Ben Shread-Hewitt

If some degree of warming is inevitable, then it is incredibly important we reach it later, rather than sooner. If we cannot yet fully avoid them, then we must decelerate our climate impacts.

The Deluge is a tome, a vast and sprawling novel with myriad narrative threads. Tracking the future of American society between 2013–2040 against the backdrop of worsening climate change, the reader is shown a nation plunging fitfully into turmoil – with hard-fought moments of recovery and sudden, devastation catastrophes.

Looting, it seems, has got a bad rap. Because to save the planet, we need to loot it. We must let nothing — not cultural artifacts, not ancient woodlands, nor even entire species — get in the way of this drive to save the planet from its number one threat: Climate Breakdown.

Through interlocking explorations of climate change, existential crisis, class conflict, mass extinction and granular insights into energy and resource availability, this book lives up to its name. It is not just an explication of potential futures, but a guide to how we might navigate them.

Our civilizational pathway is always inseparable from the fate of the wider planet, but neither does it walk in lockstep. Climate fiction novels can help us see the way we are going, and help us question — knowing the world that lies ahead — if this is the right road to embark upon.

This is what the Great Unraveling will look like as it continues to emerge, unrelated phenomena synchronising to exacerbate each other.