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You’re listening to IW, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m EM.

On a spring day like this, one of my favorite places to go in Manhattan is Madison Square Park. On one corner is one of my favorite buildings, the Flatiron. I’m sure you’ve seen it – it’s basically a giant triangle wedge. On the other side is the old Met Life Building, which is a clock tower with a slender roof and a gold statue on top. The Empire State Building looms over this park in kind of a paternal way.

Can you picture it? Good. Now imagine the entire park is underwater.

The science is irrefutable. As oceans get warmer, the sea will expand and rise. The only real debate is how high sea level will rise. I love New York history. Sitting here I think about pictures I’ve seen of the statue of liberty’s torch sitting in this park as a gimmick to raise funds for the statue itself. That was 140 years ago. It bums me out to think 140 years from now this park might be gone.

So I was fascinated to learn about a new novel called New York 2140. It imagines New York transformed into a giant version of Venice. The park is under water but Madison Ave is a canal. All of the characters live in the old Met Life tower behind me, and they take boats to work.

Even more interesting, the author is Kim Stanley Robinson. He’s one of the most respected sci-fi writers today. He’s best known for the Mars trilogy, where he imagined how we could change the atmosphere of Mars to make it livable for humans.

KSR: I am from Davis, CA and I was intimidated to write about NY. I know more about Mars than I do New York and it was more comfortable for me writing about Mars.

But he went for it. And the novel is really a hopeful vision of our future. My interview with Kim Stanley Robinson is after the break.

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I should start by describing the works of Kim Stanley Robinson, but I’ll let him do that.

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KSR: I know perfectly well because I read the Internet that cliché of my novel is long winded full of info dumps as they would call it despairingly, prone to explaining utopian histories, etc, etc, always outdoors, at this point I can play with those, I can play against my own brand at this point.

It’s true. He puts an incredible amount of research into the science behind his fiction whether it’s how to terraform or reinforce buildings so water doesn’t seep through.

KSR: You might call this world building, sci-fi novels do world building that would be bad if focus on any novel, you want a story that runs a thread through the maze that suggests the maze without going through every blind alley.

One thing he gets right about New York is the feeling that the city is always changing, but somehow still feels like New York.

So I was surprised to learn the inspiration for the novel wasn’t New York, or climate change. It was the financial crisis of 2008. He was thinking about all the factors that lead to the housing bubble, and wondered in the future, would people look back on our time and learn from our mistakes?

In another one of his novels set in the future, his characters visited a drowned Manhattan and thought – that would be an interesting real estate bubble because everyone would’ve given up on the city after the flooding. But that was a passing reference in another novel. Now he had to figure out how the city got that way.

KSR: I need it to be far enough in the future that the sea level rise that would get me a super Venice would be plausible. That pushes out pretty far considering the financial situation I wanted to discuss exists right now and is post 2008. In terms of when sea level rise starts, when would it level off? Since no one knows how fast or high it will go the idea of leveling off is questionable and problematic. One of the reasons why I describe the flooding as coming in pulses is a) that is how glaciers work, they run quickly then they stall, then they run quickly and stall. I imagine for the whole world and I imagine sea level is the same. And b) I needed a moment in my plot where everyone is assuming that sea level is going to stay stable just so they can build their ground floors and they can operate the city because if it keeps on rising then the perpetual problem of rebuilding infrastructure is less habitable than what I wanted, a super Venice and Venice has had its sea level to deal with for 400 years.

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Do you look at the streets and see your New York layered on top of it like augmented reality?

KSR: I did while I was writing the novel and it was a tough imaginative task to look up everywhere and say the water would be at third floor, at bottom of shallow bay. Madison Square is great in that way, in Italian terms the square would be called Bachino, little areas of open water that are more than a canal so the Madison Square I was thinking aquaculture you do a lot and not particularly big and Madison square is five or six acres and so I’d try to imagine it, try to imagine it but of course you’re standing on the ground, you’re thinking whoa that’s a lot of water! That’s often occurred to me is there that much ice in Antarctica? I’ve been to Antarctica, yeah there this is that much ice and it’s amazing what we’ve got up there and frightening for sea level concepts.

Did you have fun planning out the rest of the 21st century?

KSR: Well, it was less fun than walking the streets of New York. It was more like oh damn, I wish I didn’t have this much history to plausibly plot it’s sketchy in the book on purpose. To take it out to 2140 was more than comfortable but I did the best I could and it gave me time for things like two depressions, two pulses of water and the recovery which was very important because I’m depicting a healthy civilization that’s adapted to new conditions.

Manhattan is quite adaptable – not the street but the skyscrapers. They’re sturdy, built on bedrock. He imagines new ones twice as big on dry land uptown. Some of the old skyscrapers already have sky bridges, which connect them to other buildings. And the Empire State Building was originally meant to be landing docks for blimps.

KSR: Well I think we gave up on blimps too soon with Hindenberg and once switch over to inert gas good transport for carbon burn, so once you decide burning carbon is a mistake and an accident, you will want to go back to air travel that is slower and more carbon neutral, and there you get back to airships.

So why did he set the novel in the Met Life Building, which he imagines has been turned into a residential coop?

KSR: It came from a lecturer gave lecture on BitCoin at UC Davis. He asked what I was up to I said writing about Manhattan flooded into Venice and he laughed did you know the old Met Life building is imitation of building in Venice. I said I didn’t know that. He 4 said yeah it’s vastly bigger scale. And then in trying to figure out where to center this novel, I had my answer.

Each chapter in the book is told from the perspective of a different character that lives in the Metropolitan Life Building. For instance, this is Franklin, who works on Wall Street, or I guess I should say Wall Canal.

READING: So I left work and hummed down the Eldorado Equity on Canal and Mercer. Turning onto Canal Canal, as the tourists loved to hear it called, I found it crowded with afternoon traffic as usual, motorboats of every kind jammed bow to stern and thwart to thwart, to the point where more boat than water was visible. You could have walked across the canal on boat decks without ever having to jump, and quite a few flower sellers and mere passerbys were actually doing that.

Jojo was waiting on her building’s front dock, and I felt a little spike in the cardiograph. I kissed the dockside with the starboard side of the skater and said, “Hey there.”

“Hi,” she said after a brief glance at her wrist, but I was on time, and she nodded as if in acknowledgment of that. She was graceful stepping along the deck back to the cockpit; looking up at her from the wheel it seemed like her legs went on forever.

“I was thinking of the Reef Forty Oyster Bar?”

“Sounds good,” she said.

My favorite character is Vlade, the superintendent who pours his energy into maintaining building as a way of coping with the disappointments in his personal life.

READING: So Idelba showed up in her tug, which was of a size that allowed it to just fit through most of the canals of lower Manhattan. Nervously Vlade welcomed her to the Met and showed her around. It was the first time she had visited, so he gave her the grand tour, starting below the waterline, including the rooms that had been broached. Boathouse, dining hall and commons, some representative apartments occupied by people he knew well, everything from the solo closets to the big group places, occupying half a floor and accommodating a hundred people dorm-style; then up to the farm, then above that to the cupola 5 and the blimp mast. Then back down to the animal floor, pigs, chickens, goats, very smelly, and right under that the farm again, to get the view of the city through the loggia’s open arches.

Idelba seemed impressed, which pleased Vlade. Their history stood between them like a third person, but he still had his feelings; that would never change. What it was like for her, he had no idea. There was so much they had never talked about. Just the thought of trying to scared him.

KSR: And this is a tradition or genre of its own, the building novel so there’s Tom Dish famous sci-fi novel 334 which is an address, Jeff Ryman has one about London, and John Lanchester one about London called Capital.

That’s so interesting I didn’t know small genre.

KSR: Yes, said to be French, kind of Zola. So I did that and in terms of characters I needed the building superintendent, a financier, and indeed more than one there’s traders and quantz and they don’t do same things, and then I needed a social worker and refugees, what would be street urchins have to be canal urchins, water rats, and that covers, and a policeman, what is it like to enforce the law when there’s these canals with the different levels. And I should mention the citizen.

“The citizen” -- an anonymous blogger. We don’t know who he is or where he is. And when he takes over a chapter, he actually breaks the fourth wall, and addresses the readers directly.

KSR: It was a late arrival, suddenly have a citizen, an anonymous voice I thought there needed to be some way to do more than just scenes and did not one character to another as you know Bob the flood of 2060 was the bad as you don’t know reader this is what happened and this is why people are so stupid. The vocabulary like moron or humongous, it was easy, I saw that as a writer not as a Californian, I don’t know where this stuff comes from but I’m an American and New York is very prominent in America as a voice.

READING: So the people of the 2060s staggered on through the great depression that followed the First Pulse, and of course there was a crowd in that generation, a certain particular one percent of the population that just by chance rode things out rather well, and considered that it was really an act of creative destruction, as was everything bad that didn’t touch them, and all people needed to do to deal with it was to buckle down in their traces and accept the idea of 6 austerity, meaning more poverty for the poor, and accept a police state with lots of free speech and freaky lifestyles velvet-gloving the iron fist, and hey presto! On we go with the show! Humans are so tough!

But pause ever so slightly – and those of you anxious to get back to the narrating of the antics of individual humans can skip to the next chapter, and now that any more expository rants, and more info dumps (on your carpet) from this New Yorkers will be printed in red ink to warn you not to read them -- pause, broader- minded more intellectually flexible readers, to consider why the First Pulse happened in the first place.

Like many stories about New York, this one is about class. The one percent ends up just fine living in the sky. The brownstones neighborhoods aren’t so lucky.

KSR: The areas of Manhattan that are landfill you don’t have skyscraper can’t support them, all buildings if flooded fall into drink, and in the intertidal harshest underwater at high and dry at low, many blocks.

He explores those areas with two homeless kids named Stefan and Roberto. They befriend an old man -- a squatter, living in Chelsea – which by the way, was actually flooded during Hurricane Sandy.

READING: Buildings in the drink collapsed all the time -- it was a regular thing. The boys had tended to scoff at the bad stories told about such collapses, but now they were remembering how Vlade always called the intertidal the death zone. Don’t spend too much time in the death zone, he would say, explaining that was what climbers called mountains above twenty thousand feet. As the boys spent lots of time in the intertidal and were now diving the river too, they tended to just agree with him and let it be, maybe considering themselves to be like climbers at altitude. Tough guys. But now they were holding the old man by the elbows and hurrying him along the sideways-tilted hall as best as they could, then down the stairs, one step at a time, had to make sure he didn’t fall or else it would take even more time, sometimes placing his feet by grabbing his ankles and placing them. The stairwell was all knocked around, railings down, open cracks in walls showing the building next door. Small of seaweed and the anoxic stink of released mud, worse than any chamber pot. There was a booming from outside, and any number of shouts and bangs and other sounds. Shafts of light cut through the hazy air of the stairwell at od and alarming angles, and quite a 7 few of the stairs gave underfoot. Clearly this old building could fall over at any moment. The oozy stench filled the air, like the building’s guts or something.

KSR: In those zones float your, Manhattan floating barge, anchored in place, stretchy cord like floating dock, full on neighborhoods, technically possible but people will want that real estate. So my developers in 2140 these zones are never going to be habitable unless we float on the tide.

It comes to the question why stay in New York, and it’s a question people were asking after Hurricane Katrina.

KSR: Oh that’s right! In both cases, especially New York, there’s a term in economics, the tyranny of sunk costs, and that’s a nice joke because of sunk. And what I’ve been saying and thinking is that NY harbor is different, charismatic, it has a mystique, people want it, some people who leave, in the book it’s going to Denver, anywhere you go to that doesn’t have the problems of the coast with sea level rise. There would be moment of opportunity stay in NY without crippling rents, buying in because so dangerous of unhealthy or unsafe, and while that situation you might be able to live in a super Venice on the cheap but the belter you made it the more there would be gentrification.

This sounds like a very familiar story.

KSR: Yeah, exactly.

This novel is all about adaptation. But Kim Stanley Robinson doesn’t like that word because it implies there’s no point in trying to mitigate climate change because we’ll just adapt! On the other hand, he doesn’t like writing about dystopian futures because he thinks that also makes us complacent as well.

KSR: Well I think a lot of people are doing dystopia because easy and include drama, car crashes, explosions, they’re TV movie, Hollywood, dramatic disasters and then you watch them, that’s bad we’re better than them, no matter how bad my situation is I’m better off than those people in Hunger Games, instead of alarm it sets in complacency, we’re not as bad off as them and that’s their problem to dealt with. But since so many people doing those and Hunger Games is a great novel, surrealistic and not realistic, slap in the face of hopelessness and resentment of 1% so it’s a real political novella and better than fooling around in meaningless space opera, but then you need the other side, the utopian vision which doesn’t have as much intrinsic drama but it needs creative work, it need a lot of coping, it will need finessing and compromising if you’re interested in 8 drama of human relations, what we do now in trying to accommodate to reality, so I think of myself as a literary realist and as a realist to the extent sci-fi writer pushing for something instead of bad way as warning sign, positive signs as encouragements that we should try for this.

I have to admit, as much as I love living in New York, I’m not sure I’d want to live in New York 2140. The endless surprises of street life are too important to me – the sense of a neighborhood, not a giant floating docks the size of a neighborhood.

Of course if I somehow found myself there, I’d just be one of those New Yorkers who complains the city was better in my day. Don’t you kids know this isn’t way New York was supposed to be? But each generation has to reclaim their city and mold it in their image. And as climate change transforms the world in radical and dangerous ways, imagining versions of our cities that are thriving but strange and foreign to us might be the best kind of future we could hope for.

That’s it for this week, thank you for listening. Special thanks to Kim Stanley Robinson and Bill Lobely, who did the readings. You can like the show on Facebook, I tweet at emolinsky. You can also help support the show on the crowd funding site Patreon. I’ll have a link on my site imaginary worlds podcast dot org.