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In this episode, author Stephen Markley discusses his new novel, The Deluge, which describes a future affected by climate change that hits uncomfortably close to home.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn 2018, author Stephen Markley won near-universal critical praise with his debut novel Ohio, a tight set piece that takes place over the course of a single night, as four high school classmates reunite at a diner in their northeastern Ohio hometown. “Four characters, one night” is pretty much the opposite of Markley’s sprawling new novel The Deluge, which tracks dozens of characters over the course of decades, from the 2010s out past 2040, everyone from climate activists to scientists to political operatives, as they suffer the effects of climate change (there are some quasi-biblical disasters) and struggle to marshal the political will to address it.The novel crucially involves climate policy, reactionary backlashes, and direct activism, among other topics of great interest to the Volts audience. On Thursday January 12th at Seattle’s Third Place Books, I was lucky enough to talk to Markley about the genesis of the novel, some of its major themes, and the difficulties he faced in writing it.The crew at Third Place was kind enough to record the event (thanks Spencer!), so I'm happy to bring it to you as an episode of Volts. Please enjoy, and while you're at it, do the smart thing and buy copies of The Deluge for all the readers in your life.Third Place Books StaffPlease join me in welcoming Stephen Markley and David Roberts to Third Place Books. David RobertsWhere to begin? I'm just going to jump right in asking Stephen questions because I have nothing interesting to say. So, I've been writing nonfiction my whole life and have thought periodically about writing fiction—like every nonfiction author does—and even took a while one summer or one time when I had some time off to sort of sit and stare at the screen for a while and think about doing it. I had kind of a plot for a near future quasi-scifi thing, and there are tons and tons of reasons why I very quickly concluded that I was not suited to writing fiction.But one of them was the one I still think about, which is just: "What does the near future look like?" And the more I thought about that, the more I thought, "Boy, I have no idea at all what the near future looks like." I mean, I guess you could say that at any time in history, but it seems like particularly now, there's just so much crazy s**t going on. It's really like, how is it all going to interact and play out? And I found myself completely daunted and shut down by that problem.So here you are. You have decided to start a novel basically two years in the past, and then literally just detail what happens—not in some fictional world or some far off world—what happens in this world among these people in this country over the next two, four, six, ten years in detail. And that just strikes me as just, like, fictionally speaking, the highest conceivable level of difficulty that you could set yourself. Why do that? In the book that we talked a little bit beforehand, you were thinking about even before Ohio, it just seems like the hardest thing you could do. Why not write a couple of easy books to start with?Stephen MarkleyYeah, it all breezed by. It all went super easy and nothing surprised me. Yeah, it just came pouring out with no...nothing got in the way, historically or politically, that made... Yeah, no, it was an incredibly high degree of difficulty for the reasons you said. And all the problems of writing a 1,000-page novel, combined with the problems of it has to feel absolutely realistic at the moment of its publication. It has to feel as if it's our world sliding into this next world, right. At dinner, we were talking, I started the book in 2010, at roughly the same time as "Ohio," had to set it aside when "Ohio" was published, and then came back to it in 2017. So in that time, I don't know if you guys heard, a game show host actually got elected president. And so, the terrifying presidential character I was returning to was suddenly really unrealistic in his bombasticness. Because, like the real thing was much...David RobertsThere's a relatively muted fascist president in your book, looking at it from our present vantage point.Stephen MarkleyI mean, look, it was a mind-blowing project for me because I had to keep paying attention to every little detail of what was happening in climate, technology, politics, our society. And unfortunately, I had found the right veins, clearly, just in terms of how our politics were developing. And that just felt like it accelerated so quickly. And then with climate policy, I think that was another, sort of, murky issue. You've talked about on your podcast before, where there was this dead period after Waxman-Markey failed in the Obama administration, where it felt like everybody was throwing up their hands. And I think that was a tough place to be to...like thinking about the future of where policy would head or how it might develop.David RobertsYeah. And speaking of difficulty, sort of as you're writing and finishing, finally, Democrats are back in control and coming back to climate policy and debating the Build Back Better bill and then, specifically, the climate bill and, specifically, during that exact time period you were finishing, Joe Manchin was noodling around...Stephen MarkleyPrevaricating, let's say.David Roberts...prevaricating and noodling around and making everybody wait and wonder. And it was just wildly uncertain right up until the day he woke up on the right side of the yacht, I guess, or whatever happened. But right up until that day, it was just wildly unclear what was going to happen. It was a very big, sort of, historical pivot that was on the line. And it literally...that historical pivot took place during the years covered by your book. So, did this keep you awake at night, the course of actual events?Stephen MarkleyYeah, and I mean, in a way, when it passed, I was like both sobbing with relief and pissed at the Democrats. Like, "You should have let this fail so my novel would make more sense." Actually, what happened was I had fourth pass, like the last pass in my hands at the moment Joe Manchin was like, "I'm out on this bill. It's not happening." Right. So I send the book off to the publisher. I'm listening to people, like, cry on podcasts about our dark future, and then the bill passes. So what is going to be the case in the next edition?There are some key sentences that will be changed to reflect the reality of the Inflation Reduction Act passing. So this is just a way of me selling more books. You got to get the first edition and then come back to the next edition and buy that one too.David RobertsYeah, that's wild, it just goes to the difficulty, like I said, you're writing about things that are literally happening as you're writing them.Stephen MarkleyBut just to add to that, there was this sense, though, that people were paying attention, understood the Democrats would pass a mostly carrots package if they could get the chance. There wasn't going to be a price on carbon, there wasn't going to be any standards. It was going to be something where we're just going to toss as much money as possible at decarbonization. And so I think having that in mind, I could at least sort of point the direction of what would happen in the Biden administration. Although I do think the language in the book is currently unfair to the enormity of that policy that got passed.David RobertsI actually had that thought and then I remembered, like, "This is a novel." So, the other thing that you have to worry about in the real world is, of course, science and climate science. And this is something else that breaks my brain when I think about trying to do what you did, which is fictionalize it. Because if you are of an analytic mind, you follow climate science. Climate scientists, like all scientists, will say, "Here's the range of things that could happen," right? "Here are a set of error bars, a set of probabilities." And if you go to a scientist and say, "Well, here's what's going to happen. There's going to be a storm X big in 2029 in August." They'll just be like, "You're insane" if you try to...from a scientific point of view, it's crazy to try to say, "This particular thing will happen instead of that particular thing." So how much did you let kind of a worry about scientific plausibility...because the weather plays a huge role in the book. It's a big character throughout the book. There very key weather events.And how much did you let it worry you whether those particular events happening on that particular schedule were plausible to scientists? Like did you do a lot of going back and forth with science?Stephen MarkleyYeah, I did. And I think what I landed on is: I'm going to take the edge events as far as realism...to the end of the line, particularly with some stuff happening in Los Angeles and a storm that comes towards the end of the book. I think for me, it was like, "could this happen?" Not, "Is this probably going to happen." At the same time, you guys live in the Pacific Northwest, there was a heat event here a few years ago, and there was a quote by this guy's studied at Lawrence Livermore, I think, which was, "This event was impossible without climate change. It also was impossible with climate change." Like, it broke the model, the heat storm in the Pacific Northwest in '21. And so I think—and correct me if I'm wrong—we're continuously seeing is events outpacing the models that I find that particularly frightening.David RobertsYeah, and that gets to the difficulty of trying to pick a particular course of events, because even now we're being surprised and we're still in early, early stages of all this. The other big thing that gripped me throughout the novel, and it comes back and forth and up and down through the whole novel, the sort of the novel, insofar as it has a main character, is centered on an activist who gets into first, activism. There's a lot of activism working with politicians and trying to craft bills and create coalitions. And then there's a whole, sort of, other splinter of activism in the book, which goes very direct action...Stephen MarkleyAndre's mom-type.David RobertsYes. Which goes way down that road of direct action and bombing bulldozers and things like that. And it was interesting. This is probably not how you should read a novel, but I'm trying to squint and sort of figure out, like, "How does Steven really feel about activism and the role of activism?" I think you did a great job of certainly not coming down with any sort of pat-like pro or con, but, sort of, like there are key junctures in the book where activism screws everything up, like legitimately screws up and forestalls the possibility of good things happening.And then there are other, sort of, the larger sweep of the book. If you look at the whole thing, like, activism clearly played a big role. So what are your thoughts on the mom...Andre's Mom question, the sort of direct action? At what point is violence against property justified? And then another question that comes up later, which is: at what point is violence against people justified? It gets bad enough that that question is thrust on the activists. So I don't know if you have...where you come down on that.Stephen MarkleyWell, I think it's important to know...the job of the fiction writer. It's, like, none of these characters can share my point of view, right? Like that is that's the path to hell. That's the path to creating a character that's just your mouthpiece, right? So every character, you have to be, like, deeply in their perspective and see the world through them. So I feel like the way the book should work is if—Shane is the character you're referring to—when you're in Shane's sections, her point of view makes sense. These mealy-mouthed activists that...they're not getting anything done.We have to go after pipelines, right? Then you switch over to this other set of people and they're thinking, "These people are f*****g it up for us. They are creating a situation in which, basically we're going to get a Patriot Act for environmental activists and so forth. So I think just also, all of those sections are about unintended consequences. And I think that's something incredibly important to pay attention to in terms of how the structure of the plot works. Whereas just because you want to do something doesn't mean the thing you're doing is going to pan out the way you think it will.David RobertsYeah, I mean, even at the end of the book, looking back on it, there's still not a clear story to tell about activism was the good guy or the bad guy in the story. In a sense, everybody is kind of f*****g up all the time. Your activists, your scientists, your politicians.Stephen MarkleyI write realism.David RobertsNone of them really know what they're doing. Nothing works out the way any of them intend. I thought you captured that effect well, like, there's no masterminds.Stephen MarkleyYeah, but I do think that there is, at least my sense of the question is that we are all trying to point ourselves in the direction of, like, "How do we change this? How do we f*****g turn the ship? At least a fifth of the degree here, fifth a degree there." And so, in the end, I think all of these characters are pointing to the way in which the ship was turned by those incremental degrees. And even if many things backfired and many things didn't work, and the consequences were sometimes very scary or horrific, it's like trying to look at the aggregate of what has happened and how to change the situation.David RobertsYeah. It's like the aggregate that comes across. And even with the sort of benefit of hindsight, have finished the book, I'm still not sure I could go back and say to any one of the characters, "This is definitely something you should have done, or this is something you shouldn't have done." It's not even clear, even in the context of the novel, what ends up actually causing things to happen. It's just sort of like, things grind on around, which I thought is a very realistic...as someone who's seen people cast themselves on the shore of these efforts over and over again and nothing work out and lose hope. In a sense, it's hopeful. In a sense, it sort of gets at what's so frustrating about all of it, right?Stephen MarkleyFrustrating being...David RobertsThere's no A to B causation.Stephen MarkleyYeah, no, absolutely.David RobertsSo, the third sort of theme of the book that felt like it was written just for me, stuff I think about constantly is the role played by sort of far-right reactionary backlash. And I was so glad to find that in the book. There's a lot I can't predict, but the one thing I feel pretty sure about is that insofar as efforts to deal with climate change get some muscle or some seriousness, there's going to be equal and opposite reaction worse than what we're already seeing. Speaking of things being ahead of our schedule. So how do you think about it? Do you think that's inevitable?Stephen Markley100%. Yeah, I think death taxes and reactionary backlash are the only things we can be certain of. One of the things that has bothered me sometimes about, anything you watch on TV with politics, anything you…
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