I just realized what it is that New Orleans resembles–it’s the world the JG Ballard (british new wave SF author) was writing about in the seventies, with Drowned WOrld and Concrete Island. Ballard’s themes were innundation and social collapse; the thin veneer of civility that amsks savagery.
Ballard’s boyhood memoirs of life in a japanese ww2 prison camp were filmed by Spielberg as Empire of the Sun.
Ive never read those before…looks like I’ll have to pop on down to Ye Old Amazon.com…
In the meantime, I’m surprised no one has brought this one up yet…
It’s because most people try to forget Kevin Costner movies…
Yes, I was embarrassed to admit having seen that one. However, I do still like Field of Dredge and Prances with Wooffs, plus the soundtrack to Prefect Skimmer. Costner’s greatest role was probably in The Big Chill. 
djm
sigh… Simon brings a little intellectual class to this place and you guys bring us back down to the surface of our culture…
Oh well.. 
I think another Bay Area author wrote a post-Nuke Holocaust book called “Earth Abides”. In this case not water, but where the vegetation goes crazy from the radiation and envelops everything…
Guess we’re big on these tales in Disasterfornia…
Drowned World as I recall was about a post-apocalyptic, sub-tropical London inundated by a sudden rise in sea levels caused by the collapse of the antarctic Ice Sheet and global warming.
High Rise (not Concrete Island now that I think about it) was about society viewed in microcosm as a single high rise apartment building. The tower gets somehow sealed off from the outside world, and rapidly descends into anarchy while the residents await a rescue which never comes.
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Ballard’s experimental novel Crash was filmed by David Cronenberg a fewyears ago.
How about Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle?
It’s about a comet hitting the earth, which causes torrential rain, which causes massive flooding and the end of civilization.
I read that when I was in high school. I remember liking it a lot, as well as being a bit scared by the scenario envisioned in it. It might be interesting to reread it now to see how my perception of it might have changed over the years.
Didn’t Madonna have a tour called Drowned World?