A Comedy of Coping

Franklin Garr has made a good living from one number. It's called the Intertidal Property Pricing Index, and he uses it to judge how healthy the flooded neighbourhoods are, from house prices, sea-level projections and building technology, so he can bet against a bubble. Franklin is a hedge-fund man in a city under fifty feet of new sea. The sea is, for him, a market.

That's the best joke in New York 2140, and it's an accurate one. Robinson's 2017 novel is set in a Manhattan where two pulses of sea-level rise have turned everything south of 46th Street into "SuperVenice". People live on the upper floors, travel by boat and skybridge, and wait for the water to be somebody else's problem. It's a book about climate change in which the real antagonist is the mortgage.

The art: a novel the size of a flood

The pleasures are generous and a little Dickensian. Most of the cast orbit the old MetLife Tower on Madison Square, the building Robinson picked because it was modelled on the campanile in Venice. There's Vlade, the engineer who patches the submerged floors. There are Stefan and Roberto, orphans who dive the canals for salvage and go after the gold from an eighteenth-century British shipwreck. There's Amelia Black, an internet star who flies polar bears south in an airship called Assisted Migration. There's a police inspector, Gen Octaviasdottir, and Charlotte Armstrong, a refugee-resettlement worker who will go into politics. And there are Mutt and Jeff, two coders who disappear after releasing code meant to tidy up the whole financial system.

It is easy to be charmed. NPR's reviewer noticed the commuters weighing a skybridge against a vaporetto, and the clams filtering the water of the new intertidal zone. The city is more interesting than frightening. Gary K. Wolfe, in Locus, quotes the book's anonymous narrator saying it: "Possibly New York had never yet been this interesting, which is saying a lot, even discounting all the bullshit." That narrator, the Citizen, is also the book's weak spot. His chapters hand out lectures on markets, warming and human nature, and the lectures are a good deal more persuasive than the people who deliver the plot. NPR's critic found the interludes "a little much" in a novel whose plot "doesn't quite require 600 pages", and I agree. Some characters are vehicles for ideas, and the descriptions of women are, in places, clumsy enough to read as parody.

Still, the machinery works. The hunt for the gold, the missing coders and the offer to buy the whole tower converge slowly and then a storm of historic size arrives to finish the argument. Robinson himself called it a "comedy of coping", and the book keeps its promise.

It stops short of an eight because of the length, and because the final third trades some of the novel's intelligence for its optimism.

The prophecy: the water is far off, the money is here

Start with the sea, because the book does. Robinson's flood is fifty feet. Robinson has said he set the story in 2140 so that the city would stay recognisable, and that the rise was possible but "extreme". He's right, and the real numbers show how extreme. New York's sea level has risen about a foot since 1900, according to The City's account of the city's climate panel, and the panel expects at least another foot, possibly almost two, by the 2050s. The Met Office describes a low-likelihood, high-impact storyline, driven by Antarctic ice loss, of up to about 15 metres of global rise by 2300. That's close to Robinson's fifty feet. He has taken the worst tail of the physics and moved it a century and a half forward. That's licence, and it's honest licence. A city that has to learn to live with a foot of sea is a different story from a city that has to live with fifty.

The finance is where he's closest. Franklin's index is a joke that stopped being one. Researchers have found that homes exposed to sea-level rise sell for about 7% less than comparable homes that aren't, and that buyers who are sophisticated, or live in communities worried about warming, drive the gap. Another study, in Nature Climate Change, put the overvaluation of US flood-exposed homes at between $121 billion and $237 billion. The novel's speculators bet that the market has priced the water wrongly. In 2026 that bet is simply a trade.

Then there's the revolution. Amelia Black urges her millions of viewers to stop paying rents, mortgages, student loans and other private debts, and the global financial system seizes up. Charlotte, elected to Congress, persuades the chair of the Federal Reserve, who happens to be her ex-husband, to nationalise the banks that are about to fall over. A tax on capital, in the spirit of Thomas Piketty, funds a new settlement. It's the novel's least likely idea, and its most enjoyable.

The first half has a small precedent. In 2015 fifteen former students of Corinthian Colleges declared a debt strike on their federal loans. Seven years later, the Biden administration cancelled $5.8 billion of loans for about 560,000 Corinthian borrowers. The two events weren't directly linked, and a strike of fifteen is not a strike of millions. The second half has a larger precedent. Britain nationalised Northern Rock in February 2008, and ended up owning most of RBS, which it didn't finish selling until May 2025, after which the Treasury said the whole rescue had returned £35 billion, about £10.5 billion less than it put in. That's the catch. When states really do take over the banks, they run them as a repair job and put them back. Robinson's nationalisation is a beginning. History's has so far been an apology with an exit date.

The reading

New York 2140 is a baggy, warm, argumentative book, and the argument is better than the plot. As prophecy it gets the money more right than the water. Flooded property already has a price, people already argue about who should owe what, and banks have already been rescued. What hasn't arrived is the part where the rest of us decide to stop paying, and the state decides to stay.

One of Robinson's epigraphs, NPR notes, is H.G. Wells: "What a beautiful ruin it will make!" The novel's wager is that ruins get repriced, refinanced and, eventually, lived in. Drown the city, and someone still sends the mortgage statement. The book asks whether we can make that someone answer to us.