Book Review: The Deluge by Stephen Markley

 

 

The Deluge by Stephen Markley

896 pages, Hardcover
Published January, 2023 by Simon & Schuster

“From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.”

From the bestselling author of a literary novel comes a Science Fiction epic that despite being about the near future and approaching climate change apocalypse will never be called genre fiction even though it absolutely is.

Clocking in just under 900 pages and being so heavy I regretted taking it with me on a train trip to LA and back is the science fiction epic The Deluge. It is probably not the fault of the author Stephen Markley that his novel is a modern Stand on Zanzibar, I would guess he never heard of the John Brunner classic. The comparison is not an insult, I consider SOZ to be the best SF novel of the 20th century. It won the Hugo Award, and I will be comparing those books throughout this review.
Brunner embraced Science Fiction, and Markley appears to be wandering through the genre like he accidentally walked into the wrong store. That might be the fault of marketing and I apologize to Markley if I am wrong.

What he was in control of was the page count. I enjoyed this book but the weight and length did challenge me. As a writer, I try to limit narrative side quests or fluff.  I don’t like to waste words. As a reader, I am more forgiving. That said Robert McCammon’s Swan Song was almost as long as this book and the page count didn’t bother me.

There is a tight 500 or 600-page version of this novel I would have thought perfect. That is still epic, but when a book is this long, this heavy that it takes almost two weeks for a fast reader like me you start to edit in your head or question entire chapters. I would think to myself, what does that have to do with the story? Many times they are details that while important can be seeded with asides, not entire chapters. Who the fuck am I? Markley is a more acclaimed author than me but I am giving my experience as a reader.  

That is tons of negative thoughts about a book that I generally liked and think is important.  Using multiple characters in the same epic is a method that classic door stops like The Stand and Swan Song have used. This novel has a diverse set of characters that show the collapse of global sustainability and the next couple of decades of efforts to deal with it.  Cli-fi in our rapidly heating, flooding and growingly unsustainable future is the most important direction storytelling in any media is going. I might sound harsh on The Deluge but that is because it is so very important. If that sounds preachy then so be it, because apparently asking nice has universally failed to do shit to stop all this stuff.  That is the point of this novel that weaves political, personal American panorama on this future.

Heat waves, rising waters, and massive storms. Some get offended if you call this an end-of-the-world novel, and that is not exactly true. That is some optimism on behalf of the author that I am not sure I share. However one of the best things Markley is doing here is painting a realistic picture of the frustration and resistance of the desperate to survive hitting the brick wall of the political system that kicks the can down the road on climate change. This is not something the book takes time to get to page 139…

“…we have a precious handful of years left to act, I promise you this: If you join this movement now, you will wake up fifteen, twenty years from now and feel sick that you didn’t do everything you could during the sliver of time when we still had a chance. When we hadn’t yet fallen over the brink.”

One of the reasons Stand on Zanzibar was considered such a breakthrough in style was because Brunner used a style he admitted he stole from the 1930 USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos. Using letters, newspaper articles, and multiple seemingly unconnected characters and storylines. The Deluge uses this method to a degree. In one of the few page-saving methods, much of the world-building is done in Newspaper headlines that are mixed together like a collage. He still uses articles and multiple characters. Most of it is excellently written, Markley does a wonder job filling his diverse characters with an identity that makes them stand out from chapter to chapter.

I almost quit reading after the second chapter used this “experimental style” that was the only part of the writing that didn’t work for me.  That chapter used boxes that had asides that sometimes added to the chapter with context, but sometimes they didn’t.  I found them confusing, I often didn’t know what I was supposed to be reading or the order. It was frustrating.If that had gone on longer I might have quit. I would have missed out.

It is interesting reading many of the comments, and online reviews very few point or even name characters who they spent hundreds of pages following. In a sense, the characters almost were more defined by what they were in this tapestry than who they were.  The narratives used different styles, tenses, etc. so it was easy sometimes to think less about a character's name and think my self as the character not as Seth, but this is a chapter about the gay activist characters, Or this is ex-military drug addict, the guy whose name I don't remember now a week after reading the book. That is not a knock, I actually think that is a feature as part of the point seemed to be their roles in the crisis.

Each of the characters has their own personal connection to the growing crisis. The one that stood out to me was Seth and Ash deciding on having a baby. As a gay couple, the choice of having a child and raising them is powerful to get to witness in fiction but the rapidly ending world it is one I can relate to. At least one of my past relationships ended when I went with team Seth saying it was crazy to bring a baby into this world. “Forrest was born into socioecological circumstances more dire than I could have imagined. He was born into 444ppm carbon in the atmosphere, melting ice-caps, oceans crawling up the world’s coasts and deltas, soil salinization, dwindling fresh water, spreading desertification, and stalling agricultural production.”

I know this might offend some of you who are on team Ash, but I am glad I am not a young person today. That is the power of Speculative fiction. It is also the power to make this future not come true but as this part of the story powerfully displays - time is running out.

The heat waves, and the storms are well written and slowly and carefully lay out the mission statement. I am not positive but I think that statement is a rude awakening, get your shit together. Personally, I think Kim Stanley Robinson nailed the horrors of heatwaves better in his novel Ministry for the Future.  John Shirley got the power of the unending storms better in his criminally underrated Stormland.  The genre writers have been writing about an angry and warming planet for decades so perhaps we need Stephen Markley for the NPR listener who won't slum in the genre ghetto.

Some other issues this book dealt with well...

“Here in a campus bubble it was easy to look around and believe the country was swept up in a wave of change and possibility, a narrative propagated and commodified by the social media companies inflicting a new colonialism on people’s minds.”

I often tell co-workers that we are in a California bubble, where Trump doesn't seem so bad. That bubble here in San Diego also keeps the problems of climate change in the distance. The Deluge does an amazing job of portraying some of the political bubbles, and ways that the obvious need for change gets lost in the mundane even when people know better.

“You might not believe in what we’re doing, but this is the kind of action on which history pivots. This is a choice between revolution against the power structures or our extermination by those structures. People like you and your family? You’re what they harvest. Everything you do, everything you buy, everything you believe in—that’s just product and profit for them. You’re their cash crop.”

This moment stood out to me because it lays out the pivot point we are at so well. I like a cli-fi novel that reminds people that you are making choices. I have heard this novel preachy, but that is far as it goes. It doesn't say ride a bike or you will kill your grandkids, although sometimes I wish it did. It doesn't say you must go vegan, change law and act better now. It could be preachier, soI think that suggestion is without merit.

“The trajectories of the two major political parties shaped much of our lobbying experience, the Republicans in wounded disarray, trying to rebuild their party while frequently staving off primary challenges from suburban neo-Nazis, the Democrats playing a perpetual game of three-card monte, releasing aspirational platforms and progressive wish lists while mostly doing the bidding of Wall Street, Big Tech, and the military–national security–industrial complex.”

Is this preaching?  Or is this explaining the hardcore reality of why we are a culture held underwater by the powerful and elite? I don't care how it comes off I just want more books like it.

The Deluge is a fantastic book, an important message but again I can't help but feel John Brunner made an equally powerful statement in 1969. His novel also addressed global issues better and was less focused on this one country. Together the two books half a century apart make an interesting comparison.  SOZ was worried about overpopulation, and The Deluge is about a warming climate. Some dismiss Brunner prophetic nature because the population bomb didn't lead to a crash. But it is leading to a warming and unlivable future. One that Markley is warning readers about.

Environmental warning novels have a long tradition as long as the Nuclear war warning novel. The jury is out on this novel's ability to prevent this future but I can say it is adding to the discussion. I think this has more pros than cons, if a long book scares you I suggest Ministry For the Future, which reads more like a textbook but offers solutions.  I have also included a link to my shelf of Cli-fi books.  

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2167338-david-agranoff?shelf=cli-fi