Chapter 15 - Bohemia

Summary

Cities are often the sites of apocalyptic ruptures, and more often than not, urban locations operate as spaces to flee after everything has gone sideways. Yet the city is more than a place to flee; the city –– in its predisaster moment –– already offers innovative and creative forms of community in everyday life that already speak to a potential for radically different modes for living. This chapter focuses on the tension between the apocalyptic as a stage for imagining a future world that reproduces more of the same and the apocalyptic that opens a space for actually reimagining the future is crucial to Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017). Two particular attributes make New York 2140 a crucial text in the post-apocalyptic genre, its dismissal of nostalgia for the pre-apocalyptic world and its thinking at multiple scales.