The novel occurs mostly in a fictional future New York City, permanently inundated by two major rises in seawater levels caused by climate change.

Several of the book's characters live in the MetLife Tower on 23rd Street, which the tenant association has outfitted with flood-prevention mechanisms and boat storage.

Denver has replaced New York as the center of American finance and culture, and much of the United States has been deliberately abandoned by humans in order to make room for wildlife.

[6] However, some estimates indicate sea-level rises even higher than depicted in the novel (up to 72 feet/22 metres) by the year 2300, if global warming increases to 5°C (relative to pre-industrial levels).

[9] Gerry Canavan, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, referred to the novel as a further step in Robinson's "[...] construction of a huge metatextual history of the future...distributed across overlapping but distinct and mutually irreconcilable texts".