Book about a floating city with advanced technology

Question

I'm looking for a book of which I do not remember the author or title.

The details is that it features multiple characters perspectives, all centered around an advanced city floating in the ocean.

One of the characters is a young man who experiences things in virtual reality and has people watch from his perspective for entertainment.

Another character is a stock trader who somehow accelerates his mind in order to escape death that is coming for him.

A common theme in the book is something related to a technology that lets you split your mind into multiple copies or accelerate your thinking, at the risk of burning you out or something like this.

It might be a collection of dystopian short stories, but I can't be sure because I don't think I finished it.

Answer 1

The details of a floating city, multiple characters' perspectives, and one of the characters experiencing virtual reality suggest to me that this could be Lucifer's Dragon by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, published in 1998. The most detailed summary that I could find was on Amazon:

Passion di Orchi is no more than the obscenely rich daughter of a West Coast mafia boss - until she decides to rebuild Venice. In the middle of the Pacific. A century later, with New Venice ossified into a puritanical elegance, the daughter of Count Ryuchi slips away from her father's palazzo, out to the levels to play Lucifer's Dragon. A multi-level, self-perpetuating, true 3-D trawl through the Apocalypse, Lucifer's Dragon is coded so the game never repeats its own failures. But an altercation in a bar puts Karo on a collision course with NVPD officer Angeli, drafted in by media giant CySat to investigate a murder she knows way too much about. And then there's Razz, the silver exotic. Too tired and jaded to keep living, she takes on the job of guarding CySat's ultimate boss, the ten-year-old Aurelio. With all the high tech security in place, it should be a walk in the park. But the last thing Razz sees is CySat's child-ruler making too close an acquaintance with an Uzi, and then she wakes up in Zurich. Dead…

Answer 2

The Atopia Chronicles (2012) by Matthew Mather.

What could be worse than letting billions die? In the near future, to escape the crush and clutter of a packed and polluted Earth, the world's elite flock to Atopia, a massive corporate-owned artificial island in the Pacific Ocean. It is there that Dr. Patricia Killiam rushes to perfect the ultimate in virtual a program to save the ravaged Earth from mankind's insatiable appetite for natural resources.Now in development as a new TV series, The Atopia Chronicles (Book 1 of the Atopia series) is the tale of mankind's dark slide across the apocalypse as humans and machines merge in a world teetering on the brink of ecological ruin.