Book Review | New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

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.

***

Not for the first time, and not, I can only hope, for the last, Kim Stanley Robinson takes aim at climate change in New York 2140, an immensely necessary novel as absorbing as it is sprawling about how that city among cities, so close to so many hearts, moves forward following floods that raise the seas fifty feet.

The Big Apple has been blighted. Uptown, being uptown both figuratively and literally, came through the crises brought on by humanity's hard-to-kick carbon habit relatively well, but downtown, everything is different. Submerged, the streets between buildings are cast now as canals. Nobody has a car anymore, but boats are mainstays on the waterways. Pedestrians must make do with jetties, or walk the dizzying bridges between those skyscrapers that haven't already collapsed after losing the ongoing fight to stay watertight.

Needless to say, New York as we know it is no more. But New Yorkers? Why, for good or for ill, they're New Yorkers still!

There is a certain stubbornness in a New Yorker, cliche though it is to say so, and actually many of them had been living in such shitholes before the floods that being immersed in the drink mattered little. Not a few experienced an upgrade in both material circumstances and quality of life. For sure rents went down, often to zero. So a lot of people stayed. 

Squatters. The dispossessed. The water rats. Denizens of the deep, citizens of the shallows. And a lot of them were interested in trying something different, including which authorities they gave their consent to be governed by. Hegemony had drowned, so in the years after the flooding there was a proliferation of cooperatives, neighbourhood associations, communes, squats [and such]. (p.209) 

Robinson's novel is arranged around a fitting for instance of this. The old Met Life tower on the drowned remains of Madison Square is home, now, to several thousand souls: a collective of individuals who all contribute to their cooperative's pot—be it financially or by bartering man-hours or goods for common use.

Among the many are Ralph Muttchopf and Jeff Rosen, a couple of old coders, or quants, who live in "a hotello on the open-walled farm floor [...] from which vantage point lower Manhattan lies flooded below them like a super-Venice, majestic, watery, superb. Their town." (p.6) But there are elements of their town that they deeply dislike, particularly the financial sector that has started gambling on what's become known as "the intertidal zone," (p.118) and down-on-their-luck as they are, with as little left to lose as you like, Mutt and Jeff do something they shouldn't: they hack the stock market.

But I Digress | Guilt by Amazon Association

I dare say everyone will be talking about the J. K. Rowling reveal today—I certainly will in Wednesday's edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus—but I wanted to take this time to talk about a topic that didn't quite make it into the column.

In a recent blog post for The Bookseller, you see, Keith Smith had a bit of a righteous rant about how certain authors—including Joanne Harris, Julia Donaldson, Alison Weir, Ian Rankin, Kate Morton and Patrick Ness—seemed to back Amazon and various other chain retailers despite having vouchsafed their support for smaller stores. For instance his:

“As someone who owns two independent bookshops I feel angry that these authors, unthinkingly or by design, have chosen to support Amazon, W H Smith or Waterstones without giving a fig for independent bookshops. Many of these are authors who, when asked, will say they couldn’t imagine life without their local bookshop. But words need to be matched by deeds if they are to make a difference.”

In principle, I agree with this part of Smith’s argument entirely—and so, it seems, do many of the authors he specifically took to task.

But Smith draws a hard line later in the originating article that I can’t quite get behind, by insisting that “the Booksellers Association should contact all authors immediately and ask them to stop supporting Amazon directly.”

Which strikes me, at least, as rather tyrannical. And a number of authors responded to Smith’s comments in kind. Alison Weir, for one:

“Linking to Amazon does not mean that I do not support independents. [...] The fact remains that publishers can shift large quantities of books through Amazon, W H Smith, Waterstones and the supermarkets, which are their main clients. Amazon also pays authors on their associates programme fees based on the number of books sold. Authors do have a living to make and Amazon can provide a great source of income which, sadly, independent book shops could not possibly meet. I understand the concerns of independent booksellers, and I think that there is a case to be made for Amazon to pay corporation tax, so that there would be fairer parity between its prices and those which independents with overheads have to charge. But accusing authors like me [...] of not 'giving a fig' for independents is not only ignorant but untrue; I think my deeds over the years give substance to my words."

Here’s Diana Kimpton, co-creator of the Pony-mad Princess picture books, speaking by way of The Bookseller again:

“I sympathise with small independent bookshops struggling through a recession, but authors are struggling too. Only a few get the high advances mentioned in the press. The rest earn much less, and many don't even get the equivalent of the minimum wage. As a result, the fact that the Amazon Associate scheme pays commission on sales resulting from links is very important. Because I have to split the royalty on my picture books with the illustrator, I actually earn more from the Amazon commission on a sale than I do from the publisher.”

Ultimately, I think Smith’s anger is a mite misplaced. Though it’s certainly the case that authors should be squarely behind independent booksellers, let’s face it: these days, most books are bought from the bigger names in the business, and to simply sever a supplementary source of income because Amazon and its ilk are, you know, completely evil, seems... well, selfish.

Let me be clear here. I sympathise with the plight of independent booksellers, but to ask for authors to support said stores solely goes against the real issue here: our right to choose where and from whom we buy our books. Why deny readers that? That they’re buying literature to begin with is, I think, the most important thing.

In one respect, then, Keith Smith is spot-on: authors should be seen to support choice.

But so should he, surely.