1 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. >> BREAK I should start by describing the works of Kim Stanley Robinson, but I’ll let him do that. 2 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. 3 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.