Hugos 2018: New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Trade paperback, 613 pages
Published 2018 (originally 2017)
Acquired April 2018
Read May 2018

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

I haven't read a Kim Stanley Robinson novel since college, when I heroically worked my way through the "Color Mars" trilogy over a summer. New York 2140 is quite long, but also quite enjoyable. In some ways it made me think of reading a late Dickens novel, like Our Mutual Friend. There's no central character in New York 2140 and (mostly) no central plot line, just a cluster of eight characters from all different walks of life. Many, but not all, live in the Met Life Tower, and their lives sort of criss-cross one another at various points. The book is three things mainly: a piece of "cli-fi" (climate fiction, the sea level has had two dramatic rises in the next 120 years), an sf extrapolation of the global finance industry (Robinson's future has seen two more 2008-esque financial crashes, and a fourth is due), and a love letter to the city of New York (the book is filled with ruminations on the history and culture of the city). In all three areas, it's quite captivating. And I don't even like cities very much!

As I remember the Mars books being, it is long and slow, but I was never not enjoying it. This is one of those sf novels that's more about world and ideas than plot, and I was okay with that. Like, it's long... but I don't actually know what I would cut! I came to like this diverse cast of characters, and there was an awesomely audacious plot swerve about 400 pages in, even if it ultimately resolved a little too utopianly for my tastes. I'm glad I was forced to finally read more Robinson, and I ought to track more of his work down if it's anything like this.

Archival Review: Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Blue Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

 Published 1996.  Borrowed from the library.  Read August 2004.

Overall, this was probably my second favorite of the "Color Mars" Trilogy. I was very slow to get into it. However, by this point Robinson has refined almost all of his main characters, making them all very interesting and flesh-out, as opposed to the one-dimensional cyphers they were in Red Mars. I even liked Ann and Maya this time round, though it took me until almost the end of the book for the former.

The only viewpoint character I didn't really like was Jackie's daughter Zo; she was definitely the worst viewpoint character across all three books. Hiroko was actually bearable this time around, mostly because she spent the entire book missing. This was good, because I'd never really bought Hiroko as a character; she was always felt unmotivated to me, and I could never figure out why she was held in such high esteem; I personally just felt she was weird. Unfortunately Nirgal, Art, and Nadia draw the short-straw here after some wonderful fleshing out in Green Mars; the latter two's character arc is just kinda dropped and never concluded.

Throughout most of the book, my real problem was that I didn't really know what it was about. Red was about the colonizing and first revolution; Green was about the second revolution. Though Blue was initially about building a new Martian government (and there was some neat stuff here), the middle of the book felt pretty aimless to me. The end introduced the immigration crisis, but it was at this time I realized what the book was actually about.

Unlike the first two, Blue Mars is not really about the history of Mars. This novel is about long life, and the problems of living the centuries that the First Hundred can. Michel returning home to Provencal was one of the best parts of the novel; the looking-back provided was wonderful. Maya coping with her increasing distance from her own past (a plotline introduced in Green) was also very interesting. Sax's determination to solve this problem gave a strong focus to the end of the novel, because we saw through him and through Maya just how serious this memory problem was.

The best part of the problem was, well... the solution. The scene where Sax summons the remaining Hundred to Underhill, and they take the treatment was downright wonderful. If any part of the book was going to move me to tears, this was it. Sax's almost stream-of-consciousness rush of memories was extraordinary. The ending was also great in that it finally restored the bond the Hundred had had during the journey on the Ares but lost since. As the memories poured in, for the first time in centuries, the Hundred understood one another once more, and lost the distance that had been created between them. Sax and Ann finally figuring out why they were antagonists was great; as were the two brief bits with them rock climbing and sailing. (By the by, Sax's boat is almost as cool as the Zygote boulder-cars. Almost.)

Though I have had much praise for the book here, I would still place it second beneath Green Mars because of its lack of a strong plotline (the memory thing and coping with being so old is more of a theme until the very end) but above the plodding story and one-dimensional characters of Red Mars.