I’ve been thinking about New York 2140 and about social change, as that’s what’s at the heart of the book. How’d Kim Stanley Robinson engineer it?
Consider what Robinson had to say about his craft in Nature (20 December 2017):
Here’s how I think science fiction works aesthetically. It’s not prediction. It has, rather, a double action, like the lenses of 3D glasses. Through one lens, we make a serious attempt to portray a possible future. Through the other, we see our present metaphorically, in a kind of heroic simile that says, “It is as if our world is like this.” When these two visions merge, the artificial third dimension that pops into being is simply history. We see ourselves and our society and our planet “like giants plunged into the years”, as Marcel Proust put it. So really it’s the fourth dimension that leaps into view: deep time, and our place in it.
Of course, this is a self conscious and sophisticated version about that old cliché about science fiction, that it’s not about the future, it’s about the present.
In the case of NY2140 the present that interested KSR was the financial collapse of 2008. He wanted to rerun it so that it turned out differently, with the banks getting nationalized. Think about that, he created this whole world (just) so he could get a different outcome for that one event – flooded the world, raised the seas 50 feet, and changed the texture of social life, all the while keeping the basic institutional structure pretty much the same, all that to change that one event. But then that event was a society-wide event, and that’s why he had to do so much engineering, so much revisionist world building in the guise of science fiction, in order to bring about a different outcome.
Let’s first ask, however, why weren’t the banks nationalized in 2008? For one thing, the federal government was in Wall Street’s back pocket, pretty nearly, it seems like. But then that’s the case in NY2140 as well. For another thing there was no way for the outraged populace to turn their anger into political action. People were getting screwed by the banks, but there was nothing they could do but get angry. THAT’s what KSR changed.
One thing he did was change the texture of social life. You have a lot more “mutual aid” in neighborhoods and even buildings, like the Met Tower. They had gardens there and they even ate communally. Social life was more closely knit. That’s one thing.
Here’s a passage from a recent interview in Radical Philosophy conducted by Helen Feder (Feb 2018):
HF New York 2140 is an alternative future history. It tries to imagine, as you’ve said, how we get from a capitalist to a post-capitalist world, but through one building, the MetLife Building, and all the actors (people, human systems, ecosystems) in this network. Is the building also a microcosm of the relation between the money sphere and the biosphere?
KSR It was the way to tell that story, and it was an experiment in form, in the genre of the French apartment novel, used by Zola and others (recently by Thomas Dish, Geoff Ryman and John Lanchester). At the start of the story the characters don’t know each other, but they live in the same apartment building. In my version of it, they eventually get to know each other to make the plot more interesting, rather than just a collection of short stories. It turned out to be quite a long novel, as you saw, because there were eight points of view and a dozen important characters, more than I usually deal with. Well, the Mars trilogy has scores of characters, but this was a single novel.
By the end of the story I try to make what’s going on in lower Manhattan scale up to the national and the global. You can’t have a local solution [to national and global problems]. You hear this focus on local solutions in Naomi Klein, in the work of all kinds of critics: ‘At least there’ll be resistance movements, there’ll be these little pockets.’ In global capitalism those are allowable discharge zones where energy gets dispersed; [they allow] people to think things are changing, while global capitalism continues its destruction. You need a global solution.
There’s our mutual aid, these “little pockets” of local solutions. But then he continues:
At the end of the novel the householder’s union causes a financial crash; the crash causes the federal government to take over the banks. Essentially it’s 2008 again, which indeed will happen again, and the question then will be, do we settle for a little fix or a big one? A big fix would be like what we did when we took over General Motors; we got it back to health and then sold it back to private ownership. When the banks crash again, instead of giving them a hundred cents on the dollar and telling them to go out and do more, we need to nationalise them. When I say nationalise them, there are specific plans as to how this might be done, how they might become fully owned subsidiaries of the American people, how finance might become a tool rather than a master.
What I like about New York 2140 is that it describes something that could happen in the real world. The mechanisms are in place. Congress could make the laws and the president could enact them. It’s not grossly dissimilar to what Bernie Sanders was advocating during his campaign
There’s that householder’s union, that’s the organizational vehicle that allowed these local pockets of discontent to amalgamate into an irresistible political force. The union made it possible to call a nationwide strike and win.
Do we have to wait for climate disaster for this to happen? I don’t know, I don’t know.
ADDENDUM! And KSR raised the oceans by 50 feet. Yes, that’s part of climate change. But he noted in an interview somewhere that none of the models projected 50 foot rise by 2140. Maybe 20 feet, but not 50. So why 50? For cosmetics, makes lower Manhattan look more Venice-like? But this is a novel, not a movie. We don’t actually see anything; we have to imagine it, which isn’t at all the same. But a 50 foot rise is going to cause more stress than a 20 foot rise. That HAS to be why he did it. You keep the institutional structure the same, but move things around inside it. He needed a 50 foot rise to get the appropriate displacements. Not that he had a formula or anything. It’s all intuitive.
No comments:
Post a Comment