New York 2140

by Kim Stanley Robinson

“The prices are always too low, and so the world is fucked. We’re in a mass extinction event, sea level rise, climate change, food panics, everything you’re not reading in the news.”

Fifty-feet-higher sea level means a much bigger bay, more tidally confused, Hell Gate more hellish, the Harlem River a wild tidal race and not a shipping canal, the Meadowlands a shallow sea, Brooklyn and Queens and the south Bronx all shallow seas, their prismatically oily waters sloshing poisonously back and forth on the tides. Yes, a total mess of a bay, still junked up by bridges and pipelines and rusting sclerotic infrastructural junk of all kinds.

So it’s still New York. People can’t give up on it. It’s what economists used to call the tyranny of sunk costs: once you’ve put so much time and money into a project, it gets hard to just eat your losses and walk. You are forced by the structure of the situation to throw good money after bad, grow obsessed, double down, escalate your commitment, and become a mad gibbering apartment dweller, unable to imagine leaving. You persevere unto death, a monomaniacal New Yorker to the end.

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth’s entire previous five billion years (can we say “Anthropocene,” class?), and they searched the geological record for the best analogs to this unprecedented event, and they said, Whoa. They said, Holy shit. People!

It will take longer than our lifetimes. But it’s the only way forward. So that’s what I do. I know my program is only a small part of the process. I know it’s only a silly cloud show. I know that. I even know that my own producers keep stringing me out in these little pseudo-emergencies they engineer because they think it adds to our ratings, and I go along with that because I think it might help, even though sometimes it scares me to death, and it’s embarrassing too. But to the extent it gets people thinking about these projects, it’s helping the cause. It’s part of the larger thing that we have to do. That’s how I think of it, and I would do anything to make it succeed. I would hang naked upside down above a bay of hungry sharks if that would help the cause, and you know I would because that was one of my most popular episodes. Maybe it’s stupid that it has to be that way, maybe I’m stupid for doing it, but what matters is getting people to pay attention, and then to act.

To the south, the rest of uptown was a forest of superscrapers only a bit shorter than the Cloister cluster, each displaying its particular gehryglory. To the left of these towers lay the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, all three boroughs now bays studded with buildings, with Brooklyn Heights the first real land to be seen that way, topped by its own line of superscrapers. It was only from this distance one could see how tall the new towers really were, which was really very tall. Meanwhile water gleamed everywhere, filled with drowned buildings and bridges, ships and ships’ wakes.

In the 1920s a plan was proposed to dam and drain the East River, from Hell Gate to the Williamsburg Bridge, afterward filling in the emptied channel and thus connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn and Queens, while also creating for development approximately two thousand acres of new real estate.

Thorvald shrugged. “If you’re saying global temperatures have to drop for polar bears to survive, you would need to pull about a thousand gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere.” “So what? Couldn’t we do that?” “If that were our main project, yes. You would only have to change everything.” “Oh come on. Everything?”

“Sure, fine. You need refugia in the hard times. But they are only stopgaps. You are the queen of stopgaps.” “Stopgaps?” “That’s what they are. Because in the long run, only a system fix will work. Until then, we try our stopgaps. We do what we can with the handouts of the rich. We try to save the world with their table scraps.”

We usually want there to be one master rule. Pöpper called that monocausotaxophilia, the love of single causes that explain everything. It would be so nice to have that single rule, sometimes. So people make them up, and give them authority, like they used to give authority to kings or gods. Maybe now it’s the idea that more is better. That’s the rule that underlies economic theory, and in practice it means profit. That’s the one rule. It’s supposed to allow everyone to maximize their own value. In practice it’s put us into a mass extinction event. Persist in it, and it could wreck everything.

Many of the improvements were based in materials science, although there was such consilience between the sciences and every other human discipline or field of endeavor that really it could be said that all the sciences, humanities, and arts contributed to the changes initiated in these years.

All the blocks would then float up and down on the tides and currents together. Underwater framing to keep the canals between them open and navigable, bumpers to keep the outer ones from bumping too hard into stationary neighbors in a storm. Saltproof and rustproof. Photovoltaic paint, farms on the roofs, water capture systems, water tanks on the roofs in the traditional NYC style, lifestraw purification filters, all standard operating procedure everywhere in lower Manhattan. Both water and power would be semiautonomous, maybe even autonomous.

What a ruin it will make! exclaimed H. G. Wells on first seeing the Manhattan skyline

“Totally. The line between cash and not-cash has abruptly moved. Like only cash in hand is cash now. Because people are definitely not paying their rents and mortgages.” “And student loans?” Mutt inquires. “They never paid those. So now there’s nothing at the bottom of the house of cards. The dominoes are falling.” “The falling dominoes are knocking over the house of cards?” “Exactly. The whole shithouse is coming down.” “Good. And look, meanwhile we have our little home back!” “I know. It’s good.” Jeff stands in the open doorway of it, looking south at Wall Street. “If only everyone realized all you need is a hotello.” Mutt moves past him and stops by the south railing. “The view helps.”

“I read when they were building Jones Beach, Robert Moses got mad because the wind kept blowing the sand away. His people explained it was dune grass that stabilized dunes, so he ordered a thousand gardeners to the beach, and they planted a million sedge starts.” The others laughed. “We’ll pull Jones Beach too,” Idelba said. “Coney Island, Rockaway, Long Beach, Jones Beach, Fire Island. All the way out to Montauk. Move it all up to the new tide line.” The crew seemed to regard this endless task as a good thing. It was like working on the Met; it would never end. One of them raised a glass, and the others did likewise. “One can easily imagine Sisyphus happy,” Abdul declared, and they drank to that.

One thought ever at the fore— That in the Divine Ship, the World, breasting Time and Space, All Peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same destination.

Popped bubble, liquidity freeze, credit crunch, big finance going down like the KT asteroid, making desperate appeals for a government bailout: it was like the revival of some bad old Broadway musical. Book goes like this: finance says to government, Pay us or the economy dies.