Ep. 10. Stephen Markley: Diving into The Deluge

Futureverse

In this episode of Futureverse, Molly Wood and Ramanan Raghavendran interview author Stephen Markley to dive deep into his novel, The Deluge. Through a meticulous exploration of a progressively destabilizing world, Markley illustrates the possible futures we might face if we fail to act on climate now.

The conversation explores the American-centric narrative, climate denialism, surveillance capitalism, and the political dimensions of climate action.

Time stamps and the full transcript are below. This episode is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Show Notes

(02:10) Stephen Markley Discusses The Deluge

(06:00) Focusing on the Science

(07:06) The Frightening Reality of Methane Hydrates and Climate Change

(14:23) Crafting Climate Fiction to Emotionally Engage Readers

(19:08) Worst Case Scenario or Possible Future?

(24:32) The Impact of Surveillance Capitalism on Society and Democracy

(30:43) Influences and Inspirations

(32:30) Climate Fiction's Coastal Differences and Future Urban Resilience

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Stephen (00:00): There is nowhere safe, there is no place to hide, and your canned food and shotgun will not help you. This is either something we are going to solve together or we're not going to solve at all.

Molly (00:10): Welcome back to Futureverse, a podcast centered around climate fiction and how it helps us imagine our way forward through climate uncertainty. Hey everyone, I'm Molly Wood.

Ramanan (00:19): And I'm Ramanan Raghavendran. As climate investors, we spend a lot of time thinking about the future both near and far. Climate fiction helps us imagine these possible futures, and this is especially true when it comes to The Deluge, the latest novel by American author, Stephen Markley.

Molly (00:36): The Deluge is a very big book, over 900 pages in length. I set it on a pillow, which I highly recommend as a life tip for reading. It spans, as I mentioned, over 900 pages, but also four decades from 2013 into the 2040s. It uses a huge cast of characters and narrative techniques to explore the gradual but inescapable breakdown of society as a direct result of climate change.

Ramanan (01:02): This is a second novel and has been in the making for 13 years. We're thrilled to be talking to him today to understand how he went about creating such a meticulously detailed and unnervingly realistic book and what he thinks it tells us about what our society should do to prevent or mitigate a full-blown climate crisis.

Molly (01:22): Steve, thanks for coming on.

Stephen (01:24): Thank you for having me.

Ramanan (01:26): We're going to launch right into our questions as we are want to do.

Stephen (01:30): Let's do it.

Ramanan (01:30): So question one is, many climate fiction books take an indirect route to approaching climate change, and I should rephrase that. Many fiction books with climate at their heart take an indirect route to approaching climate change, exploring it through analogy or using it as the backdrop against which you dive into characters playing out their own stories. But in The Deluge, climate change is at the very heart of the novel. And what led you to decide that? To focus on it so intensely?

Stephen (02:00): Well, to me, the interesting element is not... I think there are many stories that approach it from, "This species is acting weird and what does this mean about our relationship to nature?" And it's all very ephemeral and hard to wrap your hands around it and I might just be a more logical, hard-headed person.

(02:10): I was interested in exploring the ideas of, "Why are we in the position we're in and what do we do about it?" And that's at the core of the novel and when you start following those tributaries, it leads to a thousand-page book.

There are just so many angles and avenues I wish to explore and I just found it like such a fascinating process. It was very selfishly my own way of reckoning with what is happening with what is the most important story of my lifetime.

Molly (02:52): And I'm curious to get your take on a very American tale. It's been described as a follow-up to Ohio and I wonder if these various narratives do take place principally in the USA and touch on a lot of the societal issues that we're facing right now. Do you think it has lessons for the rest of the world?

Stephen (03:11): Yeah, well, let me back up and say that my very initial conception of the novel was that it would be a global novel. When I was thinking about it and beginning it in the years from roughly let's say 2007 to 2011, sort of bridged the time when I was about to start it, my first idea was like, "This will be global. It will travel the world, it will have characters from everywhere." And quickly I realized just the American context was worthy of about 2000 pages by itself.

And furthermore, I think as an American author, obviously you can tell from my flat Midwestern accent, I was interested in not only what our country has done to perpetuate the crisis, but also its responsibility in doing something about it.

(03:55): I'm often reminded of that old Winston Churchill saying that, "America usually does the right thing after it's exhausted all of their options." And I often think of the Inflation Reduction Act in that regard. But basically, I wanted to look at the way in which the climate crisis was an American problem. And in just that little slice of it, was so important and so deathly serious that I quickly abandoned any other pretense to the context of the rest of the world.

Even though obviously the majority of future emissions are coming from China and India, we have to pay enormous attention to those developments. I'm not unaware of that, but I thought the American political, economic, and social context were the most interesting to me.

Ramanan (04:39): Super helpful. And we've had authors from outside the US here, and I think it's just really interesting too, in some ways narrow perspectives rather than trying to solve the entire world's problems in a work of fiction which brings me to, you imagined a gradual shift towards societal breakdown rather than a cataclysmic event, which we have seen in some other works of fiction that touch on climate. What said no, we're not going to do the Sturm und Drang of some enormous event. It's going to be something...

Stephen (05:15): Right. Well, I mean-

Molly (05:16): Slow and painful.

Stephen (05:17): Yeah. I think first of all, it's just like I set the parameters for myself that I'm going to follow the absolute realism of the science. I'm not going to go searching for the cataclysmic event, I'm not going to go looking for the end-of-days scenario. I want to understand what scientists are saying.

And I think this is especially important, the range of possibilities ahead of us because this is all very educated guesswork as to how bad this will be. And I think from my perspective watching those, “how bad will this be” scenarios ratchet upwards even as we work to cut emissions has been incredibly frightening.

(06:00): We're seeing such radical events and trends based on raising the temperature of the planet roughly only 1.2 degrees, and we're steering rapidly past what's most people think is the safe threshold of 1.5. So I think that was the parameter I set for myself. Think about this as realistically as possible.

So what you don't see is the day after tomorrow, super storm changing the entire weather of the planet. What you see are these little signs and signals of breakdown in various parts of the world that are water-stressed, that have enormous problems with heat, that find agricultural production collapsing. And how those effects then turn into what we see in the news and trying to gather the trends into a narrative. And that was what was vital.

Molly (06:48): I want to ask about... I have so many fears, all of which have been profoundly exacerbated by this book, and also you introduced a bit of a new one to me in the methane hydrates.

Stephen (07:05): Correct.

Molly (07:06): You've done the exhaustive research, so I'm going to let you explain the science a bit. But, which is a little like not science fiction-y, less proven, super terrifying plot point. So I just want you to dig into that one specific if you will, so that everyone can share my new terror. My new worst fear.

Stephen (07:25): Yeah. So methane hydrates to quote the great scholar Donald Rumsfeld “is one of those known unknowns”. Methane hydrates are deposits of methane trapped in lattice-like structures of ice that litter the world's oceans. And basically if these methane hydrates were to melt, it would be game over for civilization as we know it. The planet would begin to warm so rapidly there would be nothing we could do about it.

That's just one of the many time bombs built into our planet's biosphere that we know about. But we just don't know what the effects of our anthropogenic raising of temperatures, what we're doing with fossil fuel emissions will do to those hydrates. But when you start peeling back layers of it, the majority of scientists think, "Well, those probably won't melt for hundreds if not thousands of years so we have time."

But if they were to start melting, it would be as frightening as an asteroid heading for the planet. It's one of those many things that we're opening when we open this Pandora's box. We don't quite know what will go out, which is all the more reason we should work as hard and fast as possible to stop emitting carbon dioxide so we can stabilize the atmosphere of the planet.

Molly (08:42): But no, I thought that was such an interesting... It's like there's the slow-motion cataclysm and then this ever-present other potential cataclysm that just is nightmare on top of nightmare.

Ramanan (08:53): No, I mean when you explained it in this very learned manner, it somehow struck a deeper terror in my heart.

Molly (08:59): Yeah, it's way worse.

Ramanan (09:00): Yes.

Molly (09:01): Yep.

Stephen (09:02): You're welcome.

Molly (09:02): Yeah.

Ramanan (09:03): So I'm going to talk about the structure of the book. Why choose to start in 2013 and how did this feed into the writing process to include things that were happening as you wrote it?

Stephen (09:20): Yeah. That was the hardest part of the book. It's like writing War and Peace, only you're in the middle of Russia fighting France and trying to go from there. Yeah, so the exact moment of the book's beginning moved around as my idea of when the book might be published moved around. So I actually ended up changing that a little bit.

But from the beginning, my conception of the novel was I'm going to set part one of five in the recent recognizable past so it will feel like our real political and social context. And then I'm going to jump time and elide the present, whatever that present might be of the book's publication, and pick up in as near a future as I can get to and still keep it a little far out.

(10:08): And that near future is going to feel almost exactly like our reality right now. And then I'm going to take people year by year into the next few decades as the climate crisis metastasizes. Part of the editing process was refining that so that it felt like you were walking into the future. And one of the best compliments I've gotten on the book, and I get it from multiple sources, is that people put it down and they can't remember if what they are thinking about was in the news or was in my novel. They're confused about which one-

Ramanan (10:40): That is a massive compliment and makes a lot of sense.

Stephen (10:43): For sure. For sure.

Molly (10:45): And totally true. It is a snap-out-of-it thing. Talk to me about the... I mean there's not a review that does not mention... There's not a conversation I've had about the book that doesn't mention the 900 pages and it's a function of... Like you said, just the American part of this story is the politics, the activism, the actual exploration of the political process, and the machinations. Do you worry, since this is like a Cassandra tale, do you worry about people not making it through or getting lost in those details?

Stephen (11:26): Yeah. Well, let me say a couple things. First off, this is the highly edited version of the manuscript I produced, the first one was 1500 pages. So I would just like some credit from all these Goodreads nerds that I did my best to truncate the narrative

Ramanan (11:43): And well done. Well done.

Stephen (11:45): Thank you.

Molly (11:46): Literally the answer I was hoping for. Like you know what? Suck it. Get through it.

Ramanan (11:50): I do have a follow-up question once you finish this one.

Stephen (11:54): Yeah, for sure. Look, my feeling is this; I actually, unlike a lot of reviewers apparently, love to read. It's actually something I really enjoy, right? So when I find a book that I truly care about, it could be twice as long and it wouldn't bother me. That's my feeling, is that if a book is good enough and if it's holding you, who cares how long it is. Now, Simon & Schuster disagreed and really worked hard with me to edit it down.

But I just think the book is exactly what it is. It is a thorough epic of what we're living through and I wanted to make sure I gave every one of those characters their full humanity and the full scope of the ability to express themselves and to give the reader a lens into their world and their viewpoints on what's happening. And I don't regret a word and I wouldn't change it, and I don't care if it didn't sell a fucking copy. That is the novel I needed to write.

Ramanan (12:51): I love it. We love it for raw-

Molly (12:54): I want you to drop the director's cut. Just like do it. Just go full Zack Snyder, 3000 words. Bite me nerds.

Stephen (13:01): Yeah.

Ramanan (13:01): Okay. Since our audience couldn't see that was Molly...

Molly (13:05): It was very inappropriate.

Ramanan (13:07): Was sticking two fingers up. Okay.

Molly (13:10): We call that the double barrel, where Steve and I are from.

Ramanan (13:12): So Steve, the Lord of the Rings, as many of us know, was originally one book. And I forget who published it, but they split it into the six. Did you think, "Hey, I can go full science fiction here and do it as a trilogy and each one's 300 pages and stretch this out?”

Stephen (13:33): I'd heard that idea passed around but I...

Ramanan (13:35): You said, "No."

Stephen (13:38): I like the big book.

Ramanan (13:39): I love it.

Stephen (13:40): I literally read War and Peace in the middle of writing this, and I was like, "Fuck, this book could be twice as long and I would be fine with that." I just loved it… I loved that immersiveness that the way... I was having this conversation about Killers of the Flower Moon where I was just like, yeah, I liked being able to pause it at home, but being in that immersive context to me is such a joy. Seeing a world fully realized and then staying within it and just feeling like you're a part of it is such a rare thing we see anymore in our-

Ramanan (14:12): A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

Stephen (14:13): Tension like stricken media. So that's my sense of it, but maybe I was wrong and I could have sold more copies if it was...

Ramanan (14:20): Well, we agree.

Stephen (14:22): Same with 90-page books.

Molly (14:23): Director's cut for sure. All right, let's talk about the characters. It's one of the joys of this book is the way each character arc is narrated differently, but also the way that the characters themselves develop in these really dramatic ways. Some spiral into despair, others are a little bit redeemed. Talk about deciding on these seven characters from the activist to the recovering drug addict to the eco-terrorist and on and on.

Stephen (14:55): Yeah. As you can imagine, I actually began the book with many more characters than that and had to figure out, okay, who are the essential voices in this story and why? And I had to first justify to myself why they belonged and what perspective they had on the crisis that was so vital. And that was probably one of the most difficult parts of finishing the novel was abandoning characters or folding them into lesser roles. When I would've liked to expound for another 700 pages on that. That was the first part.

And I had the ultimate shape of the novel in my head from almost the very beginning. I knew so much about what was going to happen to them. There's a scene, Tony is the scientist whose chapter opens with methane hydrates, and I knew exactly the scene that was going to end his story, I knew it from the beginning.

(15:52): And so all I had to figure out was how do we get to that moment he's having at the end of his story with his daughter. And that's just the joy of writing fiction, of being a novelist, is you're on this constant never-ending journey to understand these people who aren't real, but they begin to feel very real to you. And it's just so much fun. It's such an amazing experience. And so just discovering Kate and Tony and Matt and Keeper and Ash and all the rest, it was fantastic.

Ramanan (16:23): A lot of the listeners of our podcast and perhaps your two co-hosts here are... Well, I can't speak for Molly, are failed novelists. So hearing you live, it's just inspirational. We too, one day could do that.

Stephen (16:38): Well, I'm not good at anything else. So that, you could take.

Ramanan (16:43): So guests on this podcast often talk about how climate fiction or fiction with climate at its heart can make climate change seem a lot more real. Was any of this intentional for creating your characters so that various people of various kinds can relate to climate change? Or was it, I'm just going to tell a great story for this book?

Stephen (17:04): Yeah. Look, you don't write a 900-page book about the climate crisis and not have some idea that you want to help with this, that you want to help change people's perspectives on this. And for me, one of the hardest things I find when talking to people about this is it's so emotionally distant.

And so a project of the novel is like, okay, most of us understand intellectually what the stakes of the crisis are, but we don't understand emotionally what that means. We don't get what this catastrophe is going to unleash in terms of how it will affect our day-to-day lives, how it will make us look at our friends and family and children.

(17:46): And so to get people to grapple with the enormity of this through fiction, I think is a very worthwhile endeavor. And I just wanted to do the best possible job at bringing people into the way I view it as this is not about polar bears, it's not about oil refineries, it's about everyone we love and ever will love. This is a thing of such enormous stakes that it will echo generations from now should we find a way out of it. And so what we do in these next couple of decades is of such vast consequence and I just want people to read the novel and experience that and understand it.

Molly (18:26): Yeah. What is the line toward the end of the book? It's basically like this horror has no conclusion or no ending. And I do want to, this is where the other thing to point out, I think is that this is pretty unrelentingly brutal. And I'm like, "I'm a mom. I'm just trying to get through this. What have I done?" But I want to explore that. Do you think that, because we often look at climate fiction as a way to understand what's happening, to make sense of it, to imagine, is this the future you really think will happen?

Stephen (19:06): Yeah. Let me make a couple-

Molly (19:08): Or is it the worst-case scenario in book form?

Stephen (19:14): Okay, let's back up and do a couple of quick points. One is that I was once talking to a scientist friend of mine, who had read my novel and given me his thoughts on it. And he said, "Yeah, the only thing I see wrong with it, is that the ending is way too happy. It's way too optimistic." And I was like, "Oh. Well, there you go." So where you stand depends on where you sit.

But I will say this, I truly do believe that because we've waited so long to act, and we will almost certainly raise the planet's temperature by 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial norms, probably two degrees, we are in for a period of disruption and pain and a lot of death and suffering, that will be shocking beyond what most people can comprehend currently. I think that is somewhat baked in at this point.

(20:07): And the question will be, can we mitigate the damage we've done and eventually reverse it in this century? That's an enormous project. It requires so much political will, it requires such a comprehensive international effort, it requires voters and citizens and people living their normal lives to be engaged with this. But it is definitely still possible.

And that is something I hope the book gets across, is that it is not too late and there's still so much work to be done. And partially the book being set in the future is to show us what I think is a medium-case scenario of how bad things could get and then lay out a path out of it.

(20:54): And I really do think in the last few years it's gone unnoticed almost entirely about what incredible work is being done in service of decarbonization. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, just as one example, was to me fairly surprising. I was very skeptical that bill couldn't make it through. And now that it has, we're seeing just this absolute supercharging of clean energy technologies and clean energy deployment all around the world, and it's suddenly becoming this race to the future. I think if we can keep up momentum on that, that is going to start showing people the keyhole that we can squeeze through to get out of this. But on the other hand, it's still just a keyhole.

Ramanan (21:43): Right. That was a more eloquent and impassioned explanation of what lies ahead than most of the founders that Molly and I meet in our day jobs. So that brings up a very random question, have you considered running for elected office?

Stephen (22:00): Oh my God, I have so many skeletons in my closet. There's no way.

Molly (22:03): Does that matter anymore?

Ramanan (22:05): It doesn't matter anymore.

Stephen (22:06): Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Molly (22:10): It might matter on one side, but not the other side.

Stephen (22:15): I have so little interest in that, it's astonishing. But I am a firm believer in the democratic process, and I encourage people to think about the ways that this is accessible to them. When I was on book tour, it was all over the country, but especially I'd be back in the Midwest where it is typically viewed as like, "Oh, this dumb Trump country." And I couldn't believe all the people who had come up to me with just great ideas and so much passion and such energy.

And I do think that we get trapped in this doom spiral because we look at the internet all day and we just see idiots out there being idiots. But I got to see all these awesome people of all ages, of all races, of all genders who were just like, "Let's do this." And so I have had a much more heartening experience in the last year since the publication of the novel.

Molly (23:07): That is heartening on so many levels, not least of which is because it shows maybe some growing immunity to the misinformation and propaganda that is also a big part of the book and the fossil fuel influence on what we know or think we know. So talk about that narrative and how a lot of what we think isn't even true.

Stephen (23:31): Yeah. Well, let me talk about two separate pieces. One is that climate denialism is not some organic thing that's sprung out of the woodwork. It is an incredibly well-funded piece of infrastructure of our society that fossil fuel companies began as early as the 1980s, even earlier, and really picked up steam in the 1990s when suddenly politicians became interested in doing something about climate change.

And it is developed and it has become more sophisticated. I think it's doing its work even more effectively now than before, just in terms of spreading both denial but also delayism, which is sort of like, "Ah, we don't know how bad this would be. Man, electric cars, sometimes it gets cold and they don't work as well." It's shit like that. And so I think that there's nothing to be done about that in our current context except for try to combat it as best we can.

(24:32): The other piece of the book and a major theme that I feel like I was late to when I was writing in it and only sort of started to really dive into in about 2015 right before the election, was the incredibly poisonous effect surveillance capitalism has had on our functioning as a society and on democracy.

I often think that if we had numbers to put on a spreadsheet that showed when this terrorist group came into America in 2012, they started killing all these teenagers, we would've started a war by now. But instead, we've just let these big tech companies collect our data, make us all insane.

Yes, exactly. Make us all insane, and especially really devastate teenagers, particularly teenage girls, and nobody's doing anything about it, and they basically go to these congressional hearings and then admit they're doing it and it's nothing happens.

So I really think people of all political parties should be looking at what these tech companies are doing with this data they collect, and if our right to privacy doesn't supersede their right to collect our data and exploit our behavior.

Ramanan (25:44): Right.

Molly (25:45): For those who are listening, first of all, stop clapping, we'll wait for the applause. That “exactly” moment - was that I have on my bookshelf, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, which you should all read, which talks about how that data collection inevitably tips over into manipulation because it's just that much more efficient. And also see, I love a big book, I got no problem with that.

Stephen (26:09): Exactly. Exactly.

Molly (26:10): Yeah.

Ramanan (26:11): Okay, let's talk about it, action. By that, I mean you talked on Seth Meyers's show about the potency of our actions as citizens of today's world, and people are lost, I'm lost and I do this for a living. And how can people tell the difference between, okay, this act is working and this act is not going to work?

Stephen (26:34): Yeah. Well, I'm a big critic of lifestyle branding of our consumer behavior. I think that's a really, really bad avenue that environmentalism went down for a long time. And it's not even the fault of many people who are environmentalists, it's just like when action about helping the planet becomes another consumer edifice, it loses all purpose and doesn't work and makes people angry on the opposite side anyway.

What we need in order to avert a climate cataclysm is enormous action at the government level, the state level. However, every person remains a political nodule in whatever sense that they are, that they exist. And so I always tell people, if you want to cut your carbon footprint, look at the biggest things you use that produce carbon; your car, your furnace, the lack of solar panels and a battery storage system on your roof, those are the quickest ways. But, more importantly is the political context, is voting, and not just in the presidential election every four years, it's voting for city council members who want to install more EV chargers.

(27:41): It's getting to your local school board and saying, "Hey, the Inflation Reduction Act actually lets you just put solar panels on the roofs of schools, maybe we should do that." It's finding out where you are in your life and doing something about it. I think college campuses are an incredibly important part of this because they have energy systems that you can decarbonize pretty rapidly, and they're big political players inside of their cities and their states.

And so what we're trying to do right now until we can get bigger federal action, is electrify everything and crush demand for fossil fuels. So every EV purchased, every solar panel installed, every electric heat pump installed, that is crushing demand for fossil fuels and making it harder for those companies to propagandize and to make money that they use to propagandize. That's my basic pitch for what we are as individuals inside of this.

Molly (28:34): Yeah, I mean it seems to me that those signals do really matter, even if sometimes those signals are like, "I switched to compostable wipes." It all starts to add up. But to your point, I wonder combining the idea of both propaganda and consumer action, there is also this climate denialism that's wrapped up in the defeatism. You can't do anything as an individual.

Stephen (28:56): Let me just say the most important thing you can do for our climate and our planet is obviously buying copies of The Deluge for as many people as possible. That is really the key to decarbonization.

Molly (29:04): For sure. Printed copies.

Ramanan (29:09): Buy on the Kindle by God.

Stephen (29:11): Yes. But no, defeatism I think is also... It's almost more annoying because it's like the people who have chosen to understand everything and then want to very snottily say, "Well, until we end capitalism, there's nothing we can do, so we might as well throw up our hands."

Ramanan (29:28): Right.

Stephen (29:28): It drives me absolutely bonkers, and I think it's obviously not true is the other thing, empirically it's not true. We know exactly how to decarbonize our way to solving 80% of this problem with all the technology we have right now, the other technologies we're going to need are going to be ready for prime time by the 2030s. This is doable, we can do this. And so everybody's sitting around saying like, "Oh, well, I guess we'll die." Those are privileged people who think they can just enjoy their lives until they'll be the last ones on the lifeboat. So I don't really truck with that.

Molly (30:04): Yep. Plus they're the ones-

Stephen (30:05): Sorry, are you guys getting... I'm a lot. I understand I'm a lot.

Molly (30:08): No, I'm fired up. Let’s go.

Ramanan (30:11): We were prepped because it's this 900-page book, so we came in fortified.

Molly (30:17): That is a lot on your heart.

Ramanan (30:20): Last year, we had Kim Stanley Robinson on the show who talked about his book, The Ministry of the Future, and there are some, I don't know if comparisons is the wrong word, but in the same continent perhaps as The Deluge, both are said in the near future, both have a lot of characters and interweaving stories and obviously both are focusing on-

Stephen (30:39): I should stop you. I have not read it. So if this question is about... Okay.

Ramanan (30:43): So the question is actually a meta question, which is who do you take inspiration from? Who in the fiction universe? Dostoevsky?

Stephen (30:53): Yeah. Obviously Dostoevsky, who I view as the Russian Stephen Markley.

Molly (31:00): He's your Russian daddy.

Stephen (31:01): Yeah.

Ramanan (31:01): Okay, we got our cold open. That's it. That's it right there.

Stephen (31:08): So whenever I get that question, I always revert to an author's influences to me are so multifaceted, it's so hard to describe what happens to you in your development, right? That I noticed in the thing you sent me, I typically just pick out some of the people that when I was a young person lit my world on fire. Also, I always notice how they're all men, I of course get that, but Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, Tarantino, Spike Lee.

When I was just learning that writing stories is awesome, those were the authors and filmmakers I was encountering, and I was just so enamored, I was like, "How did you do that?" When I read The Stand, I was like, "Oh my God, how did you do that?" I recently rewatched The 25th Hour, Spike Lee's movie, and I remember watching that for the first time and just being so gobsmacked about what an interesting take this was on post 9/11 New York, and had nothing to do with 9/11, yet it was all about 9/11. And I was just like, "How do you do that?" And I think it's those early experiences of seeing people create these masterful stories that makes you want to create a masterful story.

Molly (32:20): This is a slightly random question, but it occurred to me in one of our other interviews that as I've been reading this universe of climate fiction for a long time, there seems to be, you're in LA, which is why I'm going to ask you this.

Molly (32:30): It seems like the stories that are either set in LA or come out of LA, all the way back to Octavia Butler, that's always complete disaster, like complete collapse. And to your point about New York, the ones that are set there in New York 2140 or this one we read Odds Against Tomorrow, or several others have this destruction plus resilience tone. And I'm just curious about your take on the coastal differences between how we imagine the end of the world.

Stephen (33:04): All I can do is spitball on this, but maybe everybody just wants to burn down LA. There's nothing Freudian.

Molly (33:10): It's just self-hating.

Stephen (33:14): Yeah.

Molly (33:14): Straight up.

Stephen (33:14): I think when I-

Stephen (33:16): There's a big set piece in my novel where a fire sweeps through Los Angeles, and I think I was probably sitting in traffic being like, "Let's burn this place to the ground. This is just unbearable."

Yeah, I do think New York City is actually in way more trouble than LA, so the actual realistic positions of those might be reversed. But Los Angeles has an enormous problem with water, as does the rest of the American Southwest, and that's going to get really hairy really fast in the next few decades. I do think that when it comes to these major metropoles, we are going to be defending them until our last dollar.

(33:58): So Los Angeles is going to find a way to get water, even if it means taking it from the three families that own all the farms in California.

Ramanan (34:06): Boohoo.

Stephen (34:06): That would be bad. New York is going to build seawalls and attempt to gird its infrastructure. And at the end of the day, by the end of the century, it's probably all going to be throwing bad money after bad money. So I don't know about the psychology of it, but that's just my general take on it.

Molly (34:27): Yeah. Where would you go if you were... You must have already identified your Climate Haven.

Stephen (34:33): Well, see, I get that question a lot, and mostly I'm like, "There's not really a good place."

Ramanan (34:35): No, there isn't.

Stephen (34:39): There's worse places, but part of the thing about the crisis is that it truly is global and it truly is going to reach into every corner. There is nowhere safe, there is no place to hide, your canned food and shotgun will not help you. This is either something we are going to solve together or we're not going to solve at all.

Molly (35:00): Yeah.

Ramanan (35:01): Maine? How about Maine?

Molly (35:02): I know. Just let me have Duluth though.

Ramanan (35:04): Can we have Maine?

Stephen (35:06): Yeah, Duluth is not bad.

Molly (35:08): I'll take care of it.

Stephen (35:08): Everybody move to Duluth.

Ramanan (35:10): We can go to Duluth. Okay, final question. What lies ahead? What are you working on? Does it have climate somewhere? Is there going to be a movie of The Deluge? Tell us everything.

Stephen (35:20): Hollywood, I don't know if you've heard is in a little bit of a sticky place right now, so we're waiting for that to shake out. I am working on two new books and I'm also out here because I write on television shows. I'm into screenwriting now, so I'm also doing some of that.

Ramanan (35:39): Got it. The stuff you're working on the book front, is it Climate-y?

Stephen (35:43): Well, I'm taking I think a well-earned break from climate.

Ramanan (35:50): Yes, I can see why. Yes.

Stephen (35:51): My next book is a collection of short stories. And the novel after that will be my darkest one yet, so prepare yourself.

Ramanan (35:58): Okay. If the collection of short stories can have even a one-page short story about climate, we'd like to have you back to talk about it.

Stephen (36:05): Yeah. I mean, we can squeeze it in.

Ramanan (36:07): I love it. I love it.

Stephen (36:08): Yeah. For sure.

Ramanan (36:10): I'm going to wrap us up here, you've been very generous with your time. We love The Deluge and cannot recommend enough that listeners check it out.

Stephen (36:18): Thank you so much.

Molly (36:19): Absolutely. Thanks so much, Stephen. You can find The Deluge in bookstores across the world, and you can find more about Stephen's work on his website, stephenmarkley.com. Stephen, with a P-H. Thanks so much for the time.

Ramanan (36:31): Thank you for listening. Please email us at [e-mail] with any suggestions or ideas. And visit futurverse.earth for the full transcript of this podcast and other information.

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