When an anonymous offer is made to buy out the co-operative and simultaneously someone sabotages the building itself, it's clear that things are awry. They live and love and resist the ruination around them. As with the realism he aspires to, Robinson gives us a neat cross-section of society. Robinson tells his story through the residents of the co-operative Met Building, including a love-struck hedge-fund broker, a black female police inspector, two treasure-hunting homeless boys, the building's superintendent, and two coders who are kidnapped in the opening chapter for releasing anti-capitalist algorithms into the financial system. It's a plausible, bustling and complex place of hope and disappointment. His future New York, a "super-Venice" where the avenues have become canals, is a thing of wonder. This event has created immense destruction of coastal regions and also thrown up the key question of property rights: who owns the ruins beneath or sticking up through the ocean surface? As with all property, hedge funds and speculators have moved in to exploit the market.
In New York 2140 New York is part of the "intertidal region", the geographic space reclaimed by the rising ocean. A work of far-ranging intellectual interest: New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson.
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