This chapter explores the complex entanglements between the Anthropocene and the sea through a comparative reading of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017) and Peder Frederik Jensen’s Rans vilje (2023). It argues that both novels – despite their temporal and generic differences – foreground a mode of “ocean literacy” that blends practical knowledge, existential wisdom, and narrative experimentation in response to rising seas, storm surges, and climate destabilization. Rans vilje revisits the catastrophic 1872 storm surge in southeastern Denmark through a historical realist lens, while New York 2140 imagines a permanently inundated future New York shaped by pulses of sea-level rise. Both works challenge traditional dichotomies between adaptation and protection, realism and speculation, and human and more-than-human agency. The chapter situates these texts within the broader context of neocatastrophism, emphasizing a shift from sudden disaster to the ordinariness of environmental upheaval. Drawing on Blue Humanities and Anthropocene theory, the analysis shows how literature can train us to read, endure, and inhabit a world increasingly shaped by oceanic forces – an epistemological and imaginative practice best captured by Ottmar Ette’s notion of ÜberLebenswissen, or knowledge of life and for survival.