Dystopian Hope on the Water

Speaking of “futures” instead of “the future” foregrounds the fact that no singular future is guaranteed. In recent storytelling, two futures are particularly common: the techno-optimist, which envisions the triumph of capitalist innovation, and the climate dystopian, which envisions the inability of capitalism to contain its ecologically destructive powers. Both futures extrapolate features of the current “business-as-usual” order to one or another logical conclusion. This paper explores an alternative narrative found in several recent novels. These novels, including Eiren Caffall’s All the Water in the World (2025), Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City (2025), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), are set in cities that are now at least partially submerged by rising seas. While the waters wash away much of what the cities have been, they also make new forms of life possible. This paper explores the way these novels thematize water – and, with it, the uncontrollable power of a changing climate – as both destructive and potentially liberative.