An analysis of late-stage capitalism is pretty abstract, and as a novelist what you need are characters in a situation. So you set the novel in New York City because it’s a global hub of finance, then? My new novel explores this problem and how we might get out of it. By the logic of our current system we have to mess up the Earth, and that is crazy.

As one of the characters says early in the book, “We’ve got good tech, we’ve got a nice planet, but we’re fucking it up by way of stupid laws.”įinance, globalization-this current moment of capitalism-has a stranglehold on the world by way of all our treaties and laws, but it adds up to a multigenerational Ponzi scheme, an agreement on the part of everybody to screw the future generations for the sake of present profits.

It’s about climate change and sea level rise, but it’s also about the way that our economic system doesn’t allow us to afford a decent future. What would you say this book is really about? Scientific American spoke to Robinson about this possible future, his research process, how this latest novel fits with the rest of his work and why there are rational reasons for optimism in a warmer, wetter world. Beneath the surging waves and gleaming solar panels, the city’s antediluvian foundations still lurk-and occasionally resurface to profoundly change both individual lives and the course of history. But they inhabit a post-carbon super-Venice of canals, water taxis and airships moored to 300-story skyscrapers and verdant vertical farms.

Robinson’s Gothamites are indistinguishable from the New Yorkers living and working in the city today. The result is at once familiar yet alien. These woes are mostly rearview considerations for Robinson, who instead marshals a wealth of evidence from economics, politics and science to explore the new normal that would gradually, inevitably emerge in a post-deluge world. In less optimistic and capable hands such a book might be little more than a grim catalogue of the devastating migrations, famines, wars, depressions and extinctions that would inevitably accompany the inundation of coastlines worldwide. Robinson deftly constructs a sprawling, soaring story from eight interwoven narratives all sourced to a single building on the island of Manhattan-which, despite being half-drowned under rising seas, still sustains a thriving megalopolis. In his latest book, New York 2140 (Orbit Books, 2017), the acclaimed novelist Kim Stanley Robinson presents a dark-but-hopeful vision for humanity a dozen decades from now, on an Earth radically altered by climate change.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson