“New York 2140” is told from eight different perspectives.

Not a few experienced an uptick in both material circumstances and quality of life.” Actually many of them had been living in such shitholes before the floods that being immersed in the drink mattered little. As one of the book’s narrators explains, “Yes, people returned to the drowned parts of New York. You can commute by boat or by walking through one of the city’s “skybridges” (basically, big plastic tubes reinforced with graphene). Artists squat in half-drowned buildings and drink in speakeasy bathhouses the office towers of midtown have been turned into apartments with their own docks, dining halls, and rooftop farms. Each episode of flooding was “a complete psychodrama decade, a meltdown in history, a breakdown in society, a refugee nightmare, an eco-catastrophe, the planet gone collectively nuts.” Now, though, New York is the “SuperVenice.” Downtown, in the “intertidal” zone (it’s submerged at high tide, but otherwise walkable), the rent is-understandably-low. Sure, it was a rough hundred years for the planet: the seas rose ten feet in the two-thousand-fifties, then forty feet more around 2100, and billions of people died. New York may be underwater, but it’s better than ever. This is the vision of the city in “ New York 2140,” a science-fiction novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, out last month. The poor live downtown, in Chelsea, which is half-submerged.

The super-rich live uptown, in a forest of skyscrapers near the Cloisters. Workers in an inflatable raft are repairing the Flatiron dock a superintendent, in diving gear, is checking his buildings for leaks.

Out on the canal, finance guys in speedboats weave between the bigger ships. Morning commuters are boarding a crosstown vaporetto. At Twenty-sixth and Park, the waves shine in the sunlight, and the breeze is briny with seaweed.

Kim stanley robinson new yorker