Tag Archives: New York 2140

Message From the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate-fiction blockbuster, The Ministry for the Future, has galvanized readers both within and outside the science fiction community—riding the wave of anxiety catalyzed by last year’s extreme weather events, along with increasingly urgent warnings from climate experts and activists. The novel’s power relies on a two-pronged strategy: offering an imaginational way to confront the massive suffering that now seems probable, given humanity’s failure to act in a timely way so far; and a vision of one successful path toward climate solutions and a more equitable world.

With this double-edged approach, the novel starts with a fatal humid heat wave in India that kills millions. It’s experienced by a young aid worker, Frank May, who becomes one of the few survivors of the climate disaster. That’s the first chapter; the aftermath takes up the rest of the book and centers on a new UN agency, The Ministry for the Future—set up to act in the interests of our descendants and the future well-being of non-human creatures and the land. (This wonderful concept builds on the Native American “seventh generation” principle, and on legal precedents such as Bolivia’s “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth,” giving legal standing to the environment.)

One issue for writers of climate fiction is conveying the scale and multiplicity of the challenges in a single narrative. Robinson is known as a master of deploying complex, large-scale narratives in novels such as The Years of Rice and Salt, which constructs a huge alternate-history tapestry, and New York 2140, another near-future novel about climate change. Many of his books have a global reach, and he’s eminently qualified to bring this approach to bear on the overwhelming scale of the climate crisis.

There’s a kind of heroic hopefulness here, existing alongside the acknowledgment of terrible loss. The book is also shot through with desperation—not just on the level of plot, which follows Frank as he tries to grapple with survivor’s guilt and the scale of the threat, as well as shadowy groups who turn to eco-terrorism to shift the global balance away from fossil fuels. In this book, It feels to me that Robinson has translated the desperation many of us feel over the climate emergency into a complex, jittery meta-narrative structure that pokes readers beyond their usual immersion in story.

The novel is stuffed to bursting with different storytelling types, bringing up the question: can one novel hold it all? The intertwining arcs of the two main characters, Frank May and Mary Murphy, the head of the Ministry for the Future, actually take up only about a third of the book. Here’s how I see the different narrative approaches and what they bring to the novel.

  • Straight third-person voice. The two main characters’ stories, told this way, give us an emotional rope-bridge over the uncertainties of the immediate near future—the 2020s through the 2040s. Some chapters also follow the point of view of other Ministry staff.
  • Notes.   A few chapters follow Mary’s experience in the form of a stenographer’s notes of Ministry meetings. Their jagged sentence fragments, quick and dirty, propel us through the meat of those policy discussions with an urgency that feels exactly right.
  • First-person voice.   One story-strand follows an immigrant family displaced by climate disruption, through the eyes of different family members. Then there’s the first-person view of a scientist leading a massive geoengineering project in Antarctica. Both of these have the effect of highlighting their stories among the rest, elevating climate displacement and geoengineering as significant issues.
  • Omniscient narrator/authorial idea-wrestling. This voice steps in at times (in about 10% of the chapters), mostly to fill the reader in on major historical events of the coming decades. A related voice, appearing about as often, feels like the author thinking through certain ideas: wealth disparity or Keynesian economic principles, mass extinction, nihilistic social movements. These chapters echo the anonymous, editorializing “Citizen” chapters that were part of New York 2140, and they have an unfiltered, provisional feel that’s similar to the meeting-minutes chapters.
  • Dialogues.   Some chapters are structured as Socratic dialogues between unidentified speakers—a teacher and a reluctant student—debating whether technology drives history or not, for example. These also echo New York 2140’s “Mutt and Jeff” chapters, and may be an homage to Stanislaw Lem’s Dialogues.
  • Riddles.   These micro-chapters retool an ancient language game to render some really abstract concepts into something more embodied and grok-able. Though the riddle chapters are short and infrequent, they effectively poke the reader to shift gears, to think about photons, encryption, or the free market in new ways. The riddles also pop up in counterpoint to those concepts’ emergence in the narrative.

These, along with the digressive monologues and the Socratic dialogues, are all attempts to “describe the elephant” that is the full-scale problem. For Robinson, that means laying out the role of late-stage capitalism in both causing and obstructing solutions to the problem at hand.

Yes, these rhetorical variations stop the traditional narrative flow. Deal with it, Robinson seems to be saying to the reader: traditional narrative alone won’t do the trick here. Finally, there are the

  • Collective voices. I think of these as the “We” chapters, which take up a good 20% of the book. They become a kind of Greek chorus, giving eyewitness accounts from all over the world—of floods and drought, employee rebellions and social strikes, and climate-caused displacement. The apotheosis of this chorus comes when, late in the book, we hear a roll-call of representatives of grass-roots organizations all over the world, announcing the work that needs to be done where they are: desert greening, permaculture, reforestation, biodiversity projects. Here we feel the heroic hopefulness, couched in a way that emphasizes the need for collective action. For me, it’s the most “hopepunk” moment in the book.

This isn’t to say that the book is all optimism. There’s an elegiac note running through it, reverberating from the struck bell of the mass deaths in India that set the book in motion. Frank May is broken by that experience. Mary Murphy has no personal life beyond the office, and her inner life is shaped by the oversized fears and concerns over climate change that it’s her job to consider. In effect, Frank holds a pain that is too outsized for one person; Mary holds the global-sized fear, and the perseverance that’s needed to move forward.

Change happens through persistence, synergy, luck, and some dirty dealing. That dirty dealing, including black ops and eco-terrorist tactics, seems to indicate some doubt that policy change alone can accomplish what’s needed. On the other hand, Robinson leaves out of his near-future equation  the growing presence of backward-facing movements including authoritarianism, nativism and white supremacy, some fed by climate-caused suffering, and which will make progress that much harder.

Still, the book brilliantly embodies the near-impossibility of making a global-scale shift in humanity’s relationship to its planet, and the necessity of trying to do that. We’re all members of the Greek chorus. We are the “We” who suffer forest fires, intense heat waves, rising seas, and the “We” who come together to try to do something about them.

Thinking about Gaia

Image of Earth from spaceIn this month of Earth Day and marching for science and climate, I’m thinking about Gaia.

A hashtag popped up on Twitter last week: #ifonlytheearthcouldspeak. Yes! That’s a good prompt to contemplate right now. The hashtag elicited a range of responses from funny and snarky to thoughtful and earnest. Some tweeters suggested that the earth is speaking, but we’re not listening. Would that be Gaia? The environmental scientist James Lovelock first formulated the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s, proposing that the Earth could be seen as one vast living and self-regulating system, and naming it for Gaia, the primordial Greek Earth goddess. The idea has been borne out since then, but its popularity may owe a lot to Lovelock’s naming it for the Greek Mother Earth, thus connecting it in our minds to the much earlier and long-lived human sense of the earth as a living force.

In the last week, the earth’s atmosphere reached an ominous new milestone: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels broke past 410 parts per million, after hitting 400 parts per million in 2013. The last time atmospheric carbon concentrations were this high was in the Middle Pliocene, 3.6 million years ago. Our continuing to pump carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, combined with the unknown effects of climate feedback, are cause for alarm. For those of us who don’t deny the facts, it’s a scary time. I’ll be at the People’s Climate March in Washington D.C. in a few days, one of the hundreds of thousands of people needing to bear witness to the urgency of this moment.

But are facts enough to rally people to action? You can’t see carbon concentrations, and even though the earth is now experiencing changes that are much faster than the normal geological time scale, these changes are often too slow, too big, or too abstract for us to easily take in. As author Kim Stanley Robinson has said, “Fiction can tell us how new situations will feel, and also, what things mean.” Robinson’s new novel, New York 2140, set in a partially submerged future New York, is one of several just-published works of climate fiction (cli-fi), the emerging genre that invites us to picture the human consequences of climate change. Robinson offers a vision of people muddling along and making their lives in the Venice-like canals of New York, both coping with the disasters that have occurred and aware there may be worse ahead.

But where is Gaia in this future? If Earth can be seen as a living thing, couldn’t we also benefit from trying to take its perspective—as different from ours as it may be? Science fiction has gone there already. Apparently inspired by the Gaia hypothesis, Isaac Asimov included a newly discovered, sentient planet named Gaia in his 1982 novel Foundation’s Edge. And Piers Anthony made “Gaea” a main character—an archetype of the Earth, embodied in a mortal—in Becoming a Green Mother (1988), part of his Incarnations of Immortality series.

The Book of Joan, an ambitious novel by Lidia Yuknavitch, just out this month, offers a character who is empathically connected with the Earth. Living only a few decades into the future, the visionary child-woman Joan of Dirt leads a rebellion among the survivors of an environmentally ravaged earth who are now living on an orbiting space-station sanctuary ruled by a billionaire dictator. This Joan of Arc for a nightmare future can manifest volcanic eruptions—her symbiosis with the planet allows it a form of expression that can’t be ignored. It’s a risky novel, also taking on issues of gender, sex and race, and it’s on my to-be-read list.

These and other cli-fi novels do a great service by bringing the human consequences of climate change into vivid focus, at a human scale we can reckon with. If they tend to be dystopian, that is the kind of future that seems to be staring us in the face, given the forces we have already set in motion.

The Earth is speaking to us now, in her own language, not just through beautiful sunsets, but through rising sea levels, droughts, and strange weather patterns. Of course we need to be able to imagine the human costs of climate change. That’s how we think, and it is the most promising way toward changes in policy. But I also feel the need to see things from Gaia’s point of view—even if it means facing eruptions of traumatic scale and strength. What may be dystopian for us, may just be a cloudy afternoon for our long-lived planet. We desperately need to de-objectify the earth, and to try to reengage in something more like an “I–Thou” relationship with Gaia—not of equals, but in respect, and awe and wonder. I hope more writers will take up the challenge of imagining what she is saying, and might be saying in the future.