2023. Above Manhattan, people and androids, commissioned by billionaire Harry Gant, are erecting “New Babylon” - the tallest building on the planet, a monument to a bright human dream that is five million years old. And in the rotten sewer below, among the alligators and mutant rats, much darker games are being played. Under mysterious circumstances, corporate raider Yantarson Chyneg, who sought to seize Gant's empire, dies, and the idealistic ex-wife of the billionaire Joan Fine begins an investigation. She is helped by the computer-animated spirit of the Russian philosopher and American writer Ayn Rand, enclosed in a lamp, and a cheerful company of eco-pirates on a green submarine with pink polka dots under the leadership of the last black man on Earth, as well as a Volkswagen Beetle, which is inhabited by the personality of Abbie Hoffman, and a 181-year-old Civil War veteran... But no one can predict how much of a terrible conspiracy involving a great white shark named Maisterbrau, Walt Disney, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and a crowd of brutal killer robots has grown... "Sewer, Gas & Electric" is a novel about the history of the near future, written in the popular trilogy genre. But not the future that has come, but the one that existed in the 1990s, as Matt Ruff saw it in the closet of the Boston house where he wrote the first of these great many words. About a completely different future...