The Deluge

Set in the USA, this novel looks at the developing climate emergency from the early 2020s to the mid 1940s and features a large cast of characters, whose stories interconnect in surprising ways. Although there are various plot twists and excitements, it’s all too believable - the scenarios we're warned of if various tipping points are reached affect everyday lives in dramatic ways. It's a marathon read at more than 800 pages, but I listened on Audible where it's narrated by a full cast, which kept me hooked throughout. The outlook is necessarily bleak, but Stephen Markley does manage to… show more.

This is a long book (880 pp) well worth the journey. It is a brilliant, dystopian novel. Markley is an excellent writer who will capture your attention with a rich story line containing multiple characters. It is all too real, which makes this fictional work scary.

This is a lesser-known work of climate fiction compared to Ministry for the Future, but it is equally impressive in its erudition, realism, and gripping narrative trajectory. Markley has given us a chillingly realistic and affectively charged account of America’s likely near-term future.

I love the way he weaves together developments in climate, rightwing politics, and Artificial Intelligence to show how the American political landscape is likely to evolve over the next twenty to thirty years. While the climate crisis is the main storyline, Markley also shows us how big data and AI may converge to deliver unprecedented advances… show more.

Stephen Markley’s massive near-future climate apocalypse novel The Deluge features a sprawling Balzacian cast and an acknowledged debt to Stephen King’s The Stand.

The narrative proceeds, year by painful year, to detail the climatic, political, and social catastrophe that’s just around the corner.

The benefit of Markley’s painstaking approach is that the world he builds looks depressingly like our own: no Mad Max/Planet of the Apes craziness. Just a bunch of highly realistic political and corporate skullduggery that inches us closer and closer to apocalypse.

The characters are largely idealists, including a neurodiverse policy wonk who, entirely straight-faced, proposes… show more.