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October 31, 2024

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‘The Deluge,’ an epic new climate novel, drowns us in catastrophes

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By Stephen Markley Simon & Schuster: 896 pages, $33 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Although there are dozens of characters populating Stephen Markley’s second novel, “ The Deluge ,” the real protagonist is America, and although numerous forces and foot soldiers undergird the story’s antagonist, the true villain is climate change. This is an accomplishment — in the way, for example, a city can be the best kind of character — but it also detracts from the novel’s humanity, as the people animating it are secondary to the concepts.

Over nearly 900 pages, Markley moves methodically from 2013 to the 2040s, presenting a kaleidoscopic sampling of American citizenry, an unrelenting series of increasingly tragic events and an in-depth examination of the desperate corner into which the world has painted itself. It is, if nothing else, an astonishing feat of procedural imagination, narrative construction and scientific acumen.

Markley is an immensely gifted novelist, but he set himself a nearly impossible task, which appears to be his MO. His first book, the memoir “Publish This Book,” stemmed from Markley’s frustrations trying to sell a novel. It’s a meta-memoir in the vein of Dave Eggers or Chuck Klosterman, and though it’s funny and clever at times, the conceit wears thin after almost 500 pages. His debut novel, “ Ohio ,” took on a heavy subject (the opioid crisis), a large cast and a complex structure and ended up suffering from the same issues as its successor: characters subservient to theme. The redeeming merits of “The Deluge” call to mind those elaborate trick shot videos on social media in which the primary objective is missed but something else exciting occurs; these are always captioned by the phrase “ failed successfully .”

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The plot involves — are you ready? — a scientist named Tony Pietrus whose book on undersea methane functions as the novel’s core text; an activist named Kate Morris who makes headway toward combating ecological disaster by dint of undeniable magnetism and political savvy; Ashir al-Hasan, a genius in predictive analytics who turns his intellect from sports betting toward the future of Earth’s habitability; a once-famous actor who transitions into an ultra-right wing zealot under the moniker The Pastor; an advertising executive who helps orchestrate the oil industry’s response to fossil-fuel opposition; a recovering drug addict in rural Ohio who ends up an unwitting pawn in the climate war; and the enigmatic leader of a hardcore eco-terror outfit called 6Degrees. Orbiting these characters is an enormous supporting cast of allies, enemies and sycophants, including numerous real-life figures ranging from Barack Obama to Anders Breivik , the Norwegian mass murderer.

As the weather grows increasingly hostile and resources become scarcer, the reality of climate change forces action but, predictably, capitalistic short-sightedness and political maneuvering stifle any progress. Employing numerous narrative techniques — first-, second- and third-person points of view; news articles, interview transcripts, journals, et al. — Markley traces the development of complex (but ultimately ineffective) legislation, the behind-the-scenes negotiations of multiple presidential elections and the logistical nightmares created by the destruction of the environment.

Floods wipe out entire cities, fires blaze through hundreds of thousands of acres of land, food shortages affect millions, heat waves kill and hurricanes redraw the American coastlines. And that’s just the weather. Multiple characters are savagely tortured and murdered while many more, including a child, are assassinated. The U.S. government ends a nonviolent siege of the Capitol by plowing down hundreds of protesters in a cascade of bullets. Suicides, self-sacrifices and illegal imprisonment abound.

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Climate fiction tends to take place either in an already-decimated future — dystopias like Octavia Butler ’s “Parable of the Sower” or Cormac McCarthy ’s “The Road” — or in the prickly present, the dire era of inaction featured in Richard Powers’ “ The Overstory ” or Ian McEwan’s “Solar.” “The Deluge” dares to imagine, painstakingly, how we might get from here to there, filling a giant canvas with Brueghelian detail that, while making the story compelling, also flattens some of the emotional impact. Characters disappear for as many as a hundred pages and reemerge a year later, necessitating repeated exposition dumps. As a result, the reader doesn’t feel intimately close to most of the characters.

The central figure, Kate Morris, is observed exclusively through the eyes of others, never narrating her own experience. She’s a study character, like Gatsby , whom everyone comments on but no one truly knows. Moreover, nobody in “The Deluge” changes in the conventional sense. If anything, they dig deeper into themselves. Tony Pietrus, the climate scientist, is as stubbornly steadfast and gruff by the end as he is when we first met him.

When climate change is the subject of fiction, it becomes easy to interpret as advocacy, as a political novel of ideas rather than a tale driven by characters. Markley does little to dispel this impression. When there is yet another extreme weather event in “The Deluge” and many people lose their homes, communities and lives, it’s hard not to feel a bit bludgeoned by it all. There are moments when his detailed enumeration of geographic calamities reads like David Wallace-Wells ’ “The Uninhabitable Earth,” while some of the procedural stuff comes across like a forward-projected version of Nathaniel Rich’s “Losing Earth.” Both those books are nonfiction, which Markley takes great pains to mimic. This borrowed cloak of newsiness reduces the complexity of fiction into a single-minded polemic. Each storm, each wildfire, each avoidable death becomes a rehash of the same warning: This is what will happen if we don’t act now. Repeated finger-wagging, even the most deftly and eloquently crafted, grates after almost 900 pages.

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Markley does throw some satire into America’s next few decades, mostly in the form of VR environments called “worldes” that are like the metaverse ’s wet dream, but he remains decidedly earnest about his vision of the future and his plea to our present. “One day,” Morris says in a flashback, “an awful lot of people are going to wake up, look around, and wish they’d done something when they had the chance.” Pietrus’ book is titled “One Last Chance.” Markley ultimately wants to express hope that humanity can come together to address the crises, but those moments are sparse and often yield very little, whereas his relentless saga of horrors is more dispiriting than galvanizing.

Clark is the author of “An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom” and “Skateboard.”

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by Stephen Markley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 10, 2023

An ambitious rendering of a forbidding future and the public and private challenges that will define it.

A hyper-realistic, alarming vision of the world destabilized by climate change.

This sprawling novel, about 900 pages long, covers three decades of American life, beginning in 2013, as partisan divisions widen and the effects of rising global temperatures become more pronounced, and extending to a cataclysmic near future marked by social and ecological collapse. The large cast of characters introduced here includes climate scientists, domestic terrorists, political leaders of various stripes, and a gaggle of regular citizens caught up in the apocalyptic maelstrom. Shifting points of view are set against newspaper articles and government reports as the intricacies of the plot unfold and the dramatic intersection of the central characters’ lives is gradually revealed. This is an exhaustively researched book, crammed full of commentary and speculation on contemporary trends: widening wealth gaps, political polarization, the inefficacy of reformist measures to address environmental threats, the blinkered resistance of conservative forces, the inevitability of violent assaults on scapegoats as currents of irrationality pulse through the nation. There are intriguing surprises in this chronicle of accelerating disorder and anomie, and the conclusion rewards those who persevere through the thickets of character development, though overall the novel has difficulty sustaining narrative momentum, and its extraordinary length seems, at last, rather unjustified. A more streamlined story that felt less inclined to bolster its authority with mountains of detail would likely have been more powerful. Nevertheless, the author has produced a highly memorable invention in a character named Kate Morris, a charismatic eco-activist with a ferocious clarity of purpose. Her narrative, taken on its own, is unusually vivid and distills much of what the novel seems to care about most: warning of massive disruptions to our civilization in the decades to come and exploring possibilities for maintaining our humanity as we struggle to manage them.

Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-982-12309-3

Page Count: 896

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2024

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Sally Rooney

IndieBound Bestseller

THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND

by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 20, 2021

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.

Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son  and Black Boy , this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.

Pub Date: April 20, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Library of America

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Richard Wright

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Friday, February 24, 2023

• The Deluge, by Stephen Markley: Truly, A Masterpiece

If I had infinite time, a plethora of patience, was a 98-fold better writer, and could trust myself not to descend into a pit of despair and rage, this is the novel I'd love to write.

The Deluge starts at present times and spends its considerable bulk moving 20 years into the future to examine the social, political, and cultural effects of the greatest threat humanity has even known: climate change.

Markley tells this story through the shifting perspectives of several different characters, though none is more fascinating than activist Kate Morris -- who is sort of a mix of Greta Thunberg and Megan Fox. Kate starts an organization called A Fierce Blue Fire, which I only mention that because I LOVE that name. But also, there's an enraged and un-PC scientist who is furious with everyone for not recognizing the severity of the threat, an eco-terrorist, an ad executive, a genius coder, an opioid addict living in rural Ohio, scores of politicians, rock stars, activists, and regular folks. 

The thrall of this novel is how real this invented future feels. From wacky religious politicians who somehow string a huge swath of followers along to industry interests continuing to maintain outsized influence on legislation to so many people just putting their heads in the sand and deciding climate change isn't even real, Markley is really adept at framing the problem. The problem itself is manmade, but the barriers to fixing the problem are self-inflicted as well.

And then there are the storms. Wild fires, hurricanes, earthquakes become more prevalent and destructive as the climate crisis worsens. Again, all this feels so real, I felt myself needing to google "Los Angeles fire of 2031" or "Hurricane Kate destruction," etc.

It's only February but I can confidently say this will be on my best of 2023 list. I loved this book. 

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Stephen Markley Is Smiling Through the Apocalypse

The author of The Deluge , a 900-page novel about climate collapse, is a surprisingly cheerful guy. Here, he explains how he clings to hope in the face of despair.

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links. Here’s how we test products and why you should trust us.

For someone who’s spent ten years thinking about the end of the world, Stephen Markley is a surprisingly cheerful guy. He’s funny, upbeat, and miraculously willing to discuss things other than the looming apocalypse that should consume our every waking moment.

“We can just talk about books, if you like,” he says, laughing. Though he does admit to bafflement at the collective apathy about our future. “How can this not be the front-page story every single day of the week?”

By “this,” he means our environmental crisis. Global warming, the climate collapse, call it whatever you want—in a sane world, it would be the only thing anyone is talking about, because it constitutes the greatest threat to human society in our entire checkered history. But this is not a sane or rational world.

We can still talk books, though, because Markley has written one. A big one. The Deluge, out now , is his second novel, following 2018’s acclaimed Ohio . Both books share certain traits: a broad cast of characters, an of-the-moment response to crisis, and well-researched insight into the details of the problem. But where Ohio focused on a single night in a single blue-collar town, The Deluge takes the entire planet as its stage. It’s a behemoth, 900-page map to the madness of humanity’s near-future. The book traces our shared fate through four decades of accelerating chaos as activism fails, politics betray us, and both the world and society heat up. No bookseller would place this in the horror section of the store, but it is profoundly frightening nonetheless.

Maybe that’s why Stephen King went out as an early batter for The Deluge . “Prophetic, terrifying, uplifting” he tweeted , back in August 2022. Now, upon the book’s publication, I was keen to speak to Markley about each element of that praise. In particular, I was interested in King’s final word: uplifting. Because in the face of such existential threat, how do we cling to hope? And how does Stephen Markley remain so damn cheerful?

ESQUIRE: We’re speaking a week before The Deluge hits shelves. How are you feeling, considering the amount of work you’ve put into this book?

Stephen Markley: Well, the nerves are starting to butterfly around. It’s been over a decade working on this book, so the thought that it’s going to be read by actual people is alarming. I know I should try to enjoy it, but that’s still pretty notional.

I read The Deluge in that strange no-man’s land between Christmas and New Year’s when reality already feels malleable. Considering how the book incorporates real events, and how speculative elements seem to be coming true, it made for an especially disconcerting read.

Well imagine writing it! I turned in the first draft to my editor in February 2020. Suddenly it’s lockdown and global pandemic and for a year, the news was full of things that happened in my book. It was eerie. I had some dark, dark nights. It was difficult to write this book and look at what was happening and not have some despair. Plus, I felt so fucking stupid and trivial. “Oh, so that’s what you’ve been working on, writing your little book? Great.” I had to cling to the idea that art matters. That it provides a way for people to orientate themselves emotionally to what is happening.

You incorporate events as recent as Biden’s election. Was there a challenge in accommodating the pace of events over the years you spent writing?

I’ve been working on this book for years, as things in it have become increasingly true. The two threads that I had landed on as key to our social and environmental future started to happen in real life faster than I could write the book. I’ve had to write around those elements, which has been occasionally terrifying.

The biggest challenge of the book was that I wanted it to be intended for the exact moment of its publication. When it comes out, it should be able to articulate the urgency of the situation we’re in right now. The hardest part of that is getting what I call “the zipper” to meet—making sure that events in the near future reflect what has happened in the immediately recognizable past. I had all the technical problems of writing a near-thousand-page epic, with the problems of trying to reflect our actual moment.

The only thing you don’t have in there is the war in Ukraine.

I think Putin launched literally the day after I submitted the final pass. Actually, in the next edition, a few sentences will be changed to reflect that reality. Also, the next edition will include the Inflation Reduction Act that just passed here in the US.

You take an extremely detailed approach to mapping the trajectory of the crisis, considering the finer points of science, geopolitics, technology, finance. How did you manage to speculate so authentically about how each of those strands would play out in your imagined future?

Well, I certainly went a little crazy for a while. But to an extent it’s what I’ve been doing for a while in my writing, so it felt utterly normal to me. I made sure that I had a grasp of every subject I wanted to write about, but also to understand how those things affected my characters. I thought about the books they would read, the politics they would look at. I tried to take every aspect of the book seriously, not just plug in what the zeitgeist currently stipulated about a given topic like AI or VR.

Because of that sheer size and intricacy, do you have concerns that the only people who will read The Deluge are those already invested in the subject? That it won’t appeal to the people who perhaps need to read it the most?

Well in terms of size, my feeling is that because it asks so much of the reader intellectually, it also has to move like a fucking freight train. It has to grab the reader, not allow them to breathe, force them to invest in these human beings. That’s how it can serve as a tour guide to the complexity of our situation. Books aren’t movies, though. I just watched Damien Chazelle’s Babylon and I had to go to the bathroom about four times. Books are different; you can put them down or you can be swept away on a four-hour reading binge. For me, if a book is moving like lightning, and moving me … I don’t care how long it is. I remember reading The Stand as a kid and being so taken that I couldn’t sleep for days. Forget about middle school, I just wanted to be there in that world.

If a book is moving like lightning, and moving me… I don’t care how long it is.

I’m glad you mention The Stand , because Stephen King has been a major early advocate of your work.

You know it’s funny, because when he tweeted about my first novel Ohio, I asked my editor to pass on a letter expressing that Stephen was one of the writers who made me want to become a writer. But it didn’t occur to me at the time that I was working on something that probably germinated way back when I was fourteen and reading The Stand . That DNA is definitely present.

Yes, it’s clear that The Deluge shares many of the hallmarks of classic apocalyptic fiction. But where that genre exerts a kind of glee in creating a blank canvas after the event, you take the harder path of documenting the incremental slide into a nightmare future, and also suggesting that there are ways to avert it.

Thanks for bringing that up, because that instinct to just clear the table is so prevalent in fiction, and I see it as fundamentally anti-human and defeatist. And look, I’ll enjoy schlocky end-of-the-world stories as much as the next guy, but I knew this book could not be about how awesome it will be when our society collapses. It will certainly not be awesome. None of us are going back to holistic medicine and friendly subsistence farming. As I say in the book, it would be grueling and terrifying and unfamiliar as hell, and that’s something that never gets communicated in the clear-the-chessboard scenario. The challenge of the book was not to accept doom, but to say, “Okay, what do we do?” To not see our society crumble, what do we do? That was the most spiritually sustainable element for me, because there are so many people working on this, with incredible ideas and enormous heart and compassion. My characters don’t represent real people, but that’s what many of them point to.

Speaking of ideas, you artfully bounce empathy between different approaches to the problem. In one chapter we follow Kate, a political activist. In the next we meet a militant cell who favor more violent disruption. Each has contempt for the other’s ideas, and the reader’s own opinion shifts depending on our point-of-view.

That was exactly my intention. You get to Shane’s chapters [the leader of the cell] and you have to think like she’s thinking. You have to look at the activists and think, “These people are weak, they don’t know what’s happening, they are useless.” Then you have to turn around with Kate and think, “These militants are ruining our chance to legislate for a better world.” For me, this book was a process of trying to understand what I think myself. As an author, you have to take yourself all the way into the perspective of each character, and not release yourself until you are ready to move onto the next.

Is it actually a meta-exercise to expose how the weak-minded can be easily led by a compelling narrative?

[laughs]. No, but I’ll say it is in future interviews!

The challenge of the book was not to accept doom, but to say, “Okay, what do we do?”

It’s a profoundly political book, but it also eschews easy answers. You force the reader to confront some troubling compromises, and even question whether we have to sacrifice enshrined rights and beliefs to counter such existential threat.

The book challenges the reader, like it challenged me, to really consider, “What are our priorities?” It also asks, “What has social media done to our ability to focus on the single most important issue in human history?” I sometimes read the news and think, “What the fuck are you people talking about?” I think that feeling is pretty common today. How can we not be paying attention to this?

A lot of that turns up in the character of Ash [a government data analyst]. He thinks that, y’know, we can all play the game of finger-pointing and moralizing, we can write wonderful poetry about the tragedy, but at the end of the day, this is an engineering problem, a waste-disposal problem. How can we tackle that? Also, I think the book lays out the case that, although the scale of this problem is so terrifying, a path to a better and more equitable world lies directly through fixing it.

With all that in mind, how is it possible that we can remain so sanguine about this looming threat?

That’s what’s so difficult about the subject; that it’s so complex. It’s a straightforward problem: we are polluting the atmosphere. But the results of that and its implications for how we run our society are so profound. It takes so much mental energy to even approach the topic. That said, if you are not scared about the scale of what we are facing, you are in denial. What we are looking at is so totally fucking terrifying. I don’t say that flippantly. I’m not saying everyone run outside screaming. But if you spend time understanding what this crisis is going to result in, in terms of our human systems, we should be scared.

And you do offer an answer to that question. How did you come up with your grand theory of decarbonization, and how much is on the table for real?

It’s all real. I talked to a lot of scientists and engineers and thinkers who offer the most convincing argument that this is all doable. Even more, if we’d started in 1988, there would have been no real issue. Really, the problem has been the denial and delay of industry.

Feeling shame about inaction isn’t the useful tool that self-flagellating liberals, like you and me, believe it to be. The thing about the climate crisis we have to remember is that it isn’t something being done by us; it’s something being done to us. There are a hundred companies that have produced around 70% of emissions since the 1980s. It’s these industries that have captured the political processes and are stalling action. We have the technology and the policies to begin rapidly decarbonizing the global economy. It’s all there and it’s a matter of pushing our political leaders to the point where they have no option but to act. At the same time, and I hope the book gets this across, we are in a precious handful of years when we still have time to do something.

If you are not scared about the scale of what we are facing, you are in denial.

So, do you have hope?

For me, the difference between hope and despair went by the wayside around page 600. I just believe in doing the work to change the situation. I don’t mean some bullshit stance on “how to green your Netflix binge.” But how do we add up? How do you and I and other people accrue and take collective action to change a little cog here and cog there, until that mechanism adds up? Because the IRA bill passed, suddenly every school and college campus in every state, city, and small town has the ability to electrify their energy systems and begin to crush the demand for fossil fuels. Obviously it’s not going to feel like much to electrify the bus fleet in your local high school. But if a thousand schools do it, suddenly that adds up.

The opportunities we have are what we should pay attention to. Often this situation is talked about in terms of what we have to lose. But if we think about how bountiful and compassionate and equitable our society could be… that’s what I like to focus on.

Is your book one such cog?

Well, if I wrote this book and it can convince five, ten, some small number of people to come together, to take some small step forwards, some small collective action, then it will all have been worth it.

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Book Review: The Deluge by Stephen Markley

About the Author of This Post

Clicking on book covers or links on this site will take you to a page that lets you choose where to buy the book. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I also participate in several other affiliate programs. I donate 10% of all income from this site and my writing to climate justice groups.

What will the climate crisis and the world’s response to it look like over the course of the next decade or two?

The Deluge by Stephen Markley offers one of the most thorough and compelling answers to this question that I’ve read to date. This novel explores almost every facet of the climate crisis in amazing and terrifying detail. Even after reading dozens of other climate fiction classics like Ministry for the Future , Termination Shock , and Parable of the Sower , I found myself blown away by both the sheer scope of this novel and the many skillful ways Markley drew me in and kept me reading throughout the entire 896-page journey.

This novel covers so much ground that it could easily be the subject of an entire semester-long course on climate fiction. Since this isn’t a climate fiction course, I’ll narrow the focus of this review to three themes: climate catastrophes, climate solutions, and narrative structure.

Climate Catastrophes in The Deluge

The Deluge depicts floods, droughts, wildfires, and other climate catastrophes in such vivid multisensory detail that it feels like experiencing it firsthand. These catastrophes build in frequency and severity over the course of the novel, creating a broadening and deepening sense of dread about both the fictional narrative and the likelihood of similar horrors unfolding in real life.

It’s one thing to read an article about how climate change is making certain disasters more frequent or severe. It’s another thing entirely to experience these disasters through the lens of a character’s point of view. At various points throughout the novel, characters find themselves wading through putrid floodwaters, traveling through massive dust storms as thick as fog, choking on wildfire smoke as flame engulfs an entire city. These scenes convey some of the most extreme and dramatic consequences of the climate crisis through vivid imagery and visceral action sequences that left me on the edge of my seat.

What makes these moments of climate catastrophe even more powerful is the deeply personal context of the characters experiencing them. It’s not just riveting because some big climate catastrophe is happening. It’s riveting because well-developed characters find themselves in high-stakes climate disaster situations with their lives, futures, and loved ones on the line.

I also love the fact that these climate catastrophe scenes aren’t just there for the sake of rattling the characters or demonstrating the extreme weather consequences of the climate crisis. They’re meaningful turning points in the plot and character development arcs of the story. All of the institutional machinations and political organizing that unfold over the course of the novel directly shape, and are directly shaped by, these climate catastrophes. The author takes these many distinct stories of individual and institutional responses to the climate crisis and weaves them together seamlessly over the course of the novel into a single overarching narrative about the world’s response to the climate crisis.

Climate Solutions in The Deluge

This brings us to one of the greatest strengths of The Deluge: its exploration of how and why diverse characters and institutions respond to the climate crisis in radically different ways.

Characters in The Deluge respond to the climate crisis with an incredibly broad and realistic range of approaches: cynical profiteering and politicking; green investment fund management; data and policy analysis; climate communication; computer hacking and programming; personal survival strategies; community organizing; political demonstrations; civil disobedience; popular uprisings; and even eco-terrorism.

Each of the main characters in their own way offers a glimpse into the motivations and inner experiences of the people involved in one or more of these approaches.

What’s it like to be a scientist trying to warn the world about the climate crisis? What does it look like when a climate activist organizes mass demonstration campaigns across the country? What’s life like for people living in poverty and trying to survive the economic and political instability without any political analysis? What’s it like profiteering off of the climate crisis while telling yourself that it doesn’t matter or that your lucrative sustainable investment fund is part of the solution? What’s it like when your approach to the climate crisis changes dramatically over time in response to events in your life and the world at large?

Some climate fiction novels struggle to develop a deeply convincing, compelling, complex depiction of even one or two different types of responses to the climate crisis. For example, they may feature a simplistic narrative involving a plucky protagonist or band of climate heroes struggling to survive climate catastrophes or defeat one-dimensional climate villains. The Deluge, on the other hand, features an expansive cast of well-developed and morally-complex characters with many different and often conflicting motivations and worldviews.

Some of the ways that their lives intersect and interact are predictable, but there are also plenty of unexpected twists and turns along the way. Some characters have impressive redemption arcs; some meet an untimely end as a consequence of their own choices and broader social forces; some just change over time in an organic way with unclear or neutral impacts on their relationship with the climate crisis. And regardless of how much love or hate I might feel for a particular character, I always appreciated the glimpse into their internal motivations and felt eager to discover what happened next.

The author also devotes a significant amount of time to exploring the solutions themselves in both concrete and abstract ways. I would have liked to see more glimpses of a few of the constructive solutions, particularly the Fierce Blue Fire community hubs that combine elements of job creation, mutual aid, urban agriculture, addiction recovery, and social work resources for the low-income participants involved in the program. But given the fact that the novel is already 896 pages long, I can see why the details of some solutions didn’t make the cut.

Even so, I did feel that each solution was presented in enough detail to make it clear what was happening, what the key details were, and why the characters involved found this particular solution more compelling than others.

The characters supporting the main climate advocacy group, Fierce Blue Fire, feel an urgency that inspires them to pursue new community organizing projects and mass demonstrations that apply pressure to systems of power. The characters involved in 6Degrees, the underground eco-sabotage group, don’t believe that it’s possible to persuade politicians and businesses to stop fossil fuel pollution in any reasonable timeframe, so they attack the infrastructure responsible for extracting, transporting, and combusting fossil fuels. Politicians support a variety of promising climate solutions, greenwashing schemes, and openly authoritarian and fascist policies depending on the ebb and flow of political expediency and the whims of their base and donors. Wealthy fund managers see the unfolding crisis as a lucrative opportunity for profit, exploring a variety of investment responses ranging from maintaining questionable sustainability portfolios to openly profiting off of climate chaos without any moral compunction about what they’re doing.

Since the characters disagree wildly about the morality and benefits of these solutions, the reader is largely left to draw their own conclusions about what solutions might be more desirable to support, both in this story and in real life. The most extreme solutions on either end of the spectrum are ultimately portrayed negatively, but usually not to the point of eliminating the moral complexity of the characters pursuing those solutions.

I also appreciated how the author handled partisan politics. Both of the major parties in the U.S. – the Democrats and the Republicans – contribute to climate solutions in different ways. The Republicans are rightly portrayed as the most unhinged and overtly destructive of the two, but both parties pursue climate solutions and make major missteps with horrific consequences. This complexity of partisan dynamics allows the novel to explore the ups and downs of many different responses to the climate crisis without coming off as a partisan screed for or against either of the two dominant U.S. parties or any particular climate solution.

Speaking of the U.S., the plot focuses almost exclusively on characters and events in the United States, but periodically speaks to what’s happening in other parts of the world. This was an effective way for an author living in the United States, and writing a story primarily set in the United States, to handle the interplay between national and international responses to the climate crisis. There was enough detail about what was going on in the rest of the world to convey the global nature of the crisis without having to add another 800+ pages of text (and likely some inaccuracies and implausibilities) by doing a deeper dive into the climate crisis and climate solutions in other countries.

Narrative Structure in The Deluge

The Deluge has an overarching narrative structure similar to other long novels with many characters. It starts by introducing each of the main characters in their respective contexts before the onset of the main action of the story. These initial chapters of the first section of the novel establish both the characters themselves and the initial conditions that ultimately launch each of them on their individual responses to the climate crisis.

There were times in the first section of the novel where I found myself wondering why we were even exploring these particular characters at all, much less why their stories were being presented in such a variety of styles and perspectives.

Point of view shifts between first, second, and third person depending on the character. Style shifts from a more traditional text to the inclusion of sidebars, pages full of news headlines in various fonts and sizes, and whole chapters that are meant to be news articles, op-ed pieces, white papers, or similar “nonfiction” pieces from the fictional setting.

Some characters have obvious connections to the climate crisis – for example, a scientist studying methane clathrates. Others have lives and identities with no initial relationship to the climate crisis or the other characters.

Despite the initial oddness of this flip-flopping between different styles, points of view, and seemingly unrelated characters, each of the individual chapters was captivating enough (or in some cases unsettling enough) to keep me reading. The first chapter in particular got the novel off to such a strong start that it should carry any skeptical readers through the initial oddness of these point of view and style shifts.

Once the main action of the novel gets going, there’s an intense and fruitful interplay between the utopian and dystopian elements of the story.

Most readers would probably say that the novel skews in a dystopian direction – escalating climate catastrophes, worsening social conditions, and a multitude of messy climate solutions that for the most part don’t seem to prevent the worst of the social and ecological consequences of the climate crisis.

But some of the best climate fiction to date combines both utopian and dystopian elements – and the Deluge is no exception.

Over the course of the novel, some climate solutions succeed to varying degrees, temporarily or in the long run. The actions of the main characters often have dramatic impacts on the course of regional and national responses to the climate crisis (for good or ill), indicating that our agency as individuals, communities, and movements still matters, even in dire circumstances that seem beyond our control. And honestly, for me, any portrayal of the next several decades that doesn’t result in the total collapse of civil society in the United States and possibly the world is at least somewhat utopian in its outlook.

The near-future reality presented by The Deluge is similar in important ways to my own perspective and the perspectives of many climate justice advocates in recent years. Namely that the climate crisis will get far worse before it gets any better, but our actions can still have some meaningful impact on outcomes. And the greatest successes we can hope for in the near term are the abatement of the absolute worst outcomes and the enthusiastic pursuit of a broad range of climate solutions, many of which will falter and fail in messy ways.

It’s not the doe-eyed utopianism of a Marvel movie where the heroes save the world at the end of the story. But it’s also not the grimdark dystopianism of a Mad Max movie where society has already collapsed and the best we can do is survive and resist the brutal overlords who rule the wastelands. It’s something in between – a world where society is trending in a destructive direction that can’t be stopped entirely, but individual and collective action can sometimes (not always) shift circumstances in a more livable and liberatory direction. Honestly, because it strikes this balance so well, I would love to see it adapted to film, or possibly TV to give it enough breathing room to do the full story justice.

This skillful blend of dystopianism, utopianism, and excellent writing makes the Deluge one of my new favorite works of climate fiction. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to check it out and let me know what you think!

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