hundreds of port cities like New York have become instant Venices. Southern Manhattan and large portions of Brookline have gone underwater. Real estate owners have written off their flooded buildings. But abandoned tenants have adapted by applying waterproofing, converting lower floors to boathouses and spanning flimsy pedestrian viaducts from skyscraper to skyscraper.
___Robinson presents an eclectic group of characters. They've found amazing ways to eke out lives in the aftermath of ocean inundations.
___Stefan & Roberto are orphan teenagers. They've built a makeshift diving bell, and they're searching for a treasure chest of gold that was lost during the American Revolutionary War.
___Mutt & Jeff are quantum programmers who perform odd jobs in the dark net. As the novel opens, they've embarrassed their employers and gotten themselves imprisoned in a shipping container.
___Franklin Garr is a hedge fund player. He has devised a index model for the intertidal zone, tracking the livelihoods of half-drowned urban survivors. His index seems to parallel the health of the global economy.
___Vlade is the janitor, housekeeper and jack of all trades for the half-drowned highrise where most of the characters live.
___Charlotte is the chairperson of an intertidal cooperative. She suspects there are wealthy investors who want to make hostile takeovers of the dwellings in the intertidal zone. These same financiers abandoned the residents when ocean waves swamped southern Manhattan. Now they want to cash in after the residents have managed to salvage the threatened real estate.
___Inspector Gen is an old school policewoman. She vows to help Charlotte.
___Amelia is a Cloud performer. She streams her adventures in a dirigible. To gather a loyal audience, she started out with scenes that required her to solve issues without her clothes. Now that she has a considerable following, she transports endangered species to places that offer a better chance for survival.
___Robinson weaves an engaging narrative that brings these characters together. Along the way, he demonstrates the futility of governments to curb the financial parasites. Markets add surcharges to everything we buy, yet financial services contribute virtually nothing to the real economy. Central banks create money out of nothing and divvy it out to the largest commercial banks. Worse, if bankers make mistakes, governments bail them out, so bankers have a license to gamble without risk.
___ONE PASSAGE: "The bailout of the 2008 crash, which served as the model for the two that followed it, was calculated by historians at somewhere between 5 and 15 trillion dollars. One careful guess said it was 7.7 trillion dollars, another 13 trillion; both added that this was more than the cost (adjusted for inflation) of the Louisiana Purchase, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the 1980s savings and loan bailout, the Iraq wars, and the entire NASA space program, combined. Conclusion: wars and land and social programs must not be very expensive. And compared to rescuing finance from itself, they’re not."
___Unfortunately, popular wags try to tell us that business (if left unfettered) is more efficient than government. Sure thing. Any idiot can appear to be efficient if he's pumped with taxpayer money until it pours out of his ears.
___Robinson has written an entertaining narrative with an important message. I recommend this book 100%...