On writing an ambitious and terrifyingly realistic novel about climate change

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.


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transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


In 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 Staff


Please join me in welcoming Stephen Markley and David Roberts to
Third Place Books.


David Roberts


Where 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 Markley


Yeah, 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 Roberts


There's a relatively muted fascist president in your book,
looking at it from our present vantage point.


Stephen Markley


I 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 Roberts


Yeah. 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 Markley


Prevaricating, 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 Markley


Yeah, 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 Roberts


Yeah, 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 Markley


But 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 Roberts


I 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 Markley


Yeah, 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 Roberts


Yeah, 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 Markley


Andre's mom-type.


David Roberts


Yes. 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 Markley


Well, 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 Roberts


Yeah, 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 Markley


I write realism.


David Roberts


None 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 Markley


Yeah, 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 Roberts


Yeah. 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 Markley


Frustrating being...


David Roberts


There's no A to B causation.


Stephen Markley


Yeah, no, absolutely.


David Roberts


So, 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 Markley


100%. 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 read, any fictional setting, is the
de-politicized nature of it. That's incredibly irritating because
we live in an incredibly politicized environment. So, my only
goal with the book was to, sort of, not to write it from the guy
who voted for Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden's perspective. This is
not, again, my mouthpiece. It's like, how can politics develop,
surprise us? How can they swing around in ways that we don't see
coming now, but might happen in the future?


And so there's a character, a Republican president who wants to
do something about climate change. There's a Democrat who behaves
like a monster. There's all that stuff, sort of, in the way our
politics now continues to shock us, like making sure to keep the
reader off balance, right?


David Roberts


Yeah. I got to say, that Republican president doing something
good on climate change.


Stephen Markley


I knew you would hate that. Even as I was writing it in 2015,
reading David on Vox, I was like, "I know he's not going to like
this. When he finally interviews me in Seattle."


David Roberts


That was the one time where my eyebrow went up. I was yeah, and
then, of course, everything falls apart on her. I was like,
"Yeah, that makes a lot more sense."


Stephen Markley


You see what I was doing.


David Roberts


Everything falls apart after all. Another big question—I'm
hitting you with all the big themes here—is, again, maybe you try
to keep your point of view out of it and just put a lot of things
in people's mouths. But the net effect of the book is a critique
of capitalism, basically. This idea that climate is not isolated,
unique, technical problem. It is an outgrowth of the basic way
our socio and economic system works.


Is that you? How much of that is you and how much of that is
activists?


Stephen Markley


I think if I had to distill my critique of the world into a few
sentences, yeah, that would be somewhat difficult, but I think
what climate represents is it's not just a crisis of, "oh, we're
doing this or doing that wrong." It's like there's a lot wrong
with our system that we do recognize, right? And so, as you often
say, the point of solving the climate crisis is not just so we
can fly around on private jets and keep the world as this
inequitable and this miserable. The solutions to the climate
crisis point the way forward into actually changing the world for
the better in many, many ways.


And what I think your podcast does so well is explicate that. I'm
going to use this little moment to talk about this guy just
because...no, you have to suffer through it, you just have to.


David Roberts


Turn off his mic.


Stephen Markley


No, because I started reading David before I even started the
book, when he was at Grist and he was one of the first climate
writers I encountered who had such a clear-eyed view of the issue
and, sort of, left the moralizing elements of it to the side. And
since then, basically a David Roberts' completist. Like, I've
been reading him the entire time, even when he went to Vox for
the down years.


David Roberts


This is very embarrassing.


Stephen Markley


No. But anyway, you should check out Volts if you haven't. It's
an incredible podcast. When he brings on people who talk about
how we solve this. It's like one of the few moments in my day
when I'm like, "Okay, there are a lot of smart, passionate and
incredibly just intelligent people working on every element of
this problem." And I think that's something to keep in mind when
we talk about this really scary thing.


David Roberts


Yeah, it's actually...one of the things you didn't get into that
I wondered about was the role...like, one story people tell now
about how this is all going to play out is that clean energy is
getting cheaperly fast and the markets, people are going to start
opting for these things for market reasons and basically, like,
the cleverness of innovators and entrepreneurs are going to turn
markets for us and save us from ourselves. There was very little
of that in the book, I take it you just don't credit that.


Stephen Markley


No, that's not quite the case. I think the whole experience of
writing it, that was not happening yet, or it was happening, but
it was like slower. It's really turned up in the last few years
and so for me, it was just like, no introducing geothermal energy
that suddenly solves all our problems. I couldn't slip that in
and pretend like this is going to be the solution, even though,
who the f**k knows, maybe it will.


David Roberts


Who knows?


Stephen Markley


Right. So, I just think that was an element of the book that,
sort of, I was not eager to shove into it. At the same time, I
have become more excited about the possibility that stupid
capitalism is actually on our side, suddenly.Aand at the same
time, I do feel like these incumbent industries, fossil fuels,
are going to put up a way more voracious fight than a lot of
people are thinking about right now.


David Roberts


Yeah, one of the striking things about your book is they don't
quit. The Eastern seaboard basically gets flooded and they still
don't quit.


Stephen Markley


I mean, look, they're going around I would listen to that podcast
with what the gentleman who was talking about...they're going
around to a bunch of communities trying to gin up resistance to
clean energy that will benefit those communities. And they're
just really good at it.


David Roberts


Yeah, they are good at it. So, I want to get to audience
questions before too awful long, but speaking of—this kind of
gets back to the capitalism thing—sort of at the end—if we can do
this without spoilers—you could have, very easily, I think, and
very plausibly, ended this with sort of everything falling apart
and everyone dying. Just, sort of, like dissolution on the
horizon as far as you look, and that would have been 100%
defensible. So how much did you...this is like the most cliché
question in the world.


Stephen Markley


I can't wait.


David Roberts


How much did you worry about, "Do I want people to throw
themselves out of a window after I read this book? Or to what
extent do I need a happy ending?" Insofar as you can call a story
where hundreds of thousands of people are dying and getting
driven out of their homes and migrating and whatever else, happy.


Stephen Markley


Right, but we're in this very bizarre situation now where we're
talking about stopping the heating of the planet at two degrees
is the happy ending, which seems insane. And so I guess the book,
without spoiling anything, the book lands on a knife's edge,
right. It's pretty much exactly what we're looking at right now,
which is: we have every tool we need to rapidly decarbonize the
global economy. We could be growing much faster. Some of the
terrifying results are already baked in because we waited too
long and it's going to be, you know, the fight of several
generations to turn this thing around.


And I just think, like, the book ends as really that effort has
gotten underway at the scale that it actually needs to affect the
correct change, though.


David Roberts


Yeah, it takes quite a few body blows before that comes around.
Another thing, I really appreciate it in the book, I felt this
about, "Don't Look Up 2" the movie. Anytime you tell me a work of
fiction is about climate change, I go in pre-grimacing and do it
completely tensed up.


Stephen Markley


Me too.


David Roberts


Completely tensed up stuff, watching for...it's, like a doctor
watching ER or whatever. You catch all the little things. But one
thing I was glad you didn't do is this notion that once a
disaster is big enough, right. Once there's a spectacular
headlining, grabbing enough disaster, it's like a shock. And then
everybody is like, "Oh, you're right, we do need to do something
about this." And everybody swings around and gets supportive. And
as you show in the book—show rather than tell, which I
appreciated—it causes some people to do that, but it causes just
as many other people react to trauma with fear and nativism and
nationalism and anger.


Stephen Markley


I think the most important thread in the book is, there's one of
the sections is called "Feedbacks." And feedbacks, we all know
what climate feedbacks are, but the most important feedback is us
as humans is what are we going to do? And unfortunately, one of
those feedbacks is the worse things get, the more of that starts
to come out. And it's just even more reason to arrest this as
quickly as possible because those effects will accrue that kind
of resentment, nativism, hostility. It's so inevitable. And so I
think making sure that was ever present in the book was, sort of,
a key thematic aim.


David Roberts


Yeah, there's a president who runs on...this is something I've
had in my head for a long time. A president who runs on like, "We
need to put up big walls to keep all these migrants out, and we
need to hoard our fossil fuels and dig up all our fossil fuels."


Stephen Markley


Carbon maximalism is the name of the...


David Roberts


We have an island here, a walled island, and we're protected from
the rest of the world going to hell. And of course, it doesn't
and can't work, but 100% plausible that someone...


Stephen Markley


2024 will probably bring about that candidate.


David Roberts


Yeah, you got to wonder.


Stephen Markley


You're shaking your head, but, y'know.


David Roberts


Okay, well, I want to hear from y'all, so if anyone has
questions, please. The question was, "How far out into the future
does the novel go?"


Stephen Markley


It ends in the 2040s, so it starts in our recent recognizable
past, 2013. So we get like, a taste of where we've all been and
then ends in the 2040s.


David Roberts


Yeah, it really is like present day, you're familiar with,
marching right forward to your tomorrow and the day after
tomorrow. It's very disturbing in that way...how smoothly it goes
from a very familiar situation to things going fucked up in
sideways in all kinds of ways.


So the question is about this perpetual argument in the climate
space over individual action and individual responsibility versus
structural infrastructural political changes. And as a god-like
narrator, you get to choose which of those works more in the end.
Did you have that in your head as you were writing?


Stephen Markley


Yeah. There's no point in the book when flight-shaming solves
anything that's actually...


David Roberts


Plastic recycling, though.


Stephen Markley


Yeah, right. I'm sure we share this sense, which is very quickly
into my very basic intellectual encounter with the climate
crisis, even back in when I was in college, was like, "Oh, all
this stuff is like, mostly virtue signaling garbage." And that's
not to say, like, people should live their lives as ethically as
they can and they want to like I don't want to like, denigrate
anybody who does that stuff. It's just that, like, chirping about
it doesn't help anything. We really, really need to accrue
political power and change things at system levels, as David
often says. It's the most vital thing.


David Roberts


But what about just a slight twist on the question, which is
rather than personal action in the, "Buy a hemp tote bag, drive a
Prius, to..."


Stephen Markley


How to green your Netflix binge.


David Roberts


That type of thing. What about personal responsibility for
activism and political engagement?


Stephen Markley


I love that and I wish that was...what do they have memes now? I
wish that was a meme somewhere on the Tiktok.


David Roberts


I think they're called memes. Anyone in the audience?


Stephen Markley


Because it is. And just, you know, I was reading Hal Harvey's
book, "The Big Fix," which I very much recommend, which is about
this topic. And there's a story in Montgomery County, Maryland
where a bunch of high school students were agitating about their
disgusting diesel-fueled buses and it led to the county
electrifying the bus fleet. And that seems like a small thing,
but if you start multiplying that across school districts around
the country, it's not a small thing. And it dovetails with the
strategy that has emerged, which is electrify everything and
crush demand for fossil fuels. So I think those are the sort of
actions we have to look towards.


And particularly cities like Seattle and LA and all these other
sort of liberals, like bastions, can go a long way in
implementing policy and nobody pays attention to any of this. So
a little bit of action goes such a long way. Him back there?


David Roberts


The question was, "If you, in a dark alley sometime, come face to
face with a climate denier, is there anything in particular, any
strategy or fact or emotional valence that you have found useful
in moving such?"


Stephen Markley


Yeah, so what I like to do is get super upset and really dive
into all my facts and just present them in a logical way and get
angrier and angrier as the conversation progresses.


David Roberts


Don't forget footnotes.


Stephen Markley


Yeah. I pull up on my phone, articles from the New York Times and
I'm like, "Wait, look, Paul Krugman says this," and that works
every time and it's all fine. I think like I, you know, you don't
have to say it's, like, look at the Exxon documents from the
1970s. Like they knew. tTheir scientists were out studying this.
They said the world was going to go to hell if they kept doing
what they were doing. So you don't have to take my opinion for
it. You can go look at what Chevron had to say.


But no, to seriously, answer your question, though, I do think
the tech has suddenly become this very interesting tool, which is
like, anybody who has an electric heat pump—my dad won't shut the
f**k up about his electric heat pump. Not that he's a climate
denier. But it's like they should put warnings on that, on
electric heat pumps that say, "Your dad might talk about this for
a year."


David Roberts


I know. Warning to your neighbors: Do not engage on the heat
pump.


Stephen Markley


Exactly. There are these ways of just saying, "you should at
least try this thing out," that I think once people start
experiencing this very better way of producing heat and energy,
it will not move the needle on denialism, but it will at least
maybe a little crack or a fisher here or fisher there.


David Roberts


Yeah. If I could just add, like, I've been at this since early
2000s or whatever, and in the early 2000s, there weren't a lot of
people who cared one way or the other. So it was mostly, like, a
tiny handful of us who cared and a tiny handful of jackass
deniers who were paid to disagree. And I spent several years
going back and forth with them and quickly realized a couple of
things. One is: if you find people who are invested in denying,
they're usually that way ideologically, and you will not change
their mind. And the right strategy is to turn around and walk in
the other direction as fast as possible.


The vastly larger problem is: poorly informed and mildly
disengaged. Like, the vast bulk of people just don't know that
much and don't care that much. And how to get them involved is a
much, much bigger and more important question than how to turn
around some jerk off.


So the question was: what was most helpful to you in your
research about how to address the problem? And I guess that
can...because there is just for you have not read it. To my great
delight, there are some pretty weeds-y discussions of policy.
There are rooms full of people discussing policy in some detail,
which is just totally my thing. Again, not allowed to mention me.
What sources did you find helpful?


Stephen Markley


I just mentioned "The Big Fix," which was written by this guy,
Hal Harvey. He's been on...I discovered him through David's
writing, but he works at Energy Innovation, which is a think
tank. They were advising Congress on the IRA. And I was so
grateful a person who works there read the book for me and sort
of advised me on everything. And I'm just so relieved that there
are people who are like, "Alright, what is step A? Let's do step
A, and then we'll move to step B, and then we'll go to C."


And it's just that sort of level of thinking of, like, what are
the things in society driving this crisis? How do we change them,
right? I would be remiss also if I didn't recommend a book by my
good friend Lisa Wells, who is here called "Believers." It is a
terrific nonfiction book. I read it in the midst of writing "The
Deluge" and it's like one of those books that sort of, like, made
me feel what I'm supposed to feel right now in the midst of this.
And I think that's, as we were saying, like, if that's a
difficult thing to do, like all of this just sort of exists in
this haze. And every once in a while there's in a weather event
that freaks us out. But then we all go back to normal. And even
those of us who care about it have a hard time sort of holding on
to it. So I very much appreciated those books that I read that
was like, no, no, this is keep your eye trained on this.


David Roberts


And of course, to add fiction is one of the things that can do
that in a way that no nonfiction can. And sort of like reading
about this scientist who's been discussing these very sort of
cold, wonky things, the whole book careening through a burning
Los Angeles to try to save his daughter from her apartment. It
really makes things visceral for you.


So the question is about why there was so little climate fiction
or art for so long, and now it seems like it's kind of bubbling
up now. There's a couple of big things popping out, really big
ambitious works, and whether you have any thoughts on why that's
happening. And I'll say, whenever I say on Twitter or whatever,
"Oh, there's not enough climate art," people start throwing
obscure climate art at me and obscure climate novels. But in
terms of big, popular culture stuff, really, this book is the
first because you'll get lots of books that are, like, dystopic
and you're like, "Oh, it's like an analogy to climate change
hovers in the background or whatever." This is about climate
change more squarely than any work of art I've ever met. So what
do you make of that?


Stephen Markley


I think it's bizarre as well. And it's sort of in the course of
writing this book, I was somewhat terrified that someone would
come along and preempt me with the same thing, basically. And it
never really happened. And I don't know, I might get in trouble
for this, but I'll just take you through this story. I work in
Hollywood now, I don't know if you saw my picture with Tom Hanks.
It's up on Instagram. Okay. But we went out with "The Deluge"
early to see if we could gin up interest in an option.


And I just got the same question in every meeting, right, which
was basically to the effect of, like, "Well, what about the
people who don't believe in climate? Like, I believe in climate
change, but what about the people who don't? What's in this for
them?" And I always found that, like, the most bizarre,
mind-blowing thing, because when you're in it, you're like, this
is the most important f*****g thing to ever happen to humans.
Like, let alone...


David Roberts


Yeah, like somebody proposing a pandemic movie. Like, we don't
believe in pandemics.


Stephen Markley


Right? So to me, there is this weird still, and this is a
testament to the power of the propaganda laid out by the fossil
fuel industry. There is still, in the US especially, this sort of
idea that it is this highly-politicized issue, which it is, but
in a way that you can't even make art about it because it will
prickle people. At least that's my Hollywood opinion. As for
fiction, I think there are quite a few climate novels, but I
think they do exactly what you're talking about a lot of the
time, which is they're not addressing the issue, they're coming
at it from allegory or whatever else it might be. And the project
of "The Deluge" was like, okay, straight to the f*****g eye,
let's do this. Let's get every issue in this complex subject on
the table.


David Roberts


Yeah, if you want an explanation for why there hasn't been, I
just think because it's super f*****g hard. Like, climate is
everything. It is literally everything. It's every fiscal system,
every political system. It's like social system, it's emotional,
it's allegorical, it's everything. So, it's one thing to
understand that intellectually, but fiction is all about
specificity. That's what I was trying to get out of my first
question. Taking all that and deciding this specific thing,
that's just mind blowing to me, and I understand entirely why
people haven't done it. It sounds really hard. I'm still waiting
for the first good climate movie. I don't know, "Don't Look Up"
did this, sort of, like, analogy thing.


Stephen Markley


Yeah, I mean, I listened to the podcast with...what's his face?
Adam McKay, sorry.


David Roberts


McKay, yes.


Stephen Markley


I hope he's listening to that right now.


David Roberts


Famed Academy Award winning director, Adam McKay. I expect in
coming years there will be more attempts at this. I sort of hope
that, you did the sort of needful, which is like directly
grappling with the horns. But there's ways to get at this through
genre. You could do a horror, you could do a heist movie. You can
think of lots of different ways you could weave climate change
in. That's what I'd like to see is not necessarily just a ton of
stuff directly about climate change, but just more ambient
climate change in culture. Just sort of more of an
acknowledgement that it's whatever story you're telling and
whatever you're doing, it's there. It's around you.


Stephen Markley


So, David, you're telling me you have not watched the film
"Hurricane Heist"? Because that...


David Roberts


I have, actually!


Stephen Markley


Yeah, see! What are you talking about? It's a classic, yeah.


David Roberts


I thought that movie was so terrible that literally no one else
in the world would watch it. I'm glad you have the same appetite
for terrible movies.


Anybody else?


Audience Member


But did you sell the options?


Stephen Markley


No, it's still available, Adam McKay.


David Roberts


Dear Academy Award winning director Adam McKay...


Stephen Markley


Yeah, back there.


David Roberts


So the question is: was it cathartic to write this for a decade
or did you find it innervating to wallow and apocalypse?


Stephen Markley


Yeah, I definitely thought it was emotionally exhausting, and
especially about at the 60% mark or maybe the 70% mark, when I
had sort of set in motion the wheels of all these multi-faceted
crises happening at once. And I just, like, it felt too real to
myself. For me, really, like, the point when I had to shift my
own thinking on it was when I started to explore, like, okay, who
are the people out there actually trying to do something about
this? Not setting their hair on fire, not bemoaning humans as a
virus on the planet, but just like, what systems do we have to
change in order to do this?


That's when I started to orient myself a little bit more
productively towards the task at hand. Then it was being edited
in the middle of 2020 during the pandemic, during the riot of the
Capitol, like, all that s**t that just seemed like, "okay, my
book, it's, like, not scary enough," you know?


David Roberts


So, yeah, what about the riot? What about January 6? That happens
during the time period of the book, right?


Stephen Markley


Either way, without any spoilers, the way I found out about
January 6 was my friend, an early reader texted me and said, "How
does it feel to be clairvoyant?" And I did not enjoy turning on
the television to find out what he meant.


David Roberts


We'll leave it at that. You have to read the book. When will
there be an audiobook and are you going to be involved in it?


Stephen Markley


It is available right now, and I am not reading any of it. So,
you can listen to better people than me.


David Roberts


Anybody else? Yeah, go ahead. Do you get into the role of animal
agriculture in climate change in the book?


Stephen Markley


A bit through one of the most vociferous characters, who's a
vegan and sort of forces her partner to become one, as most
vegans do.


David Roberts


Hello. There they are.


Stephen Markley


Oh, wow. It's like that spot-on or something. But also there's
this moment at the end when basically a character is laying out,
okay, like, what do we do? And agricultural policy, of course,
plays a role in that, yeah.


David Roberts


Am I dreaming? But people aren't eating beef by the end of the
book for some reason? Am I making that up? It wasn't like a
policy or anything. Just like, all the cows died, or I may be
making stuff up at this point.


Stephen Markley


Yeah, it's basically like the US government goes around buying up
livestock and then basically shutters the industry, I think, is
what you're...


David Roberts


Yes, that happens. In that sense, something quite dramatic on
that.


Stephen Markley


But then you need to precipitate a crisis like in the book, and I
think we need to avoid that. Yeah.


David Roberts


So this is a question about writing process, and it is a big,
sprawling book. It's got lots of characters in it, and the
question is, sort of, how many is enough? How many is too many?
How do you know when you're representing everything you want to
represent. What's the thinking there?


Stephen Markley


Have you read "Ohio"? Okay, yeah. So with "Ohio," it's like I had
the four characters the whole time and knew exactly who everybody
was. With this, I probably started off with ten or eleven point
of view characters. And as the book progressed, it became clear,
like, you're biting off way more than you can chew. And so, they
began to drop away. And I think in the last edit, basically,
between me and my editor, I cut one more. It was hard because
when...


David Roberts


Do you know how many you ended up with?


It's seven, basically. But when you have to cut out a whole
character, it hurts. It's like chopping off your arm, right? And
so I think, like, that last hurdle of getting rid of...but the
book had to move. It had to be, and I think it is, like, very
readable, very page turnery. And I think that was something my
editor and I discussed that was vital, that a book this size with
this much policy and science and so many ideas packed into it, it
really had to be aggressively interesting. And so a few of the
characters who I thought were vital, it turns out they kind of
weren't.


Stephen Markley


And once you've cut it, once it's gone, you don't miss your arm
anymore.


David Roberts


No phantom pains.


Stephen Markley


No phantom pains.


David Roberts


Yeah. I just want to say for those of you who have read Kim
Stanley Robinson, "Ministry for the Future", I always want to say
"Swiss Family Robinson." I don't know, once I say...


Stephen Markley


That's a different type almost!


David Roberts


...like that's not It! "Ministry for the Future." "Ministry for
the Future" is a very, like, it says fiction on the cover but
it's, like, a little bit of fiction with a lot of, like, white
papers sprinkled throughout, which is, like, great if you just
want to learn. You'll learn a lot by reading it. But just to be
clear, this is not that. This is an actual novel. An actual
page-turner of a novel, and not just a bunch of learning, a bunch
of briefs.


Stephen Markley


David Roberts. F**k learning.


David Roberts


Yeah, enough with this learning. Thank you, everyone.


Stephen Markley


Thank you so much for coming out. I really appreciate it. Thank
you, David.


David Roberts


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