SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

SF/F Review: New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson https://t.co/wbENGi4C8G Short Review: 2 out of 10 (1/3)

— garik16 (@garik16) April 24, 2018

Short Review (cont): NY2140 is a book that tries to make a case against the modern financial system, only to forget about having a solid plot/writing or characters that are enjoyable...you know the important parts of any book. It gets better as it goes on, but not enough (2/3)

— garik16 (@garik16) April 24, 2018

The term "Message Fiction" is generally thrown as an insult by people who are closed minded at best and stupid and malicious at worst.  All stories have some sort of message, whether it be heavy handed or subtly placed within the narrative, and cries of "Message Fiction is bad" or that it is ruining the genre are pretty much always sour grapes by people who don't like fiction that conforms to their own perspectives.  So yeah, you'll pretty much never hear/see me use the term in a review on this blog, as whatever valid use the term might have has long been beaten out of it.

If I was EVER to use the term, New York 2140 would be the type of book where I would do it.  The book is one part science fiction - featuring a flooded New York City after Global warming has caused the sea level to rise 50 feet in the year 2140 - and a larger part screed against the current world financial system, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis.  There is nothing subtle about this book - one of the 8 point of view "characters" who narrates each chapter is explicitly giving screeds about the financial and political system of modern capitalism, often in ways not connected at all to the main storyline, and this theme pervades much of the rest of the points of view as well.

It's certainly possible this could have worked still as a novel....but it doesn't here.  Several of the main characters are incredibly grating - though a few get better as the story goes on - and the leaps of logic needed to get from one area of the plot to the next are so large as to defy one's suspension of disbelief.  As a novel, this book is bad - the characters are at best decent (and often worse), the plot is bad, and parts of the book are so painfully written that it's hard not to skim to try and get past them.  If I hadn't wanted to read every Hugo and Nebula Nominated Work for Best Novel, I would have quit reading this book fairly quickly....instead I trudged through over 600 pages so I could make this review.  I would recommend against following my example.


---------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
It is the year 2140 and New York is vastly changed....and still very much the same.  Global warming has caused "two pulses" of flooding of the city, resulting in the floor of the City being under sea level, with the waters haven risen 50 feet.  Some city buildings have fallen, but many still stand, connected by sky bridges, and life goes on as normal (with boats haven replaced cars).

The occupants of the Met Life North Building in Madison Square ("The Met") are a diverse group.  There's Franklin, the day trader; Vlade, the building Super who has to ensure the building isn't destroyed by the elements; Amelia, the "cloud" star who broadcasts her adventures helping animals migrate on her airship from devastated environments to new ones which can hopefully prevent extinction; Gen, the police inspector who wants to help the greater good; Charlotte, the immigration attorney who wants to help people and runs the coop board; Stefan and Roberto, a pair of orphan kids who live in a boat at the bottom of the building and seek adventure.

And then there's Mutt and Jeff, a pair of coders/quants who decide one day to "Fix" the world by implementing a major fix in the code of the financial system....and who immediately are kidnapped.  What they couldn't have imagined however, is that while their "fix" is hardly noticed, their absence is, by the rest of the occupants, and triggers events moving that will change New York, and the Financial System of the World, in a major way.
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The best thing I can say about New York 2140 is that some of the characters - particularly Stefan and Roberto, the adventurous orphans, as well as Inspector Gen are fun to read about as pretty interesting characters all around.  Moreover, some of the more grating characters - particularly Franklin and Amelia - get a little less annoying as the book goes on.

That's....about all I got for the positives of this book.  I didn't mention in the plot summary, but I did before the Jump, but the book features about once every 5-7 chapters a chapter written by "A Citizen" which is basically just a screed against the modern financial system that sometimes doesn't even apply at all to the events happening in the story.  These segments are so out of place that the book, in a rare moment of self awareness, notes that some readers may simply want to skip them.  I skimmed them for completeness, but I think would have gone insane if I'd listened to this on audiobook where such a thing would not have been possible.

And god are some characters grating to read.  Ignoring the "Citizen," Franklin and Amelia are notably bad - Franklin is portrayed at first as a total douchebag day trader obsessed with making money on fictional things that will hurt everyone else, and the book tries to make him kind of redeemed, but doesn't even go there fully.  The end result is a voice that is incredibly painful to read and a character I often wanted to shoot, and also one who takes some actions that don't make any sense.  Amelia early on feels like a character from a different book - her speech is punctuated with things like "YAY!" and literally involves things like trying to escape from polar bears on an airship using helium balloons, which is just so incredibly off from the tone of everything else as to be jarring.  And when she finally finishes as part of the main plot, it feels again totally out of place.

Charlotte's chapters seem generally fine except when she gets into finance talk, which is also incredibly jarring since all of a sudden she goes from an immigration attorney/coop-board head to master of financial knowledge based upon our modern world of the 1960s through 2010s.  This is a pretty common problem with this book incidentally - despite this story taking place in a world where there have been two massive global crises that have also naturally triggered global financial crises, to say nothing of smaller national-scale ones that surely would have taken place in the 122 years between the present and this book, the story repeatedly has characters reference financial crises of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as well as other such crises, as contexts for their actions.  And while I get that this is important to the author's mention, it's kind of bizarre for it to be on the minds of characters over a hundred years later so damn poignantly instead of more "recent" to the characters events.  Again, it's jarring - for example, Katrina is referenced to set a scale of an ecological disaster and it's pretty ridiculous to think someone in 2140 is referencing Katrina (even in today's world we've had two major hurricane crises just THIS PAST YEAR since Katrina).

Going away from the narration and the characters - the plot is also full of holes, heavily reliant upon characters making connections that are incredibly strained and incredible coincidences (for example, a group of characters wind up digging at a place in the city and as a side product, they discover something strange on radar....which just happens to be the location of another thing several of those characters were looking for earlier in the book in a part of the plot unconnected entirely to the digging).  The detective character, Gen, is one I liked a lot but a lot of her investigation has her assuming connections between things without any reason to think there are any such links - she's right, but it's incredibly hard to imagine even a real life Sherlock Holmes to make such a connection.  Again, it's jarring and throws one out of the suspension of disbelief one needs to read SF/F.

In short, the best I can say about NY 2140 is that it's not the worst book I've read, but while the author's ideas about the global financial system might be some that I'm not totally averse to, they are certainly not written in a way that makes this a coherent work of fiction.  I wouldn't recommend you spending much time on this book, and if those ideas appeal to you, you would probably be better off searching for non-fiction.