Repeated finger-wagging, even the most deftly and eloquently crafted, grates after almost 900 pages. 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. This borrowed cloak of newsiness reduces the complexity of fiction into a single-minded polemic. Markley does little to dispel this impression. 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. As a result, the reader doesn’t feel intimately close to most of the characters. Characters disappear for as many as a hundred pages and reemerge a year later, necessitating repeated exposition dumps. A giant canvas with Brueghelian detail that, while making the story compelling, also flattens some of the emotional impact. 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. It is, if nothing else, an astonishing feat of procedural imagination, narrative construction and scientific acumen. 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. This novel might try to do the impossible but as with the climate, so with novels: Why not try? Read Full Review >

He’d make room for hobbits and wizards if he realistically could. So it’s only natural that he’d play to both sides of the political aisle. He’s tried to write a big, unifying novel that has something for everyone - fans of horror, thrillers, science fiction, literary fiction and more. Markley is so gifted at imagining catastrophe that The Deluge generates the same kind of guilt you might feel watching a disaster movie. Markley conceives the climate crisis as a hearts-and-minds problem - we’ll do nothing until we viscerally feel the consequences of our actions. But Markley imagines predicaments that are hard to see coming and delivers them in convincing, fine-grained detail.

It’s not hard to see the role each character plays here. In writing a clear-eyed, climate-justice-minded page-turner, Markley makes his influences obvious. Markley remains fixated on how people stubbornly cling to power and the pain that power inflicts on poor people with limited options. But a lot of it is entertaining, and its length is purposeful. A lot of characters, a lot of politicking and a lot of devastation, filling a lot of pages.

Stephen markley books