This is a large-scale novel, not only in terms of its 624 pages, but also the number of characters and storylines Robinson deploys, the sheer range of themes and topics ... Robinson is not a writer who does villains; none of his characters here is evil, although some are grubbier and more compromised than others. The villain in this novel is capitalism itself ... New York 2140 does what Robinson’s award-winning Mars books did: it creates a whole world in such compelling detail that the reader starts to suspect the author has actually been there, in a time machine, and has come back to file what amounts to documentary reportage ... New York 2140 is a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation. Impressively ambitious, it bears comparison with other visionaries’ attempts to squeeze the sprawl and energy of the US between two covers: John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy and Don DeLillo’s Underworld.
The book is a strange hybrid. It has the tenacious, encyclopedic detail that Robinson is known for, the big ideas of a modern CliFi novel and the twists and turns of a heist movie. The characters are memorable, particularly the two little orphan boys and the Internet video star, Amelia. It all comes together (perhaps a little too) beautifully in the end. Anyone familiar with Robinson’s work knows that he can be tedious and heavy handed, and this novel is no exception. But like the others, the thought-provoking ideas and vivid details make the book worth reading.
At times, the book actually felt a bit over-researched to me, with too many characters talking about what used to be at this site or that, before the flood, but I came to understand that this was not simply as-you-know-Bob overexposition; it was also a token of the immense trauma they and everyone in Future New York is still living through ... It is undeniably clear that Robinson’s project has become the construction of a huge metatextual history of the future, not unlike those sagas imagined by Asimov or Heinlein in the Golden Age of Science Fiction ... New York 2140 stands as the first major science fictional artifact of the Trump era, anticipating even in its articulation of the conditions of victory the fragility of progress and the likelihood of reversal ... New York 2140 truly is a document of hope as much as dread and despair. And it’s a hope we’ll dearly need in the Anthropocene, the Anthropocide, the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, postnormality, whatever you want to call the coming bad years that, with each flood and drought and wildfire and “superstorm,” we have to realize have already begun — our own shared moment of danger, as it now begins to wash up over our beaches, breach our levees, flash up at us in an ever-rising tide.
The most immediate pleasure of Robinson’s latest speculative epic is its tour of sea-swallowed Gotham. Lower Manhattan’s a city of canals, the Hudson and East rivers now New York’s least predictable thoroughfares ... Yes, gentrification is a crisis even in the flood zone, and that’s the heart of Robinson’s novel... The plot, loose as it is, centers on a mystery consortium’s attempts to snatch the building up for billions...New York 2140 surveys life as it’s lived in the city to come. Like Dickens, Robinson examines class and capital through the serialized misadventures of caricatures. Like Dos Passos, he pauses the story for chapters of context...Robinson’s characters’ great project isn’t the establishment of some new home for humanity. It’s the humanizing of an old one.
The main character is the transformed New York, and Robinson gets it more right than wrong. The novel deftly conveys its unnerving strangeness through interludes and asides: 'New York, New York, it’s a hell of a bay' does have the ring of a culture adapting itself ... Yet it is refreshing to see a futurism that acknowledges the innate resilience of the city and, by inference, of humanity itself. Amid this, many liberties can be forgiven. These streets will still make you feel brand new, Robinson suggests, even in a future when they’re soaking wet.
Some of [the characters] feel fully realized, scraping through their daily circumstances — and the emerging conspiracies around them — while building low-key connections. Some characters, as can happen in Robinson novels, exist largely as vehicles for conceptual exposition ... Given that these interludes are scattered throughout a 600-page novel with a plot that doesn't quite require 600 pages, eventually they feel like a little much ... Honestly, this isn't a novel that cares to be subtle; it just wants its large-scale implications to feel uncomfortably close to home. Concepts and world-building take such precedence that the writing can fall flat sometimes. Nearly every introductory description of a woman seems like parody ... And yet, what defines New York 2140, beneath its anger at toxic capitalism and its despair over inadequate environmental measures is the thread of hope that somehow, maybe, we might yet balance the boat enough to make it through the ruins.
New York 2140 is indisputably a science fiction novel, but one rooted deeply in history and popular culture. The diverse points of view allow Robinson to riff on various genres, from police procedural to romantic comedy, political cyberthriller to historical travelogue, disaster novel to pirate adventure ... a big, playful and thoroughly engrossing book, generous in spirit and very serious about the political issues it raises. Robinson excels at keeping the narrative moving across multiple characters and topics of conversation, maintaining the necessary level of suspense while taking time to investigate intriguing tangents to the primary plot.
One reaches the end of New York 2140 with a smile and at least the momentary belief that the future might work out after all.
There are four basic ways coastal communities can respond to sea-level rise: suffering damage, developing protective infrastructure, finding ways of accommodating flooding and retreating from the coast. Robinson’s New Yorkers engage in all four – and Robinson’s vision of accommodation is profoundly richer than in the imaginings of adaptation strategies developed by national, state and local governments ...Science tells us that, by reshaping our global energy and agricultural systems, we can avoid the magnitude of planetary change that Robinson depicts. But to make those changes and to adapt to the changes we don’t avoid, the world’s best minds need to focus, not on new apps or financial innovations, but on the civilizational challenges at hand. Works like Robinson’s – 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 – can inspire that focus in a way that myopic discussions of the near term or grim, apocalyptic tales cannot.
The writing, ironically, is dry; several sections are exposition-heavy. They not only explain why 2140 Lower Manhattan is submerged but contain dense analyses of how investments in real estate could be evaluated via a 'kind of specialized Case-Shiller index for intertidal assets.' Such sections illustrate the comprehensive thought Robinson has given to his imagined future, but they slow down the various interesting narrative threads ... Readers open to an optimistic projection of how humans could handle an increasingly plausible environmental catastrophe will find the info dumps worth wading through.
Of course, this being Robinson, there are plenty of infodumps, mostly on climate, finance, and history, with some trenchant commentary on both gentrification and the perils inherent in ignoring human damage to the environment. But he also lightens the mood with a heavy dose of witty epigrams ... And exploring this vastly changed cityscape, where familiar streets are replaced by skybridges and subways by vaporettos, is great fun. A post-disaster fairy tale that’s light on plot and heavy on improbable coincidences but a thoroughly enjoyable exercise in worldbuilding, written with a cleareyed love for the city's past, present, and future.