It's KSR, so the book is going to be didactic and dialectic. New York 2140 is set in a post-global warming New York City, a super-venice where old skyscrapers painted with diamond phase composites emerge from polluted canals that run through the old streets. The story is told through many viewpoints centered around a co-op apartment in the old MetLife Tower. The characters aren't really worth talking about, except that one is literally KSR lecturing at you. Literally.

The A-plot, though it takes forever to get going, is a what-if around the ongoing Collapse of Capitalism. After a devastating hurricane leaves thousands of New Yorkers homeless and staring at vacant condos owned by the global elite, some of the characters call for a rent strike and a nationalization of the bank, followed by a slew of very Bernie Sanders-esque reforms of the financial system. It's a rather cutting indictment of the limits of Democratic Socialist Utopianism that it takes another 120 years to get more than "Mr. Fed can I please haz a crumb of COVID relief", and that when the revolution comes its a wealth tax and more people on more committees.

B plots wander around through more exciting topics that are dropped: sunken gold, relocating polar bears to the antarctic, pursuing beautiful women, and so on. But at the end of the day, this book is simple too business-as-usual, too nice, and too Californian to really work.

Red Mars is brilliant, but I wished I liked his other books more.