Stephen Markley on The Deluge to Come

In the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, novelist Stephen Markley joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss his novel The Deluge, which predicts and depicts the impact of climate change over the next couple of decades. Markley talks about researching and portraying the scale of catastrophic climate events, the role of the markets and other financial considerations in pushing world leaders to take the issue seriously, and which character in his novel was previously Kamala Harris. Markley also reflects on how in revision, he repeatedly had to scale up his fictional disasters to keep them ahead of actual events, the uncanny experience of forecasting disasters like Helene, and the movement leaders—including Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and James Hansen—he felt compelled to include in his novel. Markley reads from The Deluge.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: So if you can imagine this, and even a dummy like myself could imagine this financial issue, surely there’s going to be some treasure trove of information in the real world that we’ll find out; the insurance companies have been thinking about this for a long time. 

Stephen Markley: Well, let me tell you what’s so upsetting.  I was over in Geneva doing a reading for the French publication of the book, and I was talking to some activists there.  The reinsurance companies, which are the companies that insure the insurers and sort of underpin our entire civilizations financial solvency, are also deeply invested in fossil fuels; their books are brimming with the stuff. And so they’re financing the very destruction that’s rendering their business model increasingly volatile to the point of not working.  That’s a place, I think, that activism really needs to start focusing on; getting the insurance industry to acknowledge the catastrophe that is underway.

WT: There’s some amazing research that’s blended into the novel.  You talk about the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, in the very first chapter, which was not something that I knew about.  Pietrus talks about the methane hydrates melting at the bottom of the ocean. So when did you start doing this scientific portion of the research for the book, and how did you work it into the writing itself?

SM: Oh, I have not stopped doing the scientific research for the book.  I just was doing it constantly for over a decade, just reading everything I could get my hands on, talking to anybody who would talk to me. And what happens is, you come up with a character, and then you want to understand everything that that character understands, or at least enough to fake it, right? And with Tony, it’s like—okay, what is driving this guy?  It’s because he studies a process that, if it’s let loose in terms of the release of methane hydrates in the world’s oceans, would really spell doom for humanity.  If you’re looking at that every day, how does it affect you? How does it affect your relationships with your daughters, with the people you love,  etc. And so part of it is just about inhabiting the character more so than showing off one’s knowledge in literary form.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It seems to me that one of the things that you’re so effective at doing is conveying scale. I was particularly struck by a theme where Jackie is like traveling and gets asked by her sister, “You’re supposed to go check on mom.  Has no one talked to her?”  And she goes home after catastrophic flooding on the East Coast and across the Midwest because there’s a supercell storm that comes with 43 tornadoes, and that particular incident causes flooding that affects 200 million people across 25 states. These sorts of details are piling on each other and accumulating in a way that creates a certain overall effect.  So I read all of this, and I was immediately comparing it to like Helene and Milton. And then Jackie nears home, and there’s this scene where she sees it, and she says, “The Mississippi looked like an ocean.”

How did you go about the work of picturing this without simply leaping to things like apocalyptic films? How do you kind of invent the visuals for that? And also, this is a 900 page book, and it is emotionally very difficult work to research all of this stuff.  I have a lot of panic associated with this;I’m not the only person with that. Like, a new frontier in therapy is to be a climate therapist, right? How did you imagine this? And how did you sustain yourself through imagining this?

SM: Well, let’s start with the first part of the question. So, I knew the book had to have these big sort of pillars, these set pieces that were driving the action and that in order to keep the pace of the book moving and keep the reader engaged that these big moments would be coming. And so when I was creating what I’ll call weather events from another dimension, all I was doing was looking at what the science is telling us is going to happen, extrapolating that forward and making sure that whatever event I was depicting was worse than something that had already happened. Now, the problem became that as I was writing the book, these insane weather events kept outpacing what I was writing. So I would have to go back and redo sections, because the horrifying thing that I had written about had already occurred and was in the news. And so eventually I was just like, “Okay, f*ck it. I can’t keep revising. I have to take the big events of the book and push them to the outer bounds of what’s possible, just to keep the book ahead of the curve, to keep it feeling even remotely futuristic.” 

WT: Because these scenes are set in a future, just for the listeners to know.  The book begins in our known time, I think in 2013, and then moves quickly into later times. 

SM: Right, so it ends at about 2040, so all of this stuff is right around the corner. And so when I watch something like Hurricane Helene, to me it feels like I’ve lived it already. And this is the part where I don’t want to sound too precious about it, but of course writing this book was emotionally difficult.  This is really happening. It is really that scary. It really is that urgent, and it’s really that frustrating when people don’t believe it’s happening, or don’t think it’s as important as you know whatever else is going on.  And the enormity of it and the scale of it, and the timeframe in which we have to turn things around, the narrowness of that is really something that will keep you staring at the ceiling till 4am.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle. Photograph of Stephen Markley by Michael Amico.

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Stephen Markley

The Deluge • Ohio • Only Murders in the Building

Others:

Matthew Salesses on the Possibilities of Climate Fiction by Matthew Salesses • 1984 by George Orwell • Ali Zaidi • Weather Underground • Climate Defiance • The End of Nature by Bill McKibben • The Stand by Stephen King • The Inflation Reduction Act • The Green New Deal • “Helene, Milton losses expected to surpass ‘truly historic’ $50 billion each”  – CBS News • “Beyond Helene: Hurricane death toll tops 300 lives, with month left in season” – USA Today • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 4 Episode 15: Workshop Politics: Matthew Salesses on Centering the Marginalized Writer