 Welcome to Church of the Chair, where we're all human beings being human. I'm your host, E, and today it's time for a tome. Today we're talking about The Deluge by Stephen Markley. I read Stephen Markley's first book, Ohio, which you can see here, several years ago, and it quickly became one of my top 20 books. But if you have read Ohio, and you want to read this one, I need to give you a little bit of a warning. This is nothing like Ohio. This is a massive, expansive book about climate change and how we're going to deal with it in the coming years. The first thing I want to do is read a blurb from the back of the book. I rarely do this, but this blurb is from Merritt Tears, author of Love Me Back, and it really pinpoints what I loved about this book. I will go on and tell you in more detail what I loved about it, but I wanted to read this first. A ferocious, spectacular achievement. To diagram the complexity of our situation would be sufficient proof of genius. But to also map a way out is an extraordinary, exhilarating use of fiction. That's what impressed me the most about this book, is that it is not post-apocalyptic fiction. It deals with, in media res, apocalyptic fiction. The apocalypse happening in real time via the climate crisis. Think of Stephen King's The Stand, and you're going to be hearing that a lot from me in this review. Think of Stephen King's Stand, but we never get the rebuilding of society. We only get what happens in those first few chapters as the disease spreads across the world. If you think of this book like The Stand, if The Stand were all about people rushing to find a vaccine for Captain Trips, you'll have a better idea of what this book is about. Right out the bat, I want to discuss the politics in this book because there is quite a bit of it. The vast majority of the book is about politics and trying to get politicians to take the climate crisis seriously. Now while you would expect that this book would be a holy liberal leftist agenda vomit kind of thing, you'd be absolutely wrong. There is a democratic president who ends up personally responsible for the massacre of over 700 people based on an order that they give. You have a Republican president at one point in time, Mary Randall, who is trying to actively fix the situation. So you have the political parties not really turned, not really reversed, but you have every single showcase of political power and how no matter which side of the fence it is, it can be used for bad. At the very least, I would call this a centrist book, but that doesn't really apply as much as maybe I think it does because of the sheer diversity on hand. You have every single race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sex, all of that is on display here. There is a non-binary character, there is an asexual character, there are gay characters, lesbian characters, straight characters, even polyamorous characters. And quite a few of these people that fall into the LGBTQIA community are villains in this book. But one thing I was impressed with is there was always balance. When you see a bad representation of a certain demographic, you also have the positive showcased as well. You also have every class on display here. You have people that are so impoverished they don't know how they're going to pay their rent or feed their children. You have middle-class individuals. You have the absolutely mega rich, we're talking billionaires. You have politicians, you have everyday joes, you have every single type of human being you can think of is in this book. And I was blown away by how accurately Stephen Markley made all of these people human with their own pros and cons, their own struggles, their own trials and tribulations. Every single character felt real to me no matter how small that character was and how insignificant that character was to the plot. My personal favorite character in the book is not someone you would probably assume it to be. Our character is Keeper. And Keeper is a young man living in Ohio who ends up falling in with the wrong people. His entire character arc is amazing and I could not wait to get to his chapters. Now while Ohio was a mosaic novel never going back to one character that has been showcased before, this one does alternating chapters once again very much like The Stand. And if I had to do a comparison, Keeper in this book is very much like Trashcan Man from The Stand and Trashcan Man is one of my favorite Stephen King characters of all time. Now while I have been bringing up The Stand and Stephen King quite a bit, yes I am a fanboy and yes this channel is mostly about Stephen King, I'm going to stop there and continue on with why this book feels unique to me. First off, I don't think anyone in my close friends group is going to want to read or enjoy this book if they actually do. The reasoning I have for that and I'm going to try to convince you to read it. But the reason I have for that is first off it is a tome. The series is called Time for a Tome for a Reason. It's 880 pages and there is a lot of science, there's a lot of politics and there is absolutely no escapism. He is dealing with things that are going on right now and some predictions of things he couldn't have known were coming that are happening right now. This book was published in 2022 and yet he had his finger on the pulse of what was coming. And one of the things we're going to talk about at the end of this video is how he predicted the issues we are having in creative spaces with the use of artificial intelligence. Now I said all that but that is not to say that this book does not have epic action sequences, thrilling moments, even horror in some points. You have a massive Los Angeles firestorm and that scene is very reminiscent of over the top disaster films like 2012 or a volcano and so on and so forth. That kind of thing. So you have epic moments of action and intrigue and even some romance here and there. Some very heartbreaking scenes. No one is safe in this book. There is a lot going on. But in between the big set pieces like F5 hurricanes, that's even the right categorization for a hurricane. I'm not sure if that's just for tornadoes. But you have massive hurricanes that are 140 miles across and they end up wiping out entire sections of the United States. You have massive fires. You have everything that you would think would come along with a disaster movie you have here but in a literary fiction format. In between those things you have extensive research that Markley did to get the science and the politics right. And as I discussed at the beginning of the video with the blurb that I read, Stephen Markley gives us a path forward. Is it a believable path forward that we could accomplish this? Unfortunately this cynic has to say no. But that does not mean that he wouldn't be right in it working if we could come to agreements about these things. Some points I will make, now these aren't spoilers. Some points that I will make that I just want to tell you my favorite parts of the book. A lot of my favorite parts had to do with very tense scenes because Markley does such a fantastic job building up all of these characters that you don't want to see anything bad happen to the ones that you come to care about. And no one is safe in this book. This might be a little more on the spoilery side, the end of this review. So if you want to click away now, I'm giving this a full 5 out of 5 stars. I would give it more. It's a very special and unique book to me but I can't really talk about why passed. I can't really talk about why without going into spoiler territory. So very minor spoilers coming up in 3, 2, 1 spoilers. Alan's fate was probably the biggest punch to me because it changed everything after that. You have a group of people who were trying to affect change without being violent and it ended up the necessity for violence showed up. Kate Morris' fate is another one. I kept expecting her to die here, there, wherever. I kept expecting it knowing that it was coming and needless to say, Markley completely surprised me with where Kate's story arc went. Kate is a provocateur in a way. She's a polyamorous woman in a relationship with a man who is madly in love with her named Matt and their relationship was a beautiful love story even if the love wasn't reciprocated by one of the people in the relationship. The final character arc that I completely fanboyed over is Ashir Al-Hasan who is a scientist, an absolute genius and I've always said that characters in a book are only as intelligent as its author. And to read Ash's sections, he's called Ash, he's called Hassan, he's called multiple different things throughout the book, but to read these brilliant sections I had to have a dictionary handy, not going to lie, I had to do a lot of Google-ing and a lot of research for his sections, but it was worth it to find out what he was getting at and where he was going, but also Ash is on the spectrum so he has absolutely no people skills. Okay, think, I hate to do it again, but let's go back to Stephen King for just a second. Think of Holly Gibney from the Mercedes trilogy or the Bill Hodges trilogy and the Outsider and the upcoming Holly and If It Bleeds, all that. Think of her, but think of her as someone who is obsessed with the climate and trying to save the world that does not allow their emotions to get in the way whatsoever. There are some significantly heartbreaking scenes with Ash where he cannot compartmentalize the grief that he is going through, he cannot show it, he doesn't know how to respond or react to it, and he comes across as cold-blooded and heartless, but he realizes this. And watching his arc throughout the book was, it was like watching myself, now I'm not a genius by any stretch of the imagination, but I saw so much of myself in this character, it's like I see so much of myself in Holly, it's the overthinking, the over-analyzing, the cynicism, the not seeing the purpose in traditional rituals, and yes, even so much as burying our dead, not seeing the significance, and while I understand why other people need to do that for their own grieving process, I don't understand the purpose of burying a body, and that's one of the things that was brought up by Ash in the book that I really felt was poignant, especially to me, because we realized that people have these needs, that people do these things, traditions, rituals, so on and so forth, and we can respect that while also not understanding that, and that was a beautiful message, at least for me. Now we are going to go into hard spoiler territory because I want to talk about a huge risk that the author took that I don't know if I agree with it, disagree with it, but I love books that make me think, and all that I've come to since I finished reading this was it was a massive risk on his part to go this route, but anyways, actual spoilers for a huge plot point at the end of the book in three, two, one, spoilers. So there's this climate group called Six Degrees, they call themselves Six Degrees, but the press calls them the Weathermen. They start off by blowing up industry like power plants, anything that has to do with coal or pollution, they were blowing these places up, and they're trying to enact change through that way, they end up screwing up the people who are actually making progress with politicians, they end up throwing a wrench in the gearworks for them, but then you have toward the end of the book, they decide that they are going to become violent instead of just blowing up buildings, they're going to start assassinating people. And one of the people that they assassinate is a, I would say it could be compared to maybe a Mitch McConnell, there is a character named Russ Mikowski that they end up assassinating and they end up assassinating some good people along with this senator who refuses to believe in climate change, no matter how much evidence is laid before him. And they end up changing the tide of politics because they got rid of this one person. It is a massive risk to point at a scene of assassination and say that this was for the good and there was no other way around it. Now while I agree that the events in the book happened and couldn't have happened any other way, there was no other way to change things, that's where I'm stuck, that's where I have a bit of cognitive dissonance because while I understand it was for the good, you have to make yourself a monster to defeat the monsters, that old Nietzsche thing, if you stare too long into the abyss, you know, so on and so forth. But it made me think, it made me rationalize what happened in the book, it made me dive deeper into what I would do in a situation where literally everybody's lives are on the line, do you take one life or a handful of lives to save the rest of the world? So while I do believe it was a very risky idea, I liked it because it did make me think and it made me consider what I would do if placed in that same situation. The assassination of Russ Mikowski is also probably my favorite part of the book because again it has to do with Keeper, who is my favorite, absolute favorite character in the book and I say that knowing that Keeper had a history of racism, almost joined a hate group, all that stuff ended up marrying a black woman having a mixed child and his arc is fascinating, more so than anyone else in the book and I cannot express enough how much I love this character. So hopefully I pointed out some things that you yourself would like to read in a book, it is a lengthy tome, it is definitely a time sink but I got every bit of the money that I paid for and it is an amazing accomplishment and amazing feat of literature and I really do hope that you guys will at least give it a try. I know it's not going to be for everyone but for those of you who look at this book going oh this must be liberal leftist propaganda, I would ask you to try and read it anyways and the reason I say that is because everyone, every type of human being is showcased here and it shows the good and bad in all of us. So please give it a shot. Another thing that I will say that completely blew me away is that there are no acknowledgments, there is no epigraph, there are not quotes from other books in this book. There is no afterword, there is no forward, there is one dedication at the beginning of the book to Stephen Markley's mother because she sat him down in front of a computer and said tell me a story, I believe that's how it goes. And after that there are no acknowledgments to scientists, to the research he did, nothing. Yet everything that he brings up is either proven by science or science is working on it, so on and so forth. Which brings me to my final bit, I know this review is going on long, which brings me to the final bit which is the final thing I want to mention is what I spoke about at the beginning of the book which is how prescient this book is especially about AI. I'm going to read you a section from the book, there are no spoilers in this part, but I want to read you something that really hit, really hit home for me especially since I'm a creative person and I work in writing and publishing and all that. But here you go. Tony had been skeptical when Mel's son Park had explained the ghostwriting AI to him at their first lunch, but Park declared it the wave of the future. Already many of Penguin Shuster Collins most profitable titles had been written by AI. Renowned authors fed in the broad strokes of novels and the program did the rest, like a street artist painting an enormous mural on the side of a building. The artist didn't actually get up there and paint it himself, he had a crew. Soon everyone would be able to write their books in just a few days, the AI was simply the crew. So of course happening right now, we had the publishers weekly article about the man who said that he wrote 97 novels in 9 months using the help of AI and while this is a very scary time I still do not believe that artificial intelligence will ever replace the human experience. But that's all the time I have for you today, I really hope that you guys will give this book a chance because it didn't change my life but it gave me quite a bit to think about going forward seeing all the stuff that we're seeing in the news with the weather, with politics, with even artificial intelligence. But give it a chance, there is the second most popular review on Goodreads right now, gave it two stars and she only got 200 pages into the book. I would say the book didn't really start hitting for me until the 300-400 page mark so please be patient with it. If you're not into that kind of book right now, I fully understand but if you come across the time that you want to get really deep into something, I suggest picking this book up. But until next time, no matter what ideologies arise, what myths we embrace, what technologies we invent, what dreams we offer, this crisis is effectively our eternity. I'll hail the chair.