Let’s continue thinking about science in science fiction. I propose we look at Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, to which I’ve devoted a working paper that is, in part, indebted to an online reading group convened by futurist Bryan Alexander. For those not familiar with the book, it is what the title suggests, a look at New York City in the year 2140. That is, it is a look at life in New York City after global warming has reshaped earth geography by rising seas. Much of Manhattan is under water, with boats and sky-bridges replacing automobiles as transportation.
The world Robinson presents is a plausible. In fact it’s so darned plausible that some readers were disappointed that it lacked the gee-whiz razzle-dazzle characteristic of much science fiction – no faster than light travel, no wormholes, no time-travel paradoxes, no super-intelligent AIs (either benevolent or malevolent), no parallel universes, no odd creatures, no tech-mediated brain-to-brain connection. And no space travel. None. It is all so plausible, so normal, so, you know, so real.
But the Sci-Fi fiction really is there. For one thing, there is the foundational premise of that world, that the seas have risen by 50 feet. It hasn’t happened yet, not in our time. We’ve only got models that say the seas will rise (unless we do something, quick), and 50-feet by 2140 is more than most models project. But in 2140 some people are living in villages floating in the sky, and transportation by airship is common. Airships (dirigibles) are hardly new, but they are relatively rare in our current world and used only for limited purposes. They’re common in 2140 and one of the Robinson’s central characters has an airship that’s piloted by a spectacular AI. Its capabilities aren’t those of the computer on the Starship Enterprise, a repository of universal knowledge and every language in the galaxy, but it’s well beyond anything Elon Musk can sell you now or in the foreseeable future. [Bryan Alexander has compiled a useful list of tech in New York 2140.]
And that plausibility is what attracted me to the book. I was looking for an account of a post-apocalyptic world in which life isn’t perpetually shrouded in gloom and doom. Robinson certainly hasn’t given us a utopia, but it’s not a dystopia either. It’s a livable world where one can strive and thrive, even if you’re a river rat rather than an oligarch living in a floating village.
* * * * *
In a recent article about the coronavirus and our response to it, Robinson observed:
... science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling.
Science-fiction writers don’t know anything more about the future than anyone else. Human history is too unpredictable; from this moment, we could descend into a mass-extinction event or rise into an age of general prosperity. Still, if you read science-fiction, you may be a little less surprised by whatever does happen. Often, science-fiction traces the ramifications of a single postulated change; readers cocreate, judging the writers’ plausibility and ingenuity, interrogating their theories of history. Doing this repeatedly is a kind of training. It can help you feel more oriented in the history we’re making now. This radical spread of possibilities, good to bad, which creates such a profound disorientation; this tentative awareness of the emerging next stage—these are also new feelings in our time.
And that’s what New York 2140 is, a way to think about history, a history that recognizably stretches out from what we’re living now.
Yet: Does it make sense to think of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a realistic novel of its time (1871)? What of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1897)? Recall that when Orson Welles did a radio broadcast of it in 1938 some people panicked, thinking that we really were being invaded by aliens from another planet. On the other hand, I find it difficult to believe that anyone thought of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Princess of Mars (1912) as a realism for any time. What do we make of such films as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952) or Invaders from Mars (1953) – the latter scared the living-daylights out of me when I watched it on television a few years later? Both had contemporary settings, but realism?
And then we have the Stargate universe, which we examined in the first post in this series. It’s set in the present, but in what sense is it realism? If that’s the question, the most obvious answer is that the world is riven with issues of identity and with a pervading sense of paranoia – we’re under attack, initially by the Goa'uld, then by the Wraith.
What of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the focus of our second post? That’s a very interesting question. Kubrick is positing a revelation, a re-calibration, of our place in the universe that is poised between artificial intelligence (in this case, the confused and hence malevolent HAL) and (planetary) space travel. Has that revelation been received and registered (among some, if not all) in Robinson’s 2140, is it yet to arrive, or has it been forgotten by all?
No comments:
Post a Comment