I have not had the easiest relationship with Kim Stanley Robinson. There are things I like about his books, quite a lot - his embracing of complexity and willingness to delve into political machinations, for one. There are things that get under my skin - the overall pessimism and the way many of his female characters are intensely focused on just one thing and shrill as fuck about it, for another. This means that when I finish his books, I generally am all in a muddle about what I want to say about them. Unless it's the book just before this, Aurora, which I just plainly hated and included in one of my periodic "Terrible SF/F Sex Writing" posts I make for friends.
So, when I started my Hugo reading this year, I was not thoroughly pleased that that meant that I had to plow my way through another long book of his. After Aurora, I thought I'd probably wash my hands of him for good. This is a long way around to get to saying...I actually liked this without any of my usual reservations. It's not going to be high on my list for the award, necessarily, but it's more than I expected to be able to say that I enjoyed this, with no caveats.
He's got a wide canvas again, although all centered in a single city - New York of, you guessed it, 2140 (and the two years afterwards), after the seas rose dramatically twice, with half the city trying to be the new Venice, while the rich stay uptown, still safely above the rising waters. There are skyway bridges between buildings if you want to walk, or boats if you want to go by water.
The story is about the inhabitants of one building that sits below the waterline, although most of it is still above. It takes a while for their stories to intersect, but they eventually do, in interesting ways. We have a daytrader who starts out amoral, or at least, inattentive to ethics, but whose sex drive prompts him to start thinking about the long-term. We have a local attorney for refugees who are flocking to New York City, which has not enough room for them. We have a middle-aged cop who used to be one of the fiercest water sumo wrestlers the demimonde had ever seen. (The previous two characters are both women.) We have the superintendent of the building in which we live, taking care of the building like it was his own child, with a fairly obvious trauma of losing a child in the background. (It's effective, but doesn't need to be teased out. The first oblique reference, I got it.)
We have a pair of water-rat children more or less adopted by the building, with a penchant for danger and digging for gold underwater in an oversized diving bell. We have a "cloud star" who works to save endangered animals, often without any clothes on to attract more viewers. We have a pair of programmers who see the problems with the system they work in and the wider economic system that buttresses it, and are kidnapped when they make an attack on both.
And, in the theme of Kim Stanley Robinson including non-human character POVs, we have The Citizen, who is eventually and unsurprisingly revealed to be the city.
The rich have fled to Denver, but still keep empty condos in the city. Rents are high on the poor, and there are attempted takeovers of the mid-range buildings in the intertidal (partly flooded) zone. The stock market fucks everyone, and the system teeters precariously. The day trader can see the time coming when the bubble pops and works to be ready to make a bundle when it does. But then the lawyer, Charlotte, in conjunction with many of the other characters, has an idea to change the system more fundamentally, wresting power back from the machine of the stock market and the banks, and handing it back to the government and the people it represents.
It was a really enjoyable ride to see how we get there, with the city and our characters enduring a devastating hurricane along the way which sparks things into happening much sooner than one might have expected. And while there are disagreements, it doesn't have the air that little good can ever be accomplished that I associate with KSR books.
So, yeah, I enjoyed this. It was a big brick of a book, but instead of slogging, it was generally a lot of fun to read. I enjoy sprawling stories, with many characters and intersecting storylines. When the story lacks that one type of women he wrote far too often, and in the end, something gets accomplished, I'm much happier. Even if there will then be a fight to retain it, and so forth, into the future. I don't need the future to be easy. I just need it to be less bleak.
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