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A Novelist Imagined a Climate-Driven Wildfire Burning LA, Then Watched It Happen
“‘The Deluge’ is a realist novel,” says author Stephen Markley of his 2023 epic. “It was about what we are going to live through, and now it’s just about what we are living through.”
By Michael Kodas
Bestselling novelist Stephen Markley’s 2023 epic, “The Deluge,” follows the climate crisis, extreme politics and societal decline in the United States from the years 2013 to 2039 through the eyes of everyone from a climate scientist to a drug addict, an advertising savant and a network of eco-terrorists. But its most cinematically dramatic chapter describes a wildfire destroying Los Angeles in 2031.