Orbit, 2017, 619 p.

Most Science Fiction deals with Physics or Biology, sometimes Chemistry, and not infrequently societal development. It rarely treats with Economics.

In New York 2140 Robinson explicitly considers that dismal science. I was going to say economics with the emphasis on the con. A con in two senses. It isn’t a science – it’s not falsifiable; or at least its adherents do not alter their models when faced with contrary evidence – and its assumptions are unrealistic (at the very least too simplistic.)

In Robinson’s scenario sea level has risen fifty feet after two great pulses of Antarctic ice melting, The lower lying parts of New York (along with many other coastal cities; though Robinson is not much concerned with them as his main readership will not be) have been submerged. Skyscrapers rear out of the water like the stumps of piers. Nevertheless people still live in the intertidal area – a diamond-like polymer waterproofs internal and external surfaces as much as possible though buildings more susceptible to rotting occasionally “melt” back into the water/silt. The city’s thoroughfares are now canals – a SuperVenice. Walkways suspended above the waters allow passage between buildings without taking to the waves.

Robinsons hangs his story on the inhabitants of the Met Life building and some of those who come in contact with them. Each succeeding section adopts the viewpoint of one or other of two computer coders called Mutt and Jeff (surnames Rosen and Muttchopf); Police Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir; a hedge fund manager called Franklin; the building’s main caretaker, Vlade; an unnamed citizen, who provides Robinson with the opportunity to dump information and history at will; Amelia Black, a broadcaster to the cloud from her airship Assisted Migration and whose principal attraction to her viewers seems to be shedding her clothes; building representative Charlotte Armstrong; and Stefan and Roberto, two orphan adventurers searching the waters for archaeological remains under the guidance of a Mr Hexter.

There are some nice touches such as the description of our species, with regard to its (lack of) response to warnings of global warming, as Homo sapiens oblivious and references like, “ This moment of the storm,” to delight the SF aficionados plus the nickname Amelia Errhard bestowed on Black due to her facility to make mistakes.

The initial plot seems to be about an offer to the inhabitants of the Met to take it over while at the same time subjecting the building to attack. The main set piece of the book is the huge hurricane that hits New York bringing down lots of buildings and the wider financial system. (Robinson’s main target here is economics after all, rather than global warming.)

Spoiler alert.

Robinson suggests that in the aftermath of this crash (the third big one in his timeline) government will finally take on the bankers and bend them to its will/the benefit of the people. He also posits the adoption by the US of a universal health care system. Now that really is Science Fiction.

Pedant’s corner:- no start quote when speech begins a chapter, squoze (for squeezed. Is squoze a USianism?) compos mentos (it’s compos mentis, but ut may have been the character misspelling for effect,) sordiditties (sordidities,) “have look around” (have a look around,) “and shined his lamp” (shone,) Friederichschafen (Friedeichshafen?) “they remain costumed as executives or baristas or USA casuals but always in costume” (costumed in costume? Hmmm,) “use to be” (used to be,) maw (a maw is not an opening, it’s a stomach!) “of saying You look like you would be good” … “aimed a look at Amelia, like, Don’t encourage him” (why omit the quotation marks?) “Their offices were a kid of shabby decrepit office located at” (offices…office within 7 words,) “Homo sapiens oblivious” (Homo Sapiens oblivious,) “if worse came to worst” (I know that formulation is more logical but I’ve always known the phrase as “if the worst came to the worst”,) “he had never been a wind over a hundred” (in a wind,) “avuncular, meaning “unclelike” in Latin” (no, avuncular means unclelike in English; it’s derived from the Latin for uncle.) “So she was getting reading to go to dinner” (ready to go to dinner,) “‘raft buildings on it to study it’” (to steady it.)

Penguin, 2000, 333 p + xlvi p of introduction and select bibliography, 10 p of Notes on the Text and 9 p of Variants in different editions. First published 1934.

Maybe it was due to my impending house removal but I just couldn’t get into this one at all. Alternatively it may be because initially I found the characters flighty and tedious, the dialogue curious. The novel is structured into three books and that too was part of the problem. Book 1 is set on the French Riviera where Dick Diver and his wealthy wife Nicole play host to a succession of vapid individuals. Their idyll is interrupted when nascent film star Rosemary Hoyt turns up at the resort with her mother and Dick is taken with her. In this section a duel between minor characters occurs – for no good reason I could see – and a body is found in a hotel bedroom with no apparent consequences.

However, things picked up in Book II where the narration flashed back to the first meeting of Dick and Nicole when he was a psychologist and she a patient. It immediately occurred to me that this would have been a better place to start the book as the situation and the characters are more interesting. In the notes at the end I discovered this was a revision that Fitzgerald had intended to make for future editions before his death and from 1948 till this Penguin edition the novel did appear with that altered structure.

By Book III the Divers’ marriage disintegrates as Dick takes to drink and Nicole becomes more and more independent.

There were a few bon mots. “A man is vulnerable only in his pride, but delicate as Humpty Dumpty once that is meddled with.” “Doctors, chauffeurs, and Protestant clergymen could never smell of liquor.” “Women marry all their husband’s talents and naturally afterwards are not so impressed with them as they keep up the pretence of being.”

The book’s provenance in the 1920s was apparent in the use of the words negro and nigger and there was a reference to a “gone coon” whatever that was. (A dead duck according to Wikipedia.)

At one point another character says to Dick, “But remember what George the Third said, that if Grant was drunk he wished he would bite the other generals.” Wouldn’t it have been Lincoln who said that? Fitzgerald has also given a band with a Scottish pianist the name The Ragtime College Jazzes of Edinboro. I think not. The repetition in the sentence, “Their fortunes had something to do with a bank in Milan that had something to do with the Warren fortunes,” struck me as clumsy. There was also filagree for filigree.

I did not read the (46 page!) introduction till after the novel and am glad of that as it gave away much of the novel’s driving force. It was also very Marxist in its interpretation, stating that the book was actually about a shift in economic structure from accumulation to reproduction.

Wiki says the Modern Library ranked Tender is the Night as 28^th in its hundred best English language novels of the early twentieth century. Evidently there’s something in there but I’m afraid it passed me by.

What do you do when all around you are screaming, “We’re doomed!”?

It seems the answer is to add to the screams.

When one country starts to make cuts to its spending, that doesn’t matter too much. When they all do….?

Wasn’t this the sort of thing that brought about the Great Depression?

What sense does it make to take jobs in the public sector out of the economy when the private sector is manifestly incapable of taking up the slack? Not only do you not make as big a saving as it might seem – you lose the income tax on the pay of those who are not employed to fill any vacancies and possibly have to pay out benefits instead on top – you also lose the spending power of those jobs in their local (and the wider) economy and so lose the stimulus they might give.

It seems daft to me.

Wasn’t it government spending that brought an end to the Depression? I read recently Congress delayed the US recovery by several years by kyboshing some of FDR’s plans for a stimulus.

Savage cuts and an increase in VAT are both things I had a premonition near certainty about under a Conservative government.

Plus ça change….

Double dip recession (and worse?) on the horizon?