The thriller Robinson unspools in that flooded city is gripping on its own merits. But the central characters still make their lives downtown, where the streets function like wide, polluted, Venetian canals. The economic centers have moved uptown, to Washington Heights and the Cloisters. In Robinson's version of 2140, Manhattan remains a thriving city.
All of this takes place decades before the start of the novel, but sets up the world in which the novel takes place. A second pulse followed the first, raising sea level another 40 feet, changing coastlines all over the word and smashing the emergency sea wall around New York City. Too much heat had made it deep into the oceans, triggering faster ice flows and more melting. (You won't need a spoiler alert for that one if you've been following climate news.) In his story, the flood spurs a massive refugee crisis, as well as a global effort to radically slash carbon emissions and even pump sunlight-reflecting gas into the atmosphere to cool it back down.īut, at that point, it was too late. The first, a massive calamity caused by rising temperatures melting Antarctic ice, cause sea levels to rise ten feet in ten years. "New York 2140" is Robinson's most straightforward attempt to imagine the consequences of our environmental inaction today. His stories are adventures first, but they keep coming back to the anxiety that, as a species, we're wrecking the planet, and we don't really have a good imagination of what the planet is going to look like afterward.
Is this fragile environment portable? Can we fix it if we break it? What is there left to do if we can't? Robinson's past books mostly been set in space - on interstellar starships or amid the long terraforming project of the planet Mars - but they've centered on questions of how we treat planet Earth. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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