“New York 2140” is indisputably a science fiction novel, but one rooted deeply in history and popular culture. Young orphans Stefan and Roberto are fascinated by the wreck of the HMS Hussar, buried with its treasure chest somewhere beneath the flooded streets, and the boys risk their lives with homemade diving equipment in an effort to retrieve it. Watched by millions of viewers around the globe, “cloud personality” Amanda Black transports endangered species to more suitable climes aboard her dirigible, the Assisted Migration, which she moors at the Met. Day trader Franklin Garr sees investment opportunities in the precarious properties closest to the water and uses his hedge fund idea to impress the beautiful woman he wants to date. The Met is home to the rich, the eccentric and the disenfranchised. On the lookout for mechanical failures and sabotage attempts, Vlade keeps the building running, but he can’t explain the two-hour gap in the security tape at the time of the programmers’ disappearance. They take their concerns to Vlade, the skyscraper’s super. Their mysterious absence comes to the attention of police inspector Gen Octaviasdottir, via immigration lawyer Charlotte Armstrong, a fellow Met resident. Two homeless coders, dubbed Mutt and Jeff, vanish from their squat on the building’s rooftop farm.

Told from multiple points of view and reminiscent of one of Emile Zola’s “apartment” novels in the way it portrays characters from various social strata in one setting, “New York 2140” focuses on the inhabitants of a single, partially sunken apartment building, the old Met Life tower on Madison Square. But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet’s wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world’s wealth.

“This remarkable rise had been bad for people - most of them. The consequences of two disasters known as the First and Second Pulse sound familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the inequitable impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. “New York 2140” posits a 50-foot rise in sea levels, which turns the streets of Lower Manhattan into a landscape of canals between the surviving skyscrapers.

New york 2140 book