Around the midpoint of The Deluge, a character laments how quickly “you wake up and you’re in a bad movie from the future”. It’s an offhand but accurate description of the economic, ecological and technological turmoil in Stephen Markley’s bleak vision of the coming decades. In his alternative 2030s, surveillance capitalism has ended privacy and AI has eroded human agency; financial markets collapse and the political sphere becomes yet more rabid. Above it all looms our inescapable, spiralling climate catastrophe.
Beginning in 2013 and rolling inexorably forward into a darkening century, The Deluge depicts an apocalypse in slow motion. There is no schism separating before and after, no single epochal event that marks a terminus for civilisation. It’s a story of incremental chaos, political lethargy and scientific minutiae, and it is utterly mesmerising. There have been many more flamboyant end-of-the-world scenarios in fiction, but few as frighteningly plausible.
Markley spent a decade on the book, which is constructed as a collage of texts: first- and third-person narratives intermingled with magazine articles, scientific papers, White House briefings and podcast transcripts. His ability to inject these ostensibly dry sources with pathos, verisimilitude and agility of voice sets the novel apart from other apocalyptic melodramas. Point-of-view characters span the sociopolitical spectrum and the wealth ladder. A marketing exec turned hedge fund manager, an ecoterrorist, a neurodiverse data analyst, an alienated addict: each offers a peephole into events, but together they form a comprehensive tapestry of a civilisation coming undone. Markley begins with the character of climate scientist Tony Pietrus in a chapter titled “The Phase Transitions of Methane Hydrates”. It feels like an open challenge to the reader, forewarning that this book will neither hold your hand nor care about your feelings.
Yet, for all its dispassionate techno-detail, The Deluge is a book with a big, pulsing heart. Worsening climatic conditions give rise to set pieces that would not be out of place in a Roland Emmerich movie: a mad dash into an immolated Los Angeles is a particular highlight. There are also quieter reasons to care. As we accompany Markley’s characters on their decades-long journey into night, the collective trauma and the personal begin to merge. One deeply problematic figure experiences a redemption arc that feels like a thematic spine, weighted with the implication that even the worst of us can be redeemed.
Hope is the hard-won prize at the end of this mammoth novel. After such rigorous adherence to the scientific and political realities of the crisis, it would be cheap to speculate that everything will be OK. But Markley at least offers some solace, that there is still value in the fight against Big Carbon and other malign actors who would take Earth beyond the brink. Perhaps this 900-page odyssey is best summed up in a father’s words to the daughter who will inherit our ruined world: “Some of us tried, baby. Some of us fought like hell.”
