Climate Justice and Narrative Justice in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140: Finance, Opacity, and Collective Survival

초록

This article reads Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 through the lens of climate justice, arguing that literature does more than mirror ecological crisis: it equips publics with ethical and imaginative resources for collective survival. Bringing David Schlosberg’s tripartite framework—distribution, recognition, participation—into dialogue with critiques of finance (Klein’s “disaster capitalism”; Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession”) and material-semiotic theory (Latour; Bennett), it shows how sea-level rise yields a vertical hierarchy of risk, how “dark pool” opacity links financial non-display to submerged infrastructures, and how co-op practices at the Met Life—assemblies, open ledgers, maintenance routines—model scalable, procedural solidarity. Form is central: polyphony distributes interpretive authority across diverse speakers; systems scenes render hidden infrastructures legible; and temporal layering keeps slow repair and spectacular shocks in the same frame, cultivating democratic attention. Together, these devices form an imaginative commons where multiplicity challenges monopoly, transparency counters opacity, and endurance resists extraction. The article contributes by operationalizing climate justice at the level of narrative form, theorizing opacity as a shared analytic across finance and ecology, and linking formal strategy to institutional design to show how the novel rehearses institutions that align adaptation with equity.

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