Tell Me A Story I Can Believe: A Novel Approach to the Climate Crisis

Like many other works of climate fiction, such as The Sea and Summer and Here, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 pictures a city of the future that has transformed as a result of the rising sea levels caused by a number of dramatic events due to human activity. As a larger genre, climate fiction can offer us a way to picture ourselves in a state of crisis still forthcoming and to help us better prepare for a future where drastic climate events are the new norm if not avert that future all together. Unlike other novels that focus on the anxieties felt over these changes, Robinson focuses on the logic that allows contemporary societies to refuse to confront climate change. The novel challenges the economic ideology that has brought us to our current state of climate denial—the novel is a critique of capital as much as it is a call to action to implement change in our struggle to save our planet.