Kim Stanley Robinson imagines New York City in 2140, fifty feet of sea level rise having transformed every street into a canal and every skyscraper into a potential island. Rather than depicting collapse, Robinson shows adaptation: lower Manhattan has become a Super Venice, with residents navigating by boat, buildings on stilts, and a new culture emerging from the drowned remains of the old. The novel follows residents of the Met Life Tower, a once-grand building now housing a diverse community of survivors and strivers. Their interconnected stories explore how people build lives in a transformed world: two orphan water rats who know the submerged city's secrets, a hedge fund manager calculating risk in unstable markets, a building superintendent holding the community together, and others whose fates intertwine. Robinson uses the climate crisis as occasion to imagine how capitalism might evolve or be transformed under pressure, exploring alternative economic arrangements that could emerge from catastrophe. The book combines hard science fiction's attention to how things work with character-driven narrative and political imagination. Robinson refuses both apocalyptic despair and techno-optimistic denial, showing a future that is neither dystopia nor utopia but a muddled continuation of human striving under changed conditions. The novel asks what we might build from the ruins of our current order.