The novelist Jonathan Franzen is skilled at describing the rich and colourful dreams we have about our futures, whilst still managing to portray the bleak reality of life for society at large (I loved The Corrections).
Shanghai seems like a great place for this style to really shine, as a recent audio story in The New Yorker shows:
It was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world history had asked, ‘Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?’ and this place had raised its hands and said ‘Yeah!’”
via Raul Gutierrez