Read: June/July 2023
Split into chapters from the perspective of several different characters, this book tells of a future in half-submerged (post-ice caps melting) New York. The main characters all live in the same co-op building: two small orphans, an activist and politician, a police inspector, a finance bro, the facility manager, two quants/hackers, an influencer/animal rescuer, and an old professor. They do wildly different things - from digging up lost pirate gold to shipping polar bears to Antarctica to establishing a new real estate market.
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It paints an interesting picture of a chaotic and realistic NY in the future, some parts a bit Venice-like, some parts derelict and rotting. It didn’t seem entirely futuristic - besides some new hovercrafts and hints about new building materials it doesn’t seem very different to New York 2023 (or 2017 when it was written). But it’s a new perspective to imagine the time after the “pulses” where ice cap meltings and enormous floodings wreaked havoc on the world. The mix of charcters is also nice, I especially liked the scenes with the police inspector and the more exciting passages like the treasure hunt or the hurricane.
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It’s a thick book, and it could easily be cut by half. There’s a lot of “babbling” - dialogue between characters or inner monologues that just go on and don’t really lead anywhere. Lots of references to things that make you feel a bit outside the clique. And the pacing was off for me; I wished that the plot was cut down to fewer things but those described better. Like there was a whole exciting plot about hackers being abducted and kept in an underwater container, and then they’re just found, not really mentioned for half the book, and then it’s just solved who kidnapped them. And of course fiction novels don’t need to be entirely realistic, but finding this pirate gold by just sucking up some dirt in a huge vacuum cleaner was just TOO unbelievable. Some other narrative strands were just never really taken up or resolved properly: there was a tense sene about a mob starting to enter a fancy skyscraper that’s not really followed up later. I felt like I wanted to know more about where those stories went, instead of being inside the finance bros head again, thinking about if his investments into something “real” gets his crush back.