Awake in the Floating City
by Susanna Kwan
Reviewed by Galen Strickland
Posted April 28, 2025
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Susanna Kwan's debut novel will be published May 13, but I received a digital review copy from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. Set in San Francisco in 2050, give or take a few years, following massive climate change disasters. Some places have experienced drought, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, all of which have wreaked havoc on agriculture and livestock production. For San Francisco it has been almost perpetual rains. Written in third-person, but mostly from the perspective of Bo, a 40-something Chinese-American woman who should have left the city long ago, but it is the only place she has ever lived, the place where she lost her mother to the floods a few years prior to the main action. Even though her body was never found, Bo knows her mother is gone, but something keeps her in the floating city. The Bay waters have risen considerably, the hills of the peninsula now islands.
Not much is left of the once thriving city. Many commercial and residential buildings have collapsed, the few left have their lower floors flooded, with any that are close enough together connected with sky bridges. Rooftops are home to gardens and markets. Bo is (or was) an artist, but has not felt the call of her art since her mother drowned. Instead, she has been the caregiver for several elderly survivors. There are a few new types of technology mentioned, including medical treatments, but those and the climate problems are not the focus of the story. It is more personal than that, more immediately local to Bo's building and the people she meets. She was an only child, and so was her cousin Jensen, and they spent a lot of time together as kids. He has relocated to Canada, somewhere east of Vancouver, and had been trying to get Bo to move too. In some ways Bo wants to, but she takes advantage of another woman asking her to be her caregiver, leaving Jensen frustrated and angry, on a boat at the docks ready to take her north.
If things Mia tells her about her life are true, when and where she was born, Bo figures that she is almost 130 years old. Having recently been co-caregiver for my 100 year old mother, the mobility of Mia surprised me, but I assume that was thanks to different medical treatments she had been able to take advantage of. Bo's job isn't even a daily thing, just two days a week in the beginning, mostly cooking, cleaning, and making sure Mia takes her meds. On some of those days she and Mia walk through the building, onto shared balconies, and up to the roof. Whatever insurance she has gets Mia a motorized wheelchair, but she rejects the need for that for several months. Bo lives a few floors below Mia, able to get to her quickly if called beyond her scheduled days. The stories Mia tells her create a spark in Bo to research San Francisco's history, mostly about Chinatown, and the city in general both before and after the great 1906 earthquake. Mia says her father had just come to San Francisco at the time, the right time to be near a Chinese woman killed in the quake, from whom he gained citizenship papers, claiming her to be his mother.
Bo visits one of the few museums still open, and is allowed to borrow books, maps, and photographs. Along with a few things Mia still had pertaining to her family history, Bo conceives of a multi-media tribute to the city, and a memorial to Mia's life. She works diligently on that for several weeks, but due to her other duties caring for Mia, she doesn't complete everything in time. She anticipated finishing it sooner, and had contacted Jensen to come get her again, completing visa paperwork, and gaining a caregiver job in Canada, and making sure another caregiver would be available for Mia. But again, at the last minute, just as Jensen is about to board the boat at Vancouver, she changes her mind. Her life has been bonded to Mia's, she has to stay as long as Mia lives. She is able to show Mia only a portion of her art project, the parts most tied to Mia's family history, then later, using computerized drones loaned by a friend, shows off the work to as many who still remain in the floating city, projecting images of the old city onto the buildings that still remain. What is not clear is whether she continues with her art, or abandons it again to take another caregiver job.
In spite of the fact it is in third-person, we get to know a lot about Bo, her hopes, her anxieties, her regrets. Several others, including Mia, tell her she should leave while she still can, but the bonds to her home are strong, even if she has forgotten things about her mother and her childhood. It is not that she starts thinking of herself as part of Mia's family, but the few of them left have abandoned her, including her 100 year old daughter in Sweden, whom she has not seen in thirty years. Beverly does 'visit' a few times a week via holographic messaging, but seems to conveniently time those calls when she knows Mia will be asleep. Bo has to be sure she does not alienate Beverly, make her feel guilty, since everyone else in Beverly's family is with her in Sweden, sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-granchildren. Bo envies that, since after Mia she has no one again, maybe not even her cousin Jensen, who may have given up on her. Sometimes a place is as important, even more important, when you have nothing else. For Bo, that place is San Francisco, even as more and more of it disappears below the waters. It is still home. I think it likely this will be marketed more as literary fiction, with an emphasis on home and family, and Chinese immigration, rather that the SF trappings. In any case, it should appeal to both mainstream and SF readers, and deserves the recognition beyond any borders of genre. Ms Kwan has only a few other short stories to her credit so far, but hopefully many more will follow. Highly recommended.
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