New York 2140 is Kim Stanley Robinson’s newest novel and I love it. It’s a GREAT novel. It’s the best KSR book I’ve read in years and I’m supremely annoyed — No, more accurately, I’m embarrassed for our genre — that NY2140 is not on the Nebula ballot.

People! What are we here for if not to look ahead and imagine what might be, and to learn?

Alright. I understand. Science fiction means different things to different people and besides, SFF has long ago yielded dominance to the many great fantasy writers.

Still, this is a novel not to be missed. NY2140 is a wonderfully well written, engrossing, incredibly smart novel. It is also that rarest of birds in this genre of doom and dire warnings — it’s an essentially optimistic novel.

Very briefly, NY2140 is about an odd assortment of characters living and thriving in New York decades after two events of massive, successive sea-level rise. Lower Manhattan, aka “the Super Venice,” is flooded and has been for decades but life goes on — although buildings not anchored in bedrock continue to fall. Meanwhile, the world of finance — and the associated endlessly greedy billionaires — are still in control.

Early on in the story it’s hard to know what all these disparate characters have in common. Every passage is interesting, but from time to time the detailed descriptions can feel overwhelming. Just take a break and then get back to it (you’ll be drawn back to it). It’s all worthwhile.

In my early days as a writer, KSR was right up there at the top of my list of favorite writers. The Memory of Whiteness and The Wild Shore were favorites. But as his novels got longer and longer, I stopped reading them. Just in the last couple of years, I’ve started again, first listening to The Years of Rice and Salt and then reading Aurora. I suspect I am going to have to go back and read some of the in-between books that I missed. Given that I’m a slow reader, I might be some time at it.

Still, let there be no doubt: KSR is one of our greats.

Here’s a link to Amazon.

Here’s a universal link that will get you to alternate vendors.

On Twitter someone recently asked, What book has changed the way you see the world?

I’ve just finished reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus — and it’s been that kind of book for me.

Written by Charles C. Mann and originally published in 2005, 1491 presents a view of the Americas before Columbus that is in sharp contrast to what most Americans my age learned in school.

This is a fascinating, well-researched, and well-written book. I’d read articles and extracts based on it, but the details included in the full text really drive home the author’s main points:
• that the indigenous population of the Americas before Columbus was much higher, diverse, and sophisticated than has traditionally been believed;
• that between the arrival of Columbus and the settlement of what would become the American colonies, disease swept through both North and South America, decimating these once-large populations and wiping out civilizations;
• that because of this, North America only appeared to be a “virgin continent” and relatively unpopulated;
• that Indians** acted as a “keystone species” essentially engineering much of the landscape to suit their needs — for example, burning off the undergrowth in New England forests, modifying land for agriculture, encouraging the growth of nut-bearing and other useful trees, and discouraging the proliferation of species that competed for these resources.

What we think of today as North American wilderness and the “primeval” Amazon are both, in large part, recent phenomena, existing only since disease eliminated indigenous cultures.

This is compelling stuff on so many levels. First and most obviously, that many millions of people died of disease — up to 95% of the population by some estimates – and hundreds (thousands?) of cultures simply vanished.

Apocalypse is a popular topic in science fiction. What happens to a culture when 95% of its people suddenly die off? Nothing works after that. Technology, history, the complex network of human interaction that allows food to be grown and goods to be produced and traded simply vanishes. Those few who are left will be left with very little and no real means to replace what was lost. Mann uses the phrase “Holmberg’s Mistake” to describe the conclusion of an anthropologist who studied a “primitive” Amazon tribe and came to believe that these people had lived thus for thousands of years, not considering the possibility that they were the descendants of a handful who survived a real apocalypse. (more…)