The rest of the country’s brief, mawkish love of New York stretched just far enough to allow it the status of martyr, a symbolic bumper sticker for all we’ve lost and continue to lose to the rising tides.
In The Only Great Harmless Thing, award-winning author Brooke Bolander brought us back to the Coney Island and Newark of the early 20th century, delivering a haunting alternate history of the Radium Girls and Topsy the elephant. Now, in a new “Op-Ed From the Future” story in the New York Times, the award-nominated author shows us a somber vision of Manhattan, one-and-a-half centuries in the (climate-change-ravaged) future.
Asking “Who Should Live in Flooded Old New York?” Bolander imagines a time in which it’s illegal to live in the flooded remains of NYC, with the only residents being those who are too poor to move elsewhere. In this future, Mr. Rogers’ theme song has turned into an “old folk song,” and “draconian federal regulations” punish those remaining, while millionaires running illegal tourism schemes in the city get off scot-free.
Read the full piece in the New York Times.
