Kim Stanley Robinson's Post-Climate-Change Novels
Reviews
By Albert Cottica, Econ-SF:
New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson.
"It depicts a future New York City where see levels went up 15 meters, and submerged much of the city, including Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. This drove real estate values to near-zero: as a result, capital withdrew inland and urban climate refugees (“water rats”) were left to fend for themselves. The city becomes divided into above-water Uptown, home to second homes for the ultra-rich, and the Intertidal, the area between the low tide and and a high tide mark, which is (barely) inhabitable thanks to technological improvement in waterproofing and material science in general. In the Intertidal, the work of re-purposing and adapting the existing building stock is done by water rats, who organize according to a molteplicity of economic models (“in the years after the flooding there was a proliferation of cooperatives, neighborhood associations, communes, squats, barter, alternative currencies, gift economies, solar usufruct, fishing village cultures, mondragons, unions, Davy’s locker freemasonries, anarchist blather, and submarine technoculture, including aeration and aquafarming […]”). Notably, KSR sees this as a sort of controlled experiment, still in the hands of late-stage capitalist élites (“Wait and see what those crazy people did with it, an
(https://edgeryders.eu/t/econ-sf-a-selection-of-works-and-authors/8582)
2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson.
"Set in a later epoch in the same future history as the Mars trilogy and New York 2140. It depicts a solar system economy, with a fully terraformed Mars, Venus, Titan and Triton well on their way to their own full terraforming, colonies on Mercury, Luna and other moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and plenty of hollowed out asteroids. The economy is dual. “Space”, meaning everything except Earth and Mars, is run by the Mondragon Accord. This is a network of space settlements, which started out their economies as scientific stations (and so as planned economies). As these economies grew in size and complexity, they drew inspiration by Mondragon (“a small Basque town that ran an economic system of nested co-ops organized for mutual support”). The Mondragon Accord is characterized as a more sophisticated planned economy, run by quantum computers making real-time adjustments in production schedules. Markets and capitalism are still there, but they “tended to be private unregulated individual enterprises in nonessential goods. Capitalism was in effect relegated to the margin, and the necessities of life were a shared commons exchange between Earth and individual space colonies was on a national or treaty-association basis, thus a kind of colonial model”. Earth is still run by late-stage capitalism; Mars has withdrawn from the Mondragon Accord and is described as a “planetary social democratic economy”.
(https://edgeryders.eu/t/econ-sf-a-selection-of-works-and-authors/8582)