We're back from a long work- and life-related absence to fart around for a couple minutes trying to log in to our old accounts, and then we're off and running with the kind of meandering, half-baked musings you've all been missing lo these many months.
That's right, New York 2140 is the topic of our next season (series?) and we spend this episode recalling where and when we were when the book was published and pondering what it might mean today. Here's a novel that takes both place and literature itself very seriously, in a really fun way. A massively ambitious work, drawing on the literary imagination of New York as well as characteristic KSR ideas about ecology, climate change, and capitalism, inflected here through the aftershocks financial crisis of 2007-08, including the Occupy movement and the double meaning of "liquidity," NY2140 finds itself post-Obama, mid-Trump, pre-COVID, pre-AI pump-and-dump "revolution," pre--the-shit-really-starting-to-hit-the-fan-regarding-climate-change (i.e., pre-massive summerlong forest fires that golfers still manage to play through but that block out the sun for weeks at a time from Calgary to Chicago). It's still a book that imagines America as lying at the center of a global project of capitalist hegemony, if we recall correctly, and the stickiness of capital as a force that organizes society and politics is something we'll be paying close attention to, as well as the way the novel imagines collective and personal responses to crisis. Is this an optimistic or a pessimistic novel? Was it then? Does it envision an alternative to the eco-fascist path we seem to be on in this decade of "dithering"?
We do then talk about genuinely interesting things like gardening, Anya Taylor-Joy, Waterworld, weird Bryan Adams lyrics, and the relative quality of The Expanse and the joylessness of most contemporary TV, before dropping some really gratuitous spoilers about Red Mars. (This is NOT a spoiler-free podcast, for those just now joining).
Anyway, we're back, we hope to bring you new episodes every week over the course of what promises to be a deadly hot summer, and we're mostly excited to be here! We'll be back next week with Part One of NY2140, "The Tyranny of Sunk Costs," so head to your local bookstore, pick up a copy, and start reading!
Thanks for listening!
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Music by Spirit of Space