Title: The Years Of The City
Author: Frederik Pohl
Genre: Science Fiction
Comments: I picked this up at a local bookstore the last time they had a half-off sale on used books. I am partial to Pohl's work, and am more than willing to take a chance on a book by him that I have never heard of before, especially when it is half-off of its used book price.
It started out a bit slow, with the typical Pohl behavior of plunking you down into the society and letting you figure out what is going on rather than spoon feeding it to you, though he does wax philosophical about New York City and its parallels to a living organism early in the book. That is what the book is about, in fact. New York City, over the course of decades.
The Years Of The City contains five stories in a single volume, each one a bit further into the future than the last. Some characters reappear as themselves, some you catch only a glimmer of when a situation is mentioned in a later story that may or may not involve them.
The first of these stories is
When New York Hit The Fan. It starts out with New York City, much as it is today, on the edge of a crisis caused by both nature, man, and the bureaucratic machinations man has created. It sets the stage for the later stories, putting in place the system which will allow citizens to take a greater part in their own governance and eventually cause the New York City of the future to come into being.
The second is
The Greening Of Bed-Stuy, which concerns itself with the design and development of a self-sustaining segment of New York City that is on the drawing boards, but will not be built unless the designer allows it to be gutted by political and criminal interests that stand to lose a fortune if the people are no longer beholden to them. This story was a Nebula Award Nominee.
The third story in this volume is
The Blister. This portion is about the ultimate engineering project in New York City thus far, the construction of a dome which will provide numerous benefits, including protecting it from the ravages of an increasingly unpredictable climate, but once again there are those that would block it lest it hamper their ability to make a buck.
The fourth installment is titled
Second-Hand Sky. The story surrounds a recent immigrant to New York City, one that can't wait to try hang-gliding in the unique wind conditions created in a domed city. Upon getting busted, he is sentenced to serve in Emergency Services to work off his punishment. It doesn't seem so bad though, because the riskier the job you choose to work off your time, the faster you can work it off. It helps that he meets an attractive doctor who is also working off time, but it turns out she is separated from her husband, who dislikes it when other men pay attention to "his" property.
The final tale is
Gwenanda and the Supremes. In allowing the people to have a greater say in the government, it came about that there were in fact fewer laws needed on the books. Thus the Supreme Court now hears actual cases that it might not have heard in the past, as there is no real call for interpretation of the law, but rather the parties involved simply wanted to appeal to a higher authority. One Justice winds up adopting the daughter of a criminal that she sentenced to be placed in the freezer, after said criminal killed the father of the child that was adopted. Instant motherhood isn't an easy task, however, especially when your boyfriend is about to be shipped to the West Coast to help reroute a river down from Alaska, and the first pandemic in decades erupts out of nowhere.
When I first started this book, I thought it a bit weak, but by the end of it, I was wishing there were more stories built upon the framework that was constructed through the five novellas. Some of the technology in the stories is outdated now, some was viable when the book was written and you have to wonder why we haven't made use of it by now, and still more that we take for granted wasn't even conceived of when these stories were written.
It will cease to matter once you get into the book, though. It is not about ray-guns, and rocket ships, and green-skinned aliens. It is about the situations and the people involved, though the hard science that is offered is enough to pique one's interest, and I found myself making several notes of scientists and technologies to look up on the 'Net later.