Miskatonic University PressI don’t know why more people aren’t talking about The Deluge by Stephen Markley.
It’s the best new novel I’ve read this year. It’s a huge, sprawling book, 880 pages long, with multiple narratives following a handful of major characters and a large cast of others, from 2013 to 2040. It’s about climate change in America. It starts with how things are, and as it moves into the near future, things get worse, and worse, and worse, as they inevitably will.
There are some small moments and there are huge set pieces. There is poetic writing and there are lengthy detailed policy documents. It has disasters. It has fascism. It has some hope. It is a vast novel and it contains multitudes. (Markley draws on techniques John Dos Passos used in the USA trilogy, as does Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, to which it is comparable, but this is a much better novel.)
Related recommended nonfiction: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019) by David Wallace-Wells and Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (2020) by Mark Lynas. These are the two best science books I’ve read on the climate crisis. The Deluge is the best novel. (The best novel dealing with it head on as the main subject, that is. William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014) is about climate change, but a lot of other things as well.)
