Both of those would be incredibly useful materials to have if you were coping with a drowned New York. Right now, these are both more ideas than realities, but they're not far off. And I also read a lot about Venice, because Venice is the obvious model for a drowned city - how they deal with their high tides, their 'acqua alta,' and how do they cope with the corrosive power of saltwater, and how do they do sewage and electrical lights.Īnd I have to admit … I had to do a little bit of science fictional hand waving, in that they have some techs in this future world - 120 years on, materials science has given them what they call a kind of diamond spray, and also graphenated composites. They go into the infrastructural details. Robinson: There was some really fun reading to be done there. : How did you research the science of what would happen to those buildings in flooded conditions? That and a lot of reading was the bulk of my research. And then I visited New York City a couple of times during the writing of the book, and I wandered the city from the Cloisters out to Coney Island, and various places where people don't go as tourists, to try to see what the new sea level situation would be like. I marked the 50-foot contour interval all around the map and transferred that new coastline to a tourist map. Robinson: First, I got a USGS topo map of the area that included the contour intervals for elevation as well as the streets and bridges and everything.

: How did you flesh out what the future drowned New York would look like?

We are in an economic-slash-political system that is actually causing the problem, and so it's very hard to make it into a solution for the problem. It was a great suggestion, and I just ran with it. The book is making the case that climate change is basically a financial disaster, or has been caused by bad economics rather than bad technology or pure number of people. When he gave me that idea, I thought that's perfect, because global finance has a center in New York, and then all the jokes about being underwater financially could be fitted physically to the situation.

Ny 2140