The Deluge

Given the climate crisis we live in and are tasked with doing everything we can to turn its tides — metaphorical and real — I would think there would be more climate fiction. While that has become a subcategory within science fiction or speculative fiction, as seen in books like A Half-Built Garden, The Water Knife, and multiple books by Kim Stanley Robinson, "serious" fiction has not engaged with the topic much.

I first heard of Stephen Markley's book The Deluge when it was mentioned as the upcoming topic of one of Dave Roberts's Volts podcasts in January. I didn't listen to the podcast then, though, because I wanted to read it first.

I had to order a copy from Uncle Hugo's, because the science fiction bookstore didn't consider it a science fiction book, I guess, since the publisher is Simon & Schuster, not one of their usual orders. Then it was stacked up on my reading list behind all those wonderful escapist dragon books I was reading in February.

Since then I've been on it, though: all 880 pages of The Deluge.

My top-line review is that it's great and I recommend it. If you, like me, don't want to know a lot about a book before you read it (except whether it's worth it), that may be enough. Get a copy and read it!

I would add that it felt like it would have benefited from being published as a trilogy or at least two books, given the length. It had rhythms that I could feel would have worked that way. But such treatment probably would have been found to be "too genre" by the publishers, undermining its credibility as serious fiction.

Spoilers, and thoughts 

From here on, this post contains things that could be construed as spoilers.

I think of this book — which takes place between 2013 and about 2040 — as the Game of Thrones of climate fiction. The chapters rotate from one point-of-view character to another in a similar way to GoT. Major and main characters die. There are even events that call to mind the Red Wedding and a character who, at one point, calls himself Ned Stark.

I wondered how traumatic it was for Markley to write the book, and was not surprised to learn from his conversation with Dave Roberts on Volts that around 60 to 70% of the way through, it was just that.

Markley worked on the book for 10 years, constantly changing parts of it toward the end of that time to keep up with reality. It's even weirder knowing that he turned in the first draft to his editor in February 2020... just before Covid, and a year before the January 6 insurrection. It went into production just before Russia invaded Ukraine, so he missed that. (The book does include Russia invading Ukraine, but it happens years later.)

Like Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future or Green Mars, the book contains a fair amount of legislative "sausage-making." I don't have a problem with this because I wasn't listening to it as an audio book. Skim that part if you're not interested. It's still good to have a fictional world where people get something done the way it has to be done.

Three other specific things I appreciated in the book:

• Early on, a woman character explains to a man character why she's not interested in reading his fiction, or in why he wants to write. "...you view it as your inheritance, your birthright, your entitlement. It is your prerogative to look across the human condition and describe it through your ears and eyes, all while you disregard what those ears and eyes are attached to. And more than that, you ignore the long chain of affluence that allows you the time to read and write and dream" (pp. 95–96). The irony of a white man writing this does not escape me.
• As hard as it was to read, Markley's description of the reality of what bodies look like after death by AR-15. The vast majority of us are shielded from this too much.
• That democracy was not forgotten as part of the solution, despite all the backlash that seems to come from the grassroots. After many upheavals, when a progressive candidate is finally elected president, she gets a slate of voting-rights laws enacted. Then broader voting happens across the country and purple states become blue, throwing out both Republicans and Democrats who have been in the pockets of big business. More climate legislation follows.

At the end of the book, it becomes apparent that the six point-of-view characters' stories have been made available by various means: three have written memoirs (published or unpublished), one was writing memos, one was compiled through AI-informed government surveillance called Megadata Narrative Reconstruction, and the last is mysterious but also was through some other AI-surveillance method that is not government-based.

Reviews

I wondered how the book has been received, since I haven't heard much buzz about it. I found reviews from four major newspapers, which vary a bit in their enthusiasm or lack there of.

The Guardian, not surprisingly, has the most positive review. It's also short and less literary.

I would say the Washington Post's review is the next most positive, calling it a "clear-eyed, climate-justice-minded page-turner." Though the reviewer also said this:

George Will once quipped that football combines the worst things in American life: violence and committee meetings. Much the same could be said about the closing chapters of “The Deluge.”

Next down the list on positive-negative balance is the New York Times. I got a friend to send me a gift link. This reviewer thought the book was "bracing, beguiling, uneven." 

I found myself impatient with this review overall, despite his warning that he found the book uneven. He flip-flops from "Centrifugal forces threaten to tear it apart, but Markley soldiers on, in hyper-real mode" to criticizing the second half of the book with this: "This is fiction on an impossibly grand scale. We struggle to wrap our arms around it."

Here's another odd pairing:

"It may endure as a climate-fiction classic, but it’s less than the sum of its parts, undermined by its length and labyrinthine design. The string of apocalyptic events seems cartoonish rather than cautionary, redeemed by arresting visuals..."

[His closing sentence:] "Markley’s right to peer forward, though: defiant, Cassandra-like, screaming into the void. Novelists often preen as moralists, but he’s the genuine article."

Make up your mind, will you? It might become a classic, but it's a cartoon?

And then there's the worst review of all, from the Los Angeles Times, which was titled ‘The Deluge,’ an epic new climate novel, drowns us in catastrophes:

“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....

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....

In addition to being affronted that Markley dared to deal with the immensity of the climate crisis, the LA Times reviewer also argues that none of the book's characters grow. But that's not true at all. As one example, one of the point-of-view characters, who starts out interested only in numbing his own pain, acquires empathy and ends up saving hundreds of people at the end of his life. And personally, I felt close to many of the characters.

I know some reviewers believe they're getting paid to be the cleverest person in the room, but it's irritating to read something demonstrably not true about a book. Maybe the LA Times reviewer took my advice about skimming a bit too far.

Here's a quote to close this post out, from a memo written by Ash, one the point-of-view characters who survives to the end:

I thought of the arrogance the living carry. We ensconce ourselves in an epistemological certainty born from the mere fact that we've known history marginally longer than the dead. We elbow each other knowingly at their failures and ignorance. We almost never ask what it is that we don't know yet (p. 567).