Amy Brady interviews Kim Stanley Robinson for Q&A re his new cli-fi novel ''NEW YORK 2140'' -
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/03/06/kim-stanley-robinson-how-will-new-york-cope-with-climate-change/
Monday, March 6, 2017
Friday, March 3, 2017
''A towering novel'' ... ''Après nous, le déluge.'' #KSR first review in GUARDIAN of ''New York 2140''
''A towering novel'' ... ''Après nous, le déluge.'' #KSR first review in GUARDIAN of ''New York 2140''
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/03/new-york-2140-by-kim-stanley-robinson-review
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson review – an urgent vision of the future
Environmental catastrophe has hit New York while the world’s richest continue to get richer in this towering novel
by ADAM ROBERTS
Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel is set in the year 2140, more than 100 years from now, in a world where climate change has bitten deep.
The waters have risen 50 feet, half-submerging much of New York City. Every street has become a canal; every skyscraper an island, linked by sky bridges and boat taxis.
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.
There are eight main narrative strands, focusing on a group of characters who all live in the same building, the Met Life skyscraper on Madison Square.
Each strand elaborates a different type of plot: kidnap; politics small and large; Wall Street; police investigation; polar exploration; even a treasure hunt for buried gold.
The premise is reminiscent of John Lanchester’s 2012 novel Capital, with a NY skyscraper instead of a London street, though New York 2140 is considerably broader in scope and ambition.
This range and variety make summarising the plot a tricky business. Lots goes on.
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.
“Immiserate the same people who keep you alive?” boggles one character, talking about the 1%. “Which god or idiot in Homer did that? None of them. They’re worse than the worse gods in Homer.”
This means that in place of melodrama we get fine-grained future-realism. 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.
The fact that all these individuals are so different from each other makes its early stages a little sticky. Robinson also has a habit of blithely info-dumping about everything from New York history to arctic fauna, from the structural engineering of waterlogged buildings to the flow of international capital. Don’t get me wrong, though: these insights are fascinating, and the novel does accumulate a magnificent momentum, a richness rare in contemporary fiction.
Amitav Ghosh recently asked: “Where is all the fiction about climate change?” New York 2140 makes you want to grab him by his lapels and tell him: “Here! here!”
To be fair, Ghosh's lament was that “serious” literary fiction is failing in its duty when it comes to addressing climate change. He exempts science fiction from his rebuke, but insists that the literary establishment disregards the genre.
I’m not sure that’s true any more; SF is threaded everywhere through culture nowadays, and it would take an act of critical myopia to miss the fact that Robinson is one of the world’s finest working novelists, in any genre.
And that’s the bottom line.
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.
Dos Passos orchestrated his multifarious account through a literary-experimental approximation to news media: daily papers, newsreels and so on. DeLillo is similarly capacious in his ambition and uses baseball as his governing metaphor.
New York 2140 is more urgently relevant than those two masterpieces. Robinson organises his novel around the flood: the literal waters, the metaphorical sense of events – environmental change, technology, immigration – overwhelm us. And the deluge is not only metaphorically eloquent, it is dangerously close to becoming a reality.
Critics sometimes praise a new novel for being “challenging”. The term is often just another piece of reviewers’ jargon, but it happens to describe New York 2140 unusually well.
Robinson’s fiction challenges us to pay attention, to try to grasp how broad and complex the situation of the world is now, and above all it challenges our climate change complacency. Après nous, le déluge.
• Adam Roberts’ The Thing Itself is published by Gollancz
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/03/new-york-2140-by-kim-stanley-robinson-review
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson review – an urgent vision of the future
Environmental catastrophe has hit New York while the world’s richest continue to get richer in this towering novel
by ADAM ROBERTS
Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel is set in the year 2140, more than 100 years from now, in a world where climate change has bitten deep.
The waters have risen 50 feet, half-submerging much of New York City. Every street has become a canal; every skyscraper an island, linked by sky bridges and boat taxis.
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.
There are eight main narrative strands, focusing on a group of characters who all live in the same building, the Met Life skyscraper on Madison Square.
Each strand elaborates a different type of plot: kidnap; politics small and large; Wall Street; police investigation; polar exploration; even a treasure hunt for buried gold.
The premise is reminiscent of John Lanchester’s 2012 novel Capital, with a NY skyscraper instead of a London street, though New York 2140 is considerably broader in scope and ambition.
This range and variety make summarising the plot a tricky business. Lots goes on.
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.
“Immiserate the same people who keep you alive?” boggles one character, talking about the 1%. “Which god or idiot in Homer did that? None of them. They’re worse than the worse gods in Homer.”
This means that in place of melodrama we get fine-grained future-realism. 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.
The fact that all these individuals are so different from each other makes its early stages a little sticky. Robinson also has a habit of blithely info-dumping about everything from New York history to arctic fauna, from the structural engineering of waterlogged buildings to the flow of international capital. Don’t get me wrong, though: these insights are fascinating, and the novel does accumulate a magnificent momentum, a richness rare in contemporary fiction.
Amitav Ghosh recently asked: “Where is all the fiction about climate change?” New York 2140 makes you want to grab him by his lapels and tell him: “Here! here!”
To be fair, Ghosh's lament was that “serious” literary fiction is failing in its duty when it comes to addressing climate change. He exempts science fiction from his rebuke, but insists that the literary establishment disregards the genre.
I’m not sure that’s true any more; SF is threaded everywhere through culture nowadays, and it would take an act of critical myopia to miss the fact that Robinson is one of the world’s finest working novelists, in any genre.
And that’s the bottom line.
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.
Dos Passos orchestrated his multifarious account through a literary-experimental approximation to news media: daily papers, newsreels and so on. DeLillo is similarly capacious in his ambition and uses baseball as his governing metaphor.
New York 2140 is more urgently relevant than those two masterpieces. Robinson organises his novel around the flood: the literal waters, the metaphorical sense of events – environmental change, technology, immigration – overwhelm us. And the deluge is not only metaphorically eloquent, it is dangerously close to becoming a reality.
Critics sometimes praise a new novel for being “challenging”. The term is often just another piece of reviewers’ jargon, but it happens to describe New York 2140 unusually well.
Robinson’s fiction challenges us to pay attention, to try to grasp how broad and complex the situation of the world is now, and above all it challenges our climate change complacency. Après nous, le déluge.
• Adam Roberts’ The Thing Itself is published by Gollancz
New York Times Book Review to focus "across all genres" in new its format, including the "cli-fi" genre
Chief books section editor Pamela Paul at the New York Times Book Review recently told PW that the section will continue to hire new writers and editors to focus "across all genres," -- including, presumably, ''cli-fi'' -- covering novels she feels the Times did not effectively cover in the past.
Paul said that the Times is expanding its books coverage, with the intent of becoming more "strategic" in how it covers particular books.
Previously, the newspaper had 3 separate desks that covered books entirely independent of one another.
That will now change, with all books coverage falling under a single Books Desk umbrella.
To this end, Paul noted that the Times has been, and will continue, hiring new writers and editors to write about books in different ways.
Those editors and writers will be focused "across all genres," Paul said, and covering—but not reviewing—books [in genres such as cli-fi and SFF and ecolit that] she feels the the paper did not effectively cover in the past.
There will be a re-design of the New York Times Book Review, which remains "central" to the newspaper's books-related mission. The redesign will affect both digital and print and, will be unveiled sometime in summer 2017.
Thursday, March 2, 2017
"New York 2140" -- a climate change novel by the leading climate change writer in the world today: Stan Robinson
"New York 2140" a climate change novel by the leading climate change writer in the world today: Stan Robinson
''New York 2140''by Kim Stanley Robinson
from Orbit BOOKS, set for worldwide release in March 2077
"....Kim Stanley Robinson's ''New York 2140'' ...the date pretty much says it all, it takes place mor than 100 years in the future,....Stan is primarily an optimist and a utopian ....he is in many ways an idealist, .....and I agree with those who say he's probably the leading climate change, or cli-fi ...writer in the world."
-- Gary K. Wolfe
An unsigned review at Publishers Weekly, a book industry trade magazine, the bible of American publishing, put it this way:
"Setting his latest novel [''New York 2140" set in the year 2140] after a 50-foot global sea-level rise, Robinson, who frequently addresses environmental themes in his fiction, here shows how humanity might move forward after catastrophe -- New York City is still a vibrant metropolis, one in which the streets are canals and skyscrapers are islands.''
Rose Fox previewed the book this way:
''Always the optimist, Robinson finds ways to paint a hopeful picture of a flooded near-future New York City, where rising seas have turned the streets into canals."''New York 2140'' marks KSR's first main venture into climate fiction, a subgenre of the SF genre he has mined for years. It is meeting the public in this first Year of Trump with high anticipation, with Alex Steffen the futurist noting in a recent email newsletter: ''I'm almost done with Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, New York 2140, which comes out in April (if I'm remembering right). [Ed note: March 14 is the release date]. It takes place in a New York City which sea-level rise has turned into an American Venice. I plan to write a review of this, but for now, let me just say that if you're interested in the collision between planetary change, cities and technology, this is a [turning out to be a] great read.''
Others reviewing the novel will include Jeff VanderMeer, Gary K. Wolfe (in Locus magazine), James Bradley and Jonathan Strahan. Amy Brady at the Chicago Review of Books in March 2017 (any day now!) has interviewed Stan as well for her new column on cli-fi trends.
This is a Big Book from Kim Stanley Robinson. Stay tuned for more news here.
Wednesday, March 1, 2017
A Tale of Two Hashtags: #HollywoodInDenial and #HollywoodCliFi
[I wrote a new oped and will start tweeting the link. I want to reach film critics and people inside Hollywood and I need all the help I can get. Any ideas or contacts?]
A Tale of Two Hashtags: #HollywoodInDenial and #HollywoodCliFi
an OpEd by Dan Bloom
Where are the Hollywood movies about climate change issues, the movies with climate themes? You know, powerful ''issue'' movies like "On the Beach" or "Gentleman's Agreement" or "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"?
And not just in Hollywood, but among independent movie studios, too, like the one that produced "Moonlight." And not just in the USA, but among movie studios in Norway, France, Germany, Mexico, Sweden, Japan, China, Chile?
In 2016, there was not one feature movie from Hollywood about climate issues. In 2017, there will be none as well. What is wrong with the people who make movies? Can't they see the handwriting on the wall?
A few years ago, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood put out a challenge to Canadian writers, young and old, to respond to the challenge of climate change. Prime Minister Justine Trudeau's government has appointed a minister responsible for climate change, and with this action, Canada has, in terms of policy, created a new framework for writers and film directors to use in their creative works. More nations should follow Canada's example. Hollywood, are you listening?
Movies about climate change issues, either in the background of the story or front and center, are more important than ever now as the 21st century gets ready to welcome in the years 2020, 2040, 2060 and more. Some of us won't be here anymore. Others reading this will be here.
Some of these future movies with three dramatic acts -- a set-up, a look inside the situation and final denouement -- might be dystopian, some might be utopian. Some might be crime thrillers or detective yarns. They can take place in the past, the present or the future. They can be sci-fi or cli-fi or speculative fiction stories.
Since most people now accept man-made global warming as real, film producers and scriptwriters need to try to use their creative spark and emotional heft to emotionally move readers about a possible disaster that could claim much of the planet within the next 30 generations of humankind. Hollywood needs to get on this. In a hurry.
Of course, movies take time to fund and cast and greenlight. Some movies take 15 years from first speak of an idea to the final product in the theaters or on TV or DVD. Some take less time, maybe 5 or ten years. But movies cannot be made overnight or produced in a year, as novels or stage plays can. So we cannot realistically expect to see Hollywood movies about climate issues and global warming anxieties (within a 90-minute dramatic frame, with A-list actors and top producers and directors at the helm) until at least 2025 or 2030.
But you read it here first. It can happen. It will happen. Don't believe me? Just Bill McKibben or Robert Macfarlane, who both asked the same kind of question separately in essays they wrote in 2005. Better yet, ask Hollywood climate activist and producer Marshall Herskovitz. He's onto this. He' working at this. He needs more people to support him.
I am an optimist. I believe in the power of art and literature to transform lives and transform society. What Nevil Shute did with his 1957 novel "On the Beach" (with the movie adaptation released in 1959), Hollywood producers and scriptwriters can do with their movies now: shine a spotlight on the most pressing issue facing humanity ever.
Lights! Camera! Action!
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