The High-Water Mark of Capital: Financialisation, Tidal Agency, and the Capitalocene in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140

The High-Water Mark of Capital: Financialisation, Tidal Agency, and the Capitalocene in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 | Galaxy IMRJ

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The High-Water Mark of Capital: Financialisation, Tidal Agency, and the Capitalocene in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140

Ms. Parama Sharma (Research Scholar, Department of English, Assam University, Silchar, Assam, India); Prof. Saugata Kumar Nath (Professor, Department of English, Assam University, Silchar, Assam, India)
Volume / Issue
Vol. 15, Issue 4 (July 2026)
Pages
1–13
Article ID
2026V15N4005
● Open Access CC BY 4.0 DOI via Crossref

This paper offers an ecocritical analysis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, examining how the text departs from traditional post-apocalyptic nihilism to stage a critical dialectic between speculative finance and planetary mutation. Synthesising Jason W. Moore’s critique of the Capitalocene with the materialist paradigms of the “wet ontology” pioneered by Philip Steinberg and Kimberly Peters, this study explores how a mid-twenty-second-century Manhattan, severely flooded by catastrophic sea-level rise, becomes a frontier for financial commodification. Through an analysis of Robinson’s “Intertidal Property Index,” the paper illustrates how disaster capitalism seeks to transform environmental precarity into a high-yield asset class. Concurrently, the text demonstrates how the non-human material agency of the ocean tides continuously ruptures the terrestrial algorithmic logic of Wall Street. This structural collapse shifts the narrative toward a solarpunk ethos, embodied by the cooperative, climate-resilient ecosystem of the MetLife tower. By tracking the text’s trajectory from hyper-financialisation to a city-wide rent strike, this paper argues that Robinson positions the fluid geography of a drowned New York as a site of radical political potential. The high-water mark of capital is reached when the physical limits of the biosphere dissolve the abstract frameworks of capital accumulation, asserting that ecological survival demands the reclamation of a radical, democratic, and aqueous urban commons.

Capitalocene Blue Humanities Climate Fiction Wet Ontologies Tidal Agency Solarpunk.

Received
19 Jun 2026
Accepted
26 Jul 2026
Published Online
31 Jul 2026

Sharma, Parama, et al.. "The High-Water Mark of Capital: Financialisation, Tidal Agency, and the Capitalocene in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140." Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, vol. 15, no. 4, Jul 2026, pp. 1–13. DOI: 10.66376/galaxy.v15.n4.1.

© 2026 Ms. Parama Sharma (Research Scholar, Department of English, Assam University, Silchar, Assam, India); Prof. Saugata Kumar Nath (Professor, Department of English, Assam University, Silchar, Assam, India). Published by Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. You are free to share and adapt this material provided appropriate credit is given.

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