These spaces of geophysical, legal, and financial ambivalence are rippling through the world’s coastal cities (though the narrative sticks to NYC). The banality, thrills, and tensions of wet living aren’t for New York alone.

In a stretch of midtown along Sixth Avenue, kids “skimboard” on a shallow, rising tide of water, “jockeying for position on the surges, doing spinners if possible, curb turns.” A zip line connects downtown Brooklyn to the southern tower of the Brooklyn bridge. Commuters speed-walk to work in diagonal and perpendicular skybridges between buildings. And shadowy real-estate titans are scheming to buy up the reclaimed community from the residents who fought to restore it. Pumped by an “Intertidal Property Pricing Index,” a financial bubble is swelling. After years of suffering, things are getting fun again. But scrappy New Yorkers are rebuilding in this intertidal realm and some now call it SuperVenice. Property rights and values are uncertain. (Some even for the better: the drowned High Line has become an oyster bed.) Many buildings stand tall. Wall Street, Soho, Chelsea, Madison Square-each is uniquely and dramatically changed. At low tide, there’s “a green bathtub ring on every building” in the still inhabited “intertidal” zone. With sea levels fifty-eight feet higher than today, after two “pulses” of catastrophic, rapidly rising waters, the island’s bottom half is submerged. The (true) physical premise is that upper Manhattan is fifty feet higher than lower Manhattan. Still a capital of real estate, still a political powerhouse, still an unequal battleground between finance and housing movements, still a crucible where capitalism and climate politics are smashed, melted, and twisted together. It’s a novel scene-New York City, 123 years from now: half-drowned but not out. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, “New York is only half-drowned.” Above, the Manhattan skyline a few days after Hurricane Sandy (Reeve Joliffe / Flickr) Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 refuses the typical binary of climate change fiction, offering hope for a future somewhere in between victory or ruin.

2140 kim stanley robinson