Daily Archives: March 12, 2017

MARCH 11, 2017

THE FLOODS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY revealed a salient fact that wasnt very important before: lower Manhattan is indeed much lower than upper Manhattan, like by about fifty vertical feet on average. In Kim Stanley Robinsons New York 2140, out this month, this now extremely important fact has combined with rising sea levels to transform the city into what its inhabitants have come to call a SuperVenice: a hacked-together improvisation they navigate via water taxis, skybridges, airships, and private boats they store in the ruined lower floors of skyscrapers. The world has recovered from two massive economic depressions following the two Pulses two decades-long periods of rapid sea level rise following major ice-sheet collapses in Antarctica and is now mostly soldiering on again as normal. In fact, New York becomes something of a frontier city again, in its own way a boom town. Flooded with squatters, climate refugees, and other persons rendered undocumented by the midcentury loss of huge swaths of paper and digital records, the city may have lost its crown as the capital of global finance to Denver, but its still one hell of a town. Its doing so well by 2140, in fact, that some of those fantastically rich Denverites, 124 years from now, are even starting to see New York real estate as a buying opportunity, the next great target for re-gentrification.

Where most contemporary histories of the future imagine climate change as either an annoying irritation or else the end of history the disaster that will end civilization in New York 2140 Robinson cuts more of a middle path. Climate change does indeed prove utterly catastrophic in this novel, laying waste to the coastal cities where a startling percentage of the worlds population currently lives, and devastating a huge amount of infrastructure and fixed capital, costing trillions of dollars but humans are incredibly versatile problem-solvers, and we adapt. Technical solutions like sea walls and skybridges are really only the start of what would be necessary in a flooded Manhattan. Think of the immense social changes, the legal, economic, and architectural structures that would need to be innovated when huge areas of major cities are permanently underwater, or indeed become part of the intertidal zone. Even by 2140, nearly 100 years after the start of the crisis, the long work of retrofitting civilization to rising sea levels goes on, and not all of it is even that unhappy; its no secret that the capitalists use the same phrase to denote both crisis and opportunity, creative destruction. Theres even an investment fund keyed to up-to-the-minute oceanographic data, which you can buy, sell, or short based on your predictions of sea level change from tsunamis, storm surge, and other ecocatastrophic fluctuations.

Befitting its setting, the eco in New York 2140 is as much economy as ecology; climate disaster becomes just another black-swan market event no one could have predicted, with winners (mostly rich people) and losers (mostly the rest of us). And true to Robinsons famous political orientation toward utopian speculations, it falls to his 2140 characters to disrupt the cycle of bubble, crash, and bailout that has run nearly uninterrupted across multiple economic depressions since we all got it wrong the first time, way back in 2008. His protagonists are an unlikely group: a couple of homeless hackers, a YouTube-style celebrity, a hedge fund manager, an NYPD detective, a city organizer, a super, some kids all living in the abandoned Met Life building, to which they have somewhat dubious squatters rights. But ingenuity and accident give them an unexpected opening to make a real difference in the larger world, and they decide to grab it.

Unlike seemingly everyone I knew in high school, college, and graduate school, Ive never actually lived in New York City, though I did grow up in New Jersey, and have spent enough time there that I still feel the usual sort of warm glow about the place. To the extent that the East Coast/West Coast divide replicates in science fiction as it does across most contemporary pop cultural genres, Robinson is a Californian sojourning in New York, but to this Jersey kid he got the details impressively right, even down to a sidelong glance at my beloved Meadowlands. At times, the book actually felt a bit over-researched to me, with too many characters talking about what used to be at this site or that, before the flood, but I came to understand that this was not simply as-you-know-Bob overexposition; it was also a token of the immense trauma they and everyone in Future New York is still living through. What else would you think about, as you flew through a strange web of skybridges and ziplines crisscrossing the ruins of what used to be the greatest city in the world? Of course they talk and think often about how things used to be, back when the world was normal. They live with that temporal confusion every day. (I will concede, however, even as an unrepentant Robinson booster, that the people of 2140 seem awfully well informed about nuts-and-bolts details of the 2008 financial crisis.)

It is undeniably clear that Robinsons project has become the construction of a huge metatextual history of the future, not unlike those sagas imagined by Asimov or Heinlein in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, distributed across overlapping but distinct and mutually irreconcilable texts. Each new Robinson book comments on and complicates the vision of the future espoused by earlier ones, typically by refocusing our attention on some heretofore overlooked component of the problem. Here, for instance, an event that featured in the background of his other future histories including the Mars books ice sheet collapse moves to the foreground, while the question of outer space exploration and colonization is now bracketed entirely. Likewise, the question of animals in an era of mass extinction (what one character in New York 2140 calls not the Anthropocene but the Anthropocide) which was a major theme in Robinsons novel 2312 returns here in unexpected ways, some more optimistic but most rather less so. There are decent people trying to make a positive difference by working for government, like in Science in the Capital, and even some hope somehow squeezed out of the United Statess necrotic political process, if you can imagine such a thing. If the narrative situations in these books sometimes coincide, if sometimes the starting points for these stories seem a bit similar, this shouldnt be altogether shocking or offensive to us; to whatever extent the future flows out of physical, biological, and historical law it will be largely path-dependent, and with only so much variation among possibilities.

This formal similarity of possible futures, all branching out from a single history, has often been an explicit concern of Robinsons. He once published a companion to the Mars trilogy in The Martians, which contains stories in which some aspects of the Mars narrative go different ways; he also published an essay, Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, which spells out several possible futures that might have come out of his alternate history story The Lucky Strike (many of them strongly undercutting the optimism of the original story). This fascination with theme and variation turns out to be unexpectedly manifest in New York 2140 as well, whose opening chapter appeared in modified, alternate-universe form in Fredric Jamesons An American Utopia last summer as Mutt and Jeff Push the Button. Whereas it was oriented toward Jamesons discussion of universal conscription as a vision of a classless anticapitalist utopia in that book, here Mutt and Jeff set the table instead for the revolutionary financial hacks of New York 2140.

Like Galileos Dream, 2312, and Aurora before it, New York 2140 remixes many of Robinsons key futurological themes, once again with a significantly more pessimistic orientation. One of the many competing narrative voices in New York 2140, a historian (or at least history-minded amateur) who is only referred to as a citizen, seems to exist in metafictional relationship with the rest of the text, living in 2140 New York along with the others but simultaneously understanding himself to be part of a constructed and perhaps somewhat tunnel-visioned narrative. The a citizen narrator seems to understand himself to be in a sort of ongoing argument with interlocutors who dont want him to be too pessimistic, who dont want to hear a bunch of boo-hooing and giving-upness, but who also need to be made to understand that there arent actually happy endings in history, just people coming together to make choices that can make things better or make them worse (and so we should strive to make them better). Like most of the recent Robinson novels in what I would call his postScience in the Capital Middle Period and remixing, in different ways, the ends of both 2312 and Aurora New York 2140 ends on a note of strong ambiguity. The heroes have achieved many of their goals but there was no guarantee of permanence to anything they did, and the pushback was ferocious as always, because people are crazy and history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear. And out there of course, forever hovering over everything like the sword of Damocles, is the rest of the ice sheet, the climatological monster weve summoned and can neither control nor banish, which could slide into the ocean at any time, and throw everything theyve built into utter chaos once again.

Ive taken the highly unusual and possibly ill-advised step of quoting from very late in the book here because of something that I feel must be said: written before Trumps election and released just after his inauguration, New York 2140 stands as the first major science fictional artifact of the Trump era, anticipating even in its articulation of the conditions of victory the fragility of progress and the likelihood of reversal. The story ends at a moment of upswing (like the pie-in-the-sky optimism of November 2008, which felt at the time like an exhilarating moment of liberation) but how can we not hear in those words not only the disappointing and broken struggle of the actual Obama years but also the screeching, lunatic backlash of the Trump era to which we have now all been condemned? Dont be nave! the a citizen narrator implores us. There are no happy endings! Because there are no endings! And possibly there is no happiness either! I felt for a bit reading New York 2140 that perhaps it was no longer right to call Robinson our last great utopian visionary, as he is so often described; maybe even Stan has finally wised up and realized were all doomed. When the misanthropic voice of H. G. Wells pops up in one of the epigram pages that periodically punctuate the novel, to announce, upon first seeing the Manhattan skyline, What a beautiful ruin it will make! it really felt to me, when reading the novel in the bleak, miserable December of 2016, like the piercing stab of the truth, the real truth. We are going to take this beautiful place and make it a ruin, make everything a ruin until everything is dead. In fact, speaking realistically rather than utopically, we probably already have. Climate change is an intensifying feedback loop we cant interrupt and cant reverse; even if we stopped burning carbon tomorrow, itd probably already be too late to stop most of it, and we wont stop burning carbon, especially not post-11/8. Some version of New York 2140 maybe better, likely much worse seems to be the actual future of our civilization, the one our political leaders and titans of industry and artificially intelligent high-speed-trading algorithms driving the invisible hand of the market have, in their infinite wisdom, chosen for us.

So maybe New York 2140 is a genuinely utopian text after all, insofar as it puts the start of the worst of the disaster in the 2050s, when the crooks who did this to us will all be dead, and Ill be in my 70s, even more bitter and dyspeptic about the state of the world than I am now, if thats possible. In 2052, when Robinson imagines the first Pulse starting, assuming of course Trump doesnt kill us all first, my kids will be 40 and 38, both of them just a little older than I am today. Too bad for them, I guess! Too bad for any kids they might want to have, or any kids those kids will have, or any kids theyll have, or

But of course this isnt the full story either, not all of it. New York 2140 has actually clarified for me my previous misunderstanding of Robinsons intellectual project in his Middle Period, where (it has always seemed to me) we keep getting utopia-but-worse, -and-worse, -and-worse-yet. What is actually happening, I realize now, is more complicated than that. In Benjamins Theses on the Concept of History, he writes of the work of historical materialism as a bid to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Robinsons project since the Mars books has been to attempt to seize hold of the future as it flashes up at a moment of danger and say a better world is possible yes, even here, and even here. After all, every second of time, Benjamin says in that same essay, is a gate through which the Messiah might enter.

The passage that solidified this new understanding for me was ironically one in which two characters (the aforementioned Mutt and Jeff) find themselves trapped in a Waiting for Godotesque situation with nothing but time, discussing the past. Once upon a time, the Vladimir says to the Estragon, there was a country across the sea, where everyone tried their best to make a community that worked for everyone.

Utopia?

New York. We then see the Vladimir describe the founding of this New York as a place where everyone could be whoever they wanted to be, where who you were before you got there didnt matter a free place, a beautiful place, a gift. Of course its a place that never fully existed in our bad history, but from time to time we saw its glimmers, and in any event its a place we might have had.

Why didnt anyone live there before? the Estragon asks.

Well, thats another story. Actually there were people there already, I have to say, but alas they didnt have immunity to the diseases that the new people brought with them, so most of them died. But the survivors joined this community and taught the newcomers how to take care of the land so that it would stay healthy forever. Oh oh well. So this is all just another utopian dream, a lullaby, a tale for children, an alternate history not all that unlike the one Robinson himself crafted in his own The Years of Rice and Salt. But despite its what-if nature, its really not so far out of the realm of the possible. The lullaby simply imagines people who are just like us, except they chose to seize hold of utopia, together, in their shared moment of danger. It could have happened! It didnt, alas the colonists chose to accelerate the wretched work of genocide instead but it might have. Even in the world-historical disaster that was first contact between the New World and the Old, even in a time of horrific, unthinkable mass death, we can still find seeds for the utopia that might have been founded then instead. Every moment has those seeds, Benjamin said; ours does too. In this way,New York 2140 truly is a document of hope as much as dread and despair. And its a hope well dearly need in the Anthropocene, the Anthropocide, the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, postnormality, whatever you want to call the coming bad years that, with each flood and drought and wildfire and superstorm, we have to realize have already begun our own shared moment of danger, as it now begins to wash up over our beaches, breach our levees, flash up at us in an ever-rising tide.

Gerry Canavan is an assistant professor of 20th- and 21st-century literature at Marquette University and the author of Octavia E. Butler (University of Illinois Press, 2016).

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Utopia in the Time of Trump - lareviewofbooks

At one point during our trip to New Zealand, I pedaled next to Carol along the 84-mile long West Coast Cycle Trail near Kumara, New Zealand, and took in the scenery. The grade wasnt awful but since wed been climbing for the past 10 miles we were wondering if wed ever make it to the crest of the hill. Just then a man whizzed past us on the downhill and shouted Free Cake at the Top! Curious, and knowing there was a caf ahead, we redoubled our efforts.

New Zealand was like that. Always something around the corner. We knew New Zealand would be cool. Thats why we decided to go to New Zealand because it would be summer for the first leg of our 5-month overseas adventure, and it was far, far away. We were also cutting the rubber band, that invisible force that keeps small children close to their parents at playgrounds and airports, and adults from getting too far out of our comfort zone.

I expected to be wowed by the beautiful, exotic country and I was. There is no other country Ive seen that packs such sweeping vistas, exotic geology, such a kind people in so small a space. But as much as I was continually stunned by the views that greeted me each day, or warmly welcomed by the Kiwis; the two-island country is not where Id want to live.

The U.S. is my country and despite her flaws, I love everything about her. Others leave for a myriad of reasons, some political and some practical. Last year, 5,411 people voluntarily gave up U.S. citizenship, according to numbers from the U.S. Treasury. Many were already living overseas and became tired of negotiating U.S. bank and tax regulations. But, over 50,000 people in the U.S. looked at the Immigrate New Zealand website the day after the US general election in November. Hopefully, some of those who looked at New Zealand as a harbor in a storm will benefit from our experience.

Before chucking it all and moving to New Zealand, here are a few things everyone should know.

Auckland, New Zealand is 7,623 miles from the center of the U.S. It is tomorrow, today, as we crossed the international dateline just west of American Samoa and east of Tonga near 180 degrees longitude to reach New Zealand. The flight can take as little as 16 hours and as much as two days. The first thing the customs officer asks is, When are you leaving?

New Zealand is split into two islands, about the area of Colorado, and is located along the Ring of Fire upon which most of the active volcanoes lie. The geology is young since the country continues to rise from the ocean due to frequent earthquakes. The 2011 earthquake in Christchurch damaged 100,000 homes, destroying 10,000. The 2016 Christchurch earthquake damaged thousands more and raised the seabed about 18 feet around parts of the coastline. In neighborhoods and along the roads are blue signs indicating tsunami evacuation routes. Tip: If youre threatened by a tsunami climb up.

New Zealand is expensive, even factoring the 18 percent discount we get with the U.S. dollar. While we were riding in Bar Harbor, Maine, we met a man who had planned on biking about eight weeks in New Zealand but left after four.

The beer was too expensive, he said. I ran out of money.

Carol and I cooked most of our own meals while in New Zealand. We found the prices are higher than in the U.S. by a pretty good margin. A can of Old El Paso refried beans cost $5 USD. A can of Libbys pumpkin $4.50 USD. We were surprised that many staples, like peanut butter, $4 USD for 16 ounces, are processed in and imported from China. At the PaknSave (like an Aldi) streaky bacon is $5 USD per pound; ice cream $4.20 USD half-gallon; ground beef $4.20 USD per pound; and boneless chicken breast $3.40 USD per pound.

Carol and I also planned to Wild Camp on public lands to save money during our trip. Wild camping is free. Unfortunately, due to a small percentage of campers who left messes wherever they camped, most districts recently restricted tent camping on public lands and require campers to go to private holiday parks. Those parks charged tent campers $32 USD to $56 USD per night for a spot. Granted, most of those had common kitchens we used, but we found out that an AirBnB, with a soft bed and shower, instead of cold, wet, hard ground, only cost a few dollars more and sometimes less.

New Zealand also promotes bicycle touring, which we did. The infrastructure is not yet there to help the touring bicyclist. We cut our touring short because of four things: We did not agree with the guidebooks characterizations of multiple daily 1,000 foot ascents as rolling hills; there are no shoulders on the roads to protect us from large trucks, tourists in RVs not used to driving on the left side of the road, and our timeline. We simply did not have enough time to ride the distances, safely, that we needed. A bicycle tour in New Zealand should be solely on the bike trails, and there are many and the views are better without the smell of diesel. The rub is that to get from trail to trail the cyclist needs vehicle support, and that drives up the cost.

Even with the expense and remoteness of New Zealand, a reason to move to New Zealand is the people. We were treated with kindness and curiosity about Trump everywhere we visited.

Among the many kindnesses we received was from a bike shop owner. Our last day on Waiheke Island we toured an outdoor art show and Carol got a flat tire, literally the only day we rode without a patch kit. I removed the tire and rode the 3 miles into town to eCyclesNZ. In the back door came Carol and the owner of the shop, Darleen Tana. She and her family had given Carol and her bike a ride into town. We rented the bikes from another shop on the mainland.

I saw the bike missing the wheel and wandered over, Darleen said. I thought maybe it was stolen.

As Andrew, the shop mechanic, put aside his work and fixed the flat, Darleen told us her husband is an automotive engineer by trade but is currently developing the Onya Electric bike. She said they moved to the island to have a better life.

We wanted the children to be able to go to school barefoot, she said.

We thanked them for all their help.

Just tell people to use their local bike shop. Use their local bike shop.

Our expectation of New Zealand as a utopia were unmet, but the generosity and kindness we received from everyone, made the first stage of our trip enjoyable. We biked hundreds of miles, ran a half-marathon midway through for a good cause, and camped by rivers, mountains, and lakes with absolutely stunning views.

As for the free cake at the top there was no free cake or any cake at all. There was just a small American western/cowboy themed resort where we bought sandwiches and ate them.

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Whole of It: 'Free Cake at the Top' - Scottsbluff Star Herald