Imaginary Worlds - New York 2140

Episode Date: April 6, 2017

Imagine you're a New Yorker in the mid 22nd century. You have to deal with all sorts of headaches like traffic jams on the East River or brownstones collapsing into the canals. People think you're crazy to live in this Super Venice, but you wouldn't want to be anywhere else. That's the world Kim Stanley Robinson imagines in his latest novel New York 2140. It's a hopeful vision of a future where people are doing their best to live normal lives while climate change radically alters everything around them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. On a beautiful spring day like this, I love coming to my favorite spot in the city, Madison Square Park. Right to the south is the old Flatiron Building, which is a gigantic triangular wedge. I'm sure you've seen it before. It was literally the first skyscraper ever. To the north is the Empire State Building, looming over in kind of like a maternal way. And then on the east side of the park is the old Metropolitan Life Building, which is a very tall clock tower with a slender pointed roof

and a gold dome on top. And I actually got married a block away from here. My wedding photos are in this park. There's also a lot of old statues here and a lot of contemporary art too. Do you have the picture in your mind of this park? Okay, good. Now imagine it's all underwater. Sadly, the science is irrefutable. As the oceans get warmer, the sea will expand and rise. And the only real debate is how high the sea is going to rise. How much of Manhattan is going to be swallowed up by the Atlantic Ocean? And I love New York history. Like, sitting here, I think about pictures I've seen of Madison Square Park with the torch of the Statue of Liberty in it. They set it up here in the 19th century to raise funds for the Statue of Liberty itself.

That was 140 years ago. To think that, like, 140 years from now, you can't sit in this park, kind of bums me out. So I was really fascinated to learn about this new novel called New York 2140. It imagines New York transformed into a giant version of Venice in the 22nd century. And yeah, Madison Square Park is underwater, but Madison Avenue is a canal. All the characters in the book live in the Metropolitan Life Tower, and they take boats to work. Even more interesting, the author is Kim Stanley Robinson. He's one of the most respected science fiction writers today,

and he's best known for the Mars trilogy, where he imagined a time in the future where we terraform the atmosphere of Mars to make it livable for humans. I'm from Davis, California, and I was intimidated to write about New York. I will say that right off the bat. I know more about Mars than I know about New York, and it was more comfortable for me writing about Mars. But he went for it, and the novel is actually a very hopeful vision of the future. My interview with Kim Stanley Robinson is after the break. I should probably start by describing the writing style of Kim Stanley Robinson,

but I'll let him do that. I know perfectly well, because I read the internet, what that consists of. That cliche of my novel is long-winded, full of info dumps, as they would call it, disparagingly, prone to explaining utopian histories, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, always outdoors. At this point, I can play with those. I can play against my own brand at this point. It's true. He puts an incredible amount of research into the science and technology in his books. But it's always in service of the story. You might call this world building.

Oh, my God, science fiction novels, fantasy novels, they do world building. Well, that would be bad if that was the focus of any novel. What you really want is a story that runs a thread through the maze that suggests the maze without going through every blind alley. One thing he gets right about New York is the feeling that the city is always changing, but somehow still always feels like New York. So I was surprised to learn that the inspiration for the novel wasn't New York.

It wasn't even climate change. It was the financial crisis of 2008. He was thinking about all the factors that led to the housing bubble. And he wondered, in the future, would people look back on our time and learn from our mistakes? Now, in one of his other novels that was set in the future, his characters visited New York and they described it as a giant version of Venice. And he thought that would be a really interesting real estate bubble because everybody would have given up on the city after the flooding started. But, I mean, this was a passing reference in another novel.

Now he had to figure out how the city got that way. I needed it to be far enough out in the future that the sea level rise that would get me a super Venice in Manhattan was plausible. That pushes out pretty far, considering that the financial situation that I wanted to discuss exists right now and is sort of a post-2008. In other words, he needed to flood his New York relatively fast. So he decided to factor in melting glaciers. One of the reasons that I described the flooding as coming in pulses is, A, that is how glaciers work. They run quickly and then they stall, then they run quickly and then they stall. And I imagined that for the whole world. And so sea level does the same. But B, I needed a moment in my plot where everybody is assuming that sea level is going to stay stable just so that they can build their ground floors and they can operate the city.

How did you decide how far north the water would go? Well, this is a little bizarre but true. The USGS topographical maps have their contour intervals at every 10 feet. And it's only when you pick the 50-foot mark that you get a nice, substantial, contiguous Venice zone. I was also pleased, by the way, that my apartment in your book is still not underwater. So I think this was a good investment on our part. Oh, yeah, yeah. You can see how high you are. Yeah everybody can see how high they are and actually by choosing that height my house in Davis California would be

underwater. Really? Because even though I'm 75 miles inland I'm only 37 feet above sea level that's how the California Delta works. Do you feel that walking around New York do you look at the streets and see and imagine your New York layered on top of it like augmented reality? I did while I was writing the novel, yes. And it was a tough imaginative task to look up everywhere and say the water would be up at the third floor. You'd be down on the bottom of a very, very shallow bay here.

Madison Square is great in that regard. In Italian terms, in Venetian terms, the squares would be called bacinos, little areas of open water that are more than a canal. So the Madison Square bacino, I was thinking aquaculture, yeah, you could do a lot here. An aquaculture farm is not particularly big, and Madison Square is about five or six acres. And I would try to imagine it, but of course you're standing on the ground and you're thinking, whoa, that's a lot of water. That has often occurred to me when trying to imagine it is, is there that much ice in Antarctica? But I've gone to Antarctica and yeah,

there is that much ice in Antarctica. It is just amazing what we've got down there and frightening for sea level concepts. Did you have fun planning out the rest of the 21st century? Well, it was less fun than walking the streets of New York. It was more like, oh, damn, I wish I didn't have this much history to plausibly plot. So it's pretty sketchy in the book on purpose. To take it out to 2140 is more than was comfortable, but I did the best I could. And it gave me time for things like two depressions, two pulses of water, and the recovery from them,

which was also very, very important because I'm depicting in this novel a healthy civilization that has adapted to new conditions. Manhattan is actually quite adaptable. Not the streets, but the skyscrapers. They're sturdy, and they're built on bedrock. Some of them already have sky bridges, which connect them to other buildings. And the top of the Empire State Building was originally meant to be a landing dock for blimps.

Well, I think we gave up on blimps too soon with the Hindenburg crash. And once you switch them over to an inert gas, they are very good transport for carbon burn. So once you decide that burning carbon is a mistake and an accident, you will want to go back to air travel that would be slower but more carbon neutral. And there you get back to airships. But I wanted to know why he set the novel in Madison Square Park, and specifically the Metropolitan Life Building, which in his novel has been turned into a residential co-op. It came from a lecturer, Finn Brunton, and he was giving a

lecture on Bitcoin at UC Davis. And he asked what I was up to as a writer. I said, I'm writing about, you know, Manhattan flooded into a Venice. And he laughed and he said, did you know that the old MetLife building is an imitation of the Campanile in San Marcos Plaza in Venice? I said, no, I didn't know that. And he said, yeah, it's vastly bigger. It's a scale model that's maybe 10 times as big as the original, but it's modeled on it. And you can see when you look at the two of them, it is indeed a reproduction at bigger scale. At that point, trying to figure out where do I center this novel, I had my answer. Each chapter in the book is told from the perspective of a different character living in the MetLife building. For example, this is Franklin, who works on Wall

Street. Or I guess I should say, Wall Canal. So I left work and hummed down the El Dorado equity on Canal and Mercer, turning on to Canal Canal, as the tourists love to hear it called. You could have walked across the canal on both decks without ever having to jump, and quite a few flower sellers and mere passers-by were actually doing that. JoJo was waiting on her building's front dock, and I felt a little spike in the cardiograph. I kissed the dockside with the starboard side of the skater and said,

Hey there. I was thinking of the Reef 40 Oyster Bar. Sounds good, she said. My favorite character was Blade, the superintendent who pours all of his energy into maintaining the building as a way of coping with disappointments in his personal life. So Adelba showed up in her tug, which was of a size that allowed it to just fit through most of the canals of lower Manhattan. Nervously, Blade welcomed her to the Met and showed her around. It was the first time she had visited, so he gave her the grand tour, starting below the waterline, including the rooms that had been broached.

Boathouse, dining hall and commons, some representative apartments occupied by people he knew well, everything from the solo closets to the big group places, occupying half a floor and accommodating a hundred people dorm style. Then up to the farm, then above that to the cupola and the blimp mast. Adelba seemed impressed, which pleased Vlade. Their history stood between them like a third person, but he still had his feelings. That would never change. What it was like for her, he had no idea. There was so much they had never talked about.

Just the thought of trying to scared him. And this is a tradition, a genre, or a form of its own, the building novel. Tom Dish has one set in New York, a famous science fiction novel called 334, which is an address. Jeff Ryman has a great one about London called 253, and John Lanchester has a great one about London called Capital, a recent one. That's so interesting. I didn't know that was like a small genre. A small genre, yes. And it's said to be French and kind of Zola. So I did that, and then in terms of characters,

I needed the building superintendent and a financier, someone working in finance, and indeed more than one people working in finance because there's traders and then there's quants and they don't do the same kinds of things. And then I needed a social worker and refugees. What would be street urchins have to be canal urchins, water rats. Oh, and then a policeman. What does it become like to try to actually enforce the law on the streets and the canals when there are these different levels? And I guess I should mention The Citizen. Yeah, The Citizen is a real outlier. Unlike all the

other characters in the novel, we don't know who this guy is. We don't know where he is. And so in the chapters that are dedicated to him, he's just ranting at us. Like he actually breaks the fourth wall and addresses the readers directly. I thought there needed to be some way to do something more than just present scenes. And I did not want one character explained to another. As you know, Bob, the flood of 2060 was the bad one. I needed somebody to say, as you don't know, reader, this is what happened, and this is why people are so stupid. And the vocabulary, like moron or humongous, it was easy. I say that as a writer and not as a Californian. I don't know where this stuff

comes from. But I mean, I'm an American, and New York is very prominent in America as a voice. So the people of the 2060s staggered on through the Great Depression that followed the first pulse. And, of course, there was a crowd in that generation, a certain particular one percent of the population that just by chance wrote things out rather well and considered that it was really an act of creative destruction, as was everything bad that didn't touch him. And all people needed to do to deal with it was to buckle down in their traces

and accept the idea of austerity, meaning more poverty to the poor, and accept a police state with lots of free speech and freaky lifestyles velvet-gloving the iron fist, and hey, presto, on we go with the show. Humans are so tough. Like many stories about New York, this one is about class. The 1% end up just fine living in the sky.

The brownstone neighborhoods are not so lucky. The areas of Manhattan that are landfill from earlier generations of filling in ponds and lowlands, you don't have high skyscrapers because you can't support them. And indeed, all the buildings in there, if they were flooded, would tend to just fall into the drink. And in the inner tidal, that's the harshest zone of all, where it's underwater at high tide and dry at low tide. And in some places, that's many blocks. He explores these areas through these two characters that are homeless kids, Stefan and Roberto.

They befriend an old man who's a squatter living in Chelsea, which is a neighborhood that actually was flooded during Hurricane Sandy. They were holding the old man by the elbows and hurrying him along the sideways tilted hall as best they could. Then down the stairs, one step at a time. Had to make sure he didn't fall or else it would take even more time. Sometimes placing his feet by grabbing his ankles and placing them. The stairwell was all knocked around, railings down, open cracks and walls showing the building next door. Smell of seaweed and the anoxic stink of released mud,

worse than any chamber pot. There was a booming from outside, and any number of shouts and bangs and other sounds. Shafts of light cut through the hazy air of the stairwell at odd and alarming angles, and quite a few of the stairs gave underfoot. Clearly this old building could fall over at any moment. The oozy stench filled the air, like the building's guts or something. Uzi stench filled the air like the building's guts or something. In those zones, you might want to just float the Manhattan block that is a floating barge, in effect, or a houseboat, anchored in place on stretchy cord so that it could go up at high tide,

down at low tide without swinging around too much. Like floating docks work now, but full-on neighborhoods. That would be technically possible, and people will still want that real estate. And so my developers and my technological infrastructure base by 2140 is saying, these zones are never going to be habitable unless we float on the tide. I mean, it comes down to the question, why stay in New York? And it's a question that even after Hurricane Katrina, some people were kind of callously saying, let's just give up on New Orleans. Oh, right. That's right. Well, in both cases, but especially with New York,

there's a term out of economics, the tyranny of sunk costs. And that's, again, a nice joke because of sunk. And what I've been saying and thinking is that New York Harbor is different. It's charismatic. It has a mystique to it. People want it. And that being the case, there will be some people who leave. In the book, it's called Going to Denver. And Denver just stands in for everywhere that you would go to that doesn't have the problems

of the coast with sea level rise. There would be a moment of opportunity where you could stay in New York without the crippling rents by being a squatter, by being the first into co-op, by buying in at a point where it's cheap because it's so dangerous or moldy or unhealthy or generally regarded as unsafe. And while that situation obtained, you might be able to live in Venice, super Venice, on the cheap.

But then the better you made it, the more there would be gentrification. This sounds like a very familiar story. Yeah, exactly. This is a novel about adaptation. But Kim Stanley Robinson doesn't like the word adaptation because it implies that we shouldn't try to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. You know, we'll just adapt. On the other hand, he thinks that dystopian science fiction can also make us complacent. Well, I think a lot of people are doing dystopias because they're easy and they include drama like car crashes, explosions.

They're dramatic disasters. And then when you watch them, you think, well, that's bad. And so we are better than them. And no matter how bad my personal situation is, at least I'm not as bad as these poor people in the Hunger Games. Instead of inducing alarm and activity, it induces a certain kind of complacency that we're not as bad off as they are. And if they get that bad off, that's their problem to deal with. But since so many people are doing those, and The Hunger Games actually is a very great dystopian novel, surrealistic and not a realist novel, but it is a slap in the face. And it's an expression of hopelessness of young people and of the resentment of the 1%. So it's a real political novel, and it's better than just fooling around in a meaningless space opera.

But then you need the other side, which automatically doesn't have as much intrinsic drama right away, but it will need a lot of creative work. right away. But it will need a lot of creative work. It'll need a lot of coping. It'll need a lot of finessing and compromising, which themselves can be dramatic if you're interested in the novel of human relations, a sort of realist novel that resembles more closely what we do right now in trying to accommodate to reality. So I think of myself as a kind of literary realist. And as a realist, if I'm to the extent that I'm a science fiction writer pushing for something, instead of showing the bad way as a warning sign, I'm showing some positive ways as encouragements that we should try for this. I have to admit, I'm not sure I'd want to live in the New York of his novel.

The endless surprises of street life are too important to me. The sense of a neighborhood, not a giant floating dock acting as a neighborhood. Of course, if I somehow found myself in that New York of 2140, I'd just be one of those New Yorkers who complains the city was better in my day. But each generation has to reclaim their city and mold it in their image. And as climate change transforms the world in really radical ways, imagining versions of cities we know well that have adapted beyond recognition might be the best kind of future we could hope for. Well, that is it for this week.

Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Kim Stanley Robinson and Bill Lobley, who did the readings. You can like the show on Facebook, a tweet at eMilinski. You can also help support the show on the crowdfunding site, Patreon. Just click the donate button on my site,

imaginaryworldspodcast.org.