New York 2140

I enjoyed the book because of the detailed descriptions of New York City and the plausible future technologies involved in maintaining living spaces in the drowned zones, the "Intertidal" areas of coastal cities submerged beneath 60 ft of sea level rise.

The stories of the individuals living in The Met, a commune grown up in a skyscraper whose basement and lower floors are now permanently submerged, was perfectly fine. There were a lot of characters to keep track of, but compared to the Mars trilogy, I'd say Robinson restrained himself there.

He did NOT restrain himself when it comes to political views lol. He even has a chapter where it's just him talking to the reader like "If you want to skip my lecturing, go ahead and read the fun stories. Also fuck you if you want a happy ending." But then he goes and gives us a pretty happy ending.

The politics? Well, they seem like a blast from the 1990s or maybe early 2000s at this point. It's just not plausible that the USA still has a functioning government in 2140 and, OMG, the NOAA gets several mentions. So that kinda took me out of the story.

Still, fun was had.

After what seems like it took forever I finally finished listening to the audio.
This must have been the best audio-book I listened to ... ever. And that is saying a lot. I think there are about 8 or 10 speakers - one for each main character. But they all have to speak the other characters, too, when they appear in their chapters... and they are all done so well.

Anyway, this a classic Kim Stanley Robinso. If you've read the Mars trilogy you know what you're in for. If not: it is a lengthy exploratory story with tons of meticulously researched background and well-put together consequences and thought experiments.

Interestingly, this book has one big difference. Apparently, readers gave some feedback to the author how he kept writing these huge info-dumps and how boring those were. So he took the info-dumps and put them into separate chapters, once even breaking the forth-wall and telling the readers that they can just skip the info dump chapters if they so choose, but that they'd be stupid to do so because at some point they became too much but here they felt more fitting and less story-interrupting. So seems like a good choice :)

The story meanders through the lives of a group of future New Yorkers who live in the Met building which now is surrounded by water like all of the still-standing buildings in lower Manhattan because the rise of sea-levels all over the world. But this book doesn't only explore climate change and ecological damage we do to our world but also the backgrounds and economics that contribute to all this and it leads to a cleverly engineered "solution" in which the characters get to play a central part.

It is a complex book, that was hard to process and rather low-key story arcs that took me a long long time to finish. But it is absolutely worth reading and I highly recommend the audio.