“Green, at this point, is a dead fucking brand,” says Kate Morris, the brash and irreverent political organizer at the center of Stephen Markley’s The Deluge. “Green,” for Morris, is traditional environmentalism, along with its preoccupation with aesthetic beauty and faraway places and its commitment to a politics of compromise. Her own group, A Fierce Blue Fire, could easily be mistaken for a “green” environmental organization, but is instead something new: a political group almost exclusively concerned with climate change and willing to bite any hand that isn’t poised to strike at the fossil fuel industry.

The same is true of Markley’s novel. While easily mistaken for a “green” or “environmental” novel, The Deluge is, in fact, a key example of an emerging subgenre that we might call the “climate assessment drama.” These books are vast in size and scope and, at the same time, narrowly concerned with the particular political, ethical, and technical conundrums of the world climate change has wrought. Like many earlier environmental novels, climate assessment dramas depict a planet recklessly transformed; but unlike earlier novels, they focus almost exclusively on the political machinations and the existential plight of human beings.

To read them is to appreciate just how daunting climate change is as a fictional subject. Narrativizing climate change means writing about environmental catastrophe in a way that cuts against the grain of established environmental commitments, it means imagining unprecedented political dynamics from within the limits of our own political moment, and it means describing a near-totalizing phenomenon through what is inevitably a narrow aperture.

The most celebrated climate assessment drama is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020). The most recent is Nick Fuller Googins’s The Great Transition (2024). The longest by far is The Deluge, and it is perhaps the quintessential example of the genre. Even more than The Ministry for the Future, The Deluge sketches—both intentionally and inadvertently—the outline of our current predicament.

Shifting back and forth among several perspectives, The Deluge tells the stories of dozens of Americans during a three-decade period, culminating in a mobilization to confront climate change spearheaded by the federal government. The novel follows legislative and electoral battles in Washington, DC; corporate strategizing in New York and Chicago; overt and covert activism across the country; the frustrations of a wandering oceanographer; and the misfortunes of a struggling community in central Ohio.

Two groups drive the novel’s narrative. The first is Morris’s A Fierce Blue Fire, the second a clandestine network of radicals called either the Weathermen or 6Degrees, led by a woman known primarily as Shane Acosta. Morris’s A Fierce Blue Fire galvanizes a generation of activists and helps reshape national politics around a sprawling, climate-centered agenda. Acosta’s 6Degrees inspires imitation and indignation and triggers a Rube Goldberg machine of consequences with no discernible end. Everyone in The Deluge is eventually tied to at least one of these groups, and, the novel suggests, so too is the fate of the planet.

Morris describes the name of her group as a riff on “the Phil Shabecoff phrase,” presumably referring to Philip Shabecoff’s 1993 history of the environmental movement, A Fierce Green Fire. But Shabecoff was himself borrowing from Aldo Leopold. In “Thinking Like a Mountain,” an essay beloved by generations of conservationists, Leopold wrote about shooting a wolf and watching “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” He described the moment as transformative: “I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.” In writing about trophic cascades and the unforeseen consequences of extirpating wolves, Leopold considered the fundamental unknowability of natural systems and the need for humility before them. That sense of humility has long been at or near the center of environmental thought. If environmentalism has a core message, it almost certainly concerns the limits of human wisdom.

Does climate change in fact signal the end of one epoch and the beginning of another?

There is little sense of humility in climate assessment dramas, which focus on urgency, action, and heroic attempts to reengineer human societies and the planet as a whole. Morris—an unapologetic and overly confident leader who inspires a cult of personality—embodies this faith in human capabilities. Her conviction allows her to rage against modern politics and society and still rhapsodize about “democracy and organization and compassion and our willingness and ability to confront this emergency, arm in arm, together.” In The Deluge the belief that “green” is a “dead fucking brand” arises in part from the kind of climate chauvinism that Morris espouses—she considers climate change an unparalleled disaster that contains or else overshadows all other concerns, and so she thinks of classical environmentalism’s commitment to preservation as largely obsolete. Real-world climate activists are similarly critical, deriding the supposed romanticism and sentimentality of old-school conservationists and dismissing bedrock environmental laws as obstacles to renewable infrastructure.

In climate assessment dramas, audacity and solutionism are virtues, all the more so when combined, and lithium mines and solar farms provide almost unalloyed benefits for people and planet. Here and there The Deluge suggests, in passing, that such a rapid transformation could produce significant and enduring harms. But only one character not employed by the fossil fuel industry pauses to consider what might be lost. As a crucial legislative package nears signing, a congressional aide named Ashir al-Hasan gestures vaguely toward the precautionary principle. “Every decision we make now, day by day, week by week,” he tells a friend, “will be irrevocable.”

Urgency and immediacy are the hallmarks of climate assessment dramas. The crisis has arrived, and the response must be swift. These novels ask how prepared democratic societies are to contend with calamity and whether extrajudicial measures are warranted. This is not entirely unfamiliar ground for the environmental movement. But environmentalists have never been so focused on a single cause and consequence, and they have traditionally stood for gradualism and against irretrievableness. This has made traditional environmentalists increasingly out of step with those who think climate change means there is nothing left to lose.

Climate change is “a failure of imagination,” declared Bill McKibben 20 years ago, “and in this way a literary failure.” A rapidly heating planet, he noted, had yet to produce “an Orwell or a Huxley, a Verne or a Wells, a Nineteen Eighty-Four or a War of the Worlds.” More than a decade later, Amitav Ghosh described climate change as “a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), Ghosh considered “the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction.” The modern novel, he argued, has emphasized the familiar and the human scale while avoiding the aberrant and the catastrophic—a form of anthropocentric hubris nurtured by the relatively temperate conditions that have characterized the Holocene epoch.

By many measures, imagination has caught up with crisis. In local bookstores, climate change has quickly migrated from the “Science and Nature” shelf to the “New Fiction” table. There are novels in which climate change is the relentless focus, novels in which it hovers threateningly in the background, and novels in which it has seeped into every aspect of daily life. Several years after writing The Great Derangement, Ghosh pointed to 2018 as the beginning of this wave. In that year the world endured a series of floods, hurricanes, and wildfires, and Richard Powers’s The Overstory was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (it would go on to win the Pulitzer in 2019). “It wasn’t hived off into the usual silos of climate change or speculative fiction, but was treated as a mainstream novel,” Ghosh told The Guardian. “Since then, there’s been an outpouring of work in this area.”

That outpouring hasn’t been all to the good, according to the novelist Jeff VanderMeer. Fiction, he insists, “need not contain the added weight of expertise on complex policy matters, except to establish a credible reality. Because we don’t need fictional extrapolation, even now, to do better—we need better strategic planning, more political will, and strict regulation to avoid the worst of climate change.” The best climate fiction, he says, “uses its knowledge of the subject as underpinning, not foreground.”

Presumably, McKibben would object to the distinction between political will and fictional extrapolation. And for many readers, spending time in the world of The Deluge is likely to be an arresting experience, one that might shape their outlook, inform their votes, and focus their attention. But VanderMeer’s caution—that for environmental novels the problem is not a lack of imagination so much as an excess of technical specificity—speaks to the potential for both vision and myopia in climate fiction.

The Overstory is not explicitly about climate change, but it presaged the heft and the brow-furrowing seriousness of climate assessment dramas. At just over 500 pages, it was an early example of books about environmental crisis with word counts to match. Some of the most elegant and meaningful works about climate change have been modest in size and scope, but many of the most noted have been door stoppers. To varying degrees, these longer works tend toward the wonkish, focusing especially on questions of policy and politics. They can feel like novels built on a firm foundation of position papers.

Climate assessment dramas pair the urgency and bewilderment of disaster scenarios with the fussy hair splitting of policy debates. Calamitous set pieces are obligatory: The Ministry for the Future opens with a harrowing chapter about a heat wave in India in which wet bulb temperatures approach 35 degrees Celsius, conditions that push against the limits of human survivability. In The Deluge, meanwhile, a massive conflagration torches greater Los Angeles and, a year later, torrential flooding submerges much of the Midwest.

While these scenes are affecting and alarming, they serve mainly to illustrate the stakes of the political process, which is where the real drama unfolds. The Deluge and The Ministry for the Future are so invested in the minutiae of policy that they often give themselves over to it completely. Robinson leaves his characters behind to go on several-page-long jags about the Jevons paradox, or modern monetary theory, or competing methods of quantifying inequality, or the relative distribution of resources around the world. Many of Markley’s chapters are imagined articles—from Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The New Yorker—that reinforce a sense of topicality. Markley also uses the congressional aide al-Hasan as a walking, talking source of exposition. Al-Hasan is given to writing white papers that are, implausibly, equal parts description, assessment, and memoir. Each forms its own chapter and offers technical details and political analyses while incidentally advancing certain plot points.

Climate assessment dramas are at once provocative and prosaic, jolting readers by depicting a profoundly different future while at the same time hewing to familiar arenas of human action and models of human behavior. The animating questions tend to be methodological and would not be out of place in a political science seminar. How do the politics of climate change work, if at all? What strategies, tactics, and institutions are most consequential? What is the role of scientific research and political compromise?

But climate assessment dramas also push political questions in more pointed directions. They take seriously what the activist and academic Andreas Malm has called “Lanchester’s Paradox,” in reference to an observation made by the British writer John Lanchester in 2007: “It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights.”

In How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (2021), Malm insists that political violence is often effective. In the case of climate change, he says, it is essential. “When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands?” Malm asks. “Is there a good reason we have waited this long?” In one sense, Malm would find the politics of climate assessment dramas bracing. These novels wrestle with the implications of attacking pipelines and oil rigs in a way that few others have needed or bothered to. They often feature violence, and, more than most novels, they take sabotage seriously as a theory of change.

But climate assessment dramas also question Malm’s call to destruction. The Deluge, in particular, offers three reasons to stow the dynamite. First, there is the book’s claim that property destruction is ineffective and inevitably leads to more serious forms of violence. Late in the novel (but early in its chronology), Kate Morris rolls her eyes at a would-be bomb thrower and warns them, “Extremism always demagnetizes its own moral compass. The righteous start off wanting to kill the tyrant, but that’s never enough.” Years later, A Fierce Blue Fire is on the verge of brokering a major piece of climate legislation inelegantly called the Pollution Reduction, Infrastructure, and Refund Act (PRIRA), when 6Degrees bombs several US power plants and immediately shifts the political terrain. “Motherfuckers just cost us our Ohio senator,” Morris seethes, underscoring the sort of legislative inside baseball that defines this first iteration of her group. Meanwhile, 6Degrees operatives question whether their carefully planned acts of sabotage have accomplished anything beyond inspiring a few sloppy copycats. Instead of choosing to follow A Fierce Blue Fire on the road to reform, they make the fateful decision to move toward armed insurgency.

“The Deluge” poses difficult ethical and strategic questions about radical action, but its most convincing argument against sabotage is a practical one. In an age of limitless data, there are no longer any shadows in which to operate.

A second response to Malm’s question is that anything that invites the label “terrorism” is counterproductive. “The word ‘terrorism’ is the most powerful marketing tool of the twenty-first century,” a corporate PR staffer in The Deluge muses, while plotting how to tar A Fierce Blue Fire with the term. When 6Degrees bombings jeopardize PRIRA, the bill doesn’t collapse; instead, it becomes a vehicle for expanding a repressive police state. The government’s monopoly on the legal use of force makes even the accusation of terrorism an existential threat. Here Malm at least partially agrees; although he rejects the notion that blowing up a pipeline is terrorism (he prefers “vandalism” or “sabotage”), he understands that the term can be discharged like a shotgun blast—with an imprecision that makes it all the more lethal.

The third response The Deluge offers to Malm’s provocation—and the one in which the novel puts the most stock—is that, in the 21st century, extended and anonymous campaigns of sabotage and destruction are nearly impossible to pull off. That’s because the near omniscience of modern surveillance technologies makes capture and arrest a foregone conclusion. Forty years ago, a manual for environmental monkeywrenching called Ecodefense offered tips on how to stay out of sight at night and minimize potentially incriminating forensic evidence. Today, such tradecraft seems laughably irrelevant. Without even thinking about it, most people blaze a wide and well-maintained digital trail detailing their movements, activities, and even thoughts. Those who do think about it find it increasingly difficult to leave no trace.

Climate assessment dramas—and novels about environmentalism more generally—are often either captivated or haunted by technology, and especially the internet. The Overstory places an odd hope in the role of virtual reality and artificial intelligence in conserving the natural world, while The Ministry for the Future finds salvation in the blockchain. The guerrilla gardeners of Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood (2024), meanwhile, are undone by a tech mogul and his assortment of spyware and drones.

In The Deluge, the outlaws of 6Degrees spend more time and energy evading detection than taking action. They strip cars of vehicle identification numbers; they wear disguises and avoid any networked devices while traveling; they swipe other people’s phones in order to search for terms like “eco-terrorists” or “pipeline attack”; and they communicate via coded mailings with shifting keys. They also recognize the futility of trying to completely escape detection, so they work with a hacker to sweep away some of their digital footprints and they engage in as much banal online activity as possible. “You misunderstand the panopticon,” Shane Acosta advises one of her fellow conspirators. “The point isn’t to watch everyone; it’s to give the illusion of total surveillance. For the actual watchers, they can only point their eyes in so many directions at once. The amount of data overwhelms and confounds. It helps us.”

Acosta’s plan works remarkably well, until it doesn’t. In the 2030s of The Deluge, the FBI uses artificial intelligence to mine data and model the identities, behaviors, and beliefs of not only particular individuals but also anyone with whom those individuals ever interacted. The terms are ominous—“Megadata Narrative Reconstruction,” “Psychological Reconstitution,” “echolocation”—and the methods vague. Still, the novel describes a world in which law enforcement pairs artificial intelligence with available data in order to reassemble entire lives. Eventually, and inevitably, the digital dragnet surrounds 6Degrees.

The Deluge poses difficult ethical and strategic questions about radical action, but its most convincing argument against sabotage is a practical one. In an age of limitless data, there are no longer any shadows in which to operate.

Do modern surveillance technologies completely preclude radical acts in favor of sanctioned methods? Not necessarily. In The Deluge, the question of whether to engage in sabotage or pursue reform ends up being the wrong one, or at least wrongly stated as an either/or proposition. While the structure of the novel presents A Fierce Blue Fire and 6Degrees as antagonistic factions, the narrative winds them together. By the second half of the story, Kate Morris’s increasingly confrontational tactics put as many lives in danger as do 6Degrees’ bombs, and a decade after 6Degrees derails one legislative package, the group’s guerrilla tactics inadvertently clear a path for another. “What matters is passing this legislation so that we can arrest the current crisis,” al-Hasan says even after a 6Degrees attack kills some of his loved ones. “Now we have an opening.”

On the surface, 6Degrees seems to gravitate toward increasingly destructive and even nihilistic acts. But the campaigns of A Fierce Blue Fire and 6Degrees can never be disaggregated, and the choice between repairing the system and tearing it down is never a binary one. This Moebius-like relationship between reformers and radicals is also present in The Ministry for the Future. Initially, Robinson’s novel positions a global bureaucracy and a group of militant activists as philosophical foes, only to later reveal that they are different sides of the same path. In climate assessment dramas, saboteurs and special interests are often confederates, whether they know it or not.

“The Deluge” is a work of imagination and also of chronicling. It can be read today as a warning, and tomorrow as a reminder of our own blinkered point of view.

Whether or not one looks ahead with trepidation, there is a growing sense that we are entering a profoundly different world for both human and nonhuman life. This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein insists in the title of her 2015 book about how climate change will spark not just ecological but also political and social transformation. Does climate change in fact signal the end of one epoch and the beginning of another?

Climate assessment dramas tend to affirm this sense of rupture and renewal. The Great Transition takes place a decade and a half after “Day Zero,” when the planet’s net carbon emissions bottom out thanks to an all-out planetary effort to give up fossil fuels and adapt human civilization to a changing climate. The society the novel depicts has been sculpted by that tectonic shift. In The Deluge, when one member of 6Degrees argues for cautious reassessment, another maintains the choice is out of their hands. “All the years of talk about the end of the world, but that’s not what’s happening,” she says. “It’s the beginning. And no one can wrap their minds around what it’s the beginning of yet.”

The break between past and present is never as complete as some might imagine. While The Great Transition and The Deluge exude a similar sense of never-before-now, both novels are surprisingly bound to the New Deal as a model for what societal transformation would look like. The Great Transition describes the struggle to adapt to climate change as essentially a reinvention of the Civilian Conservation Corps on a much larger scale. The Deluge also uses New Deal agencies like the CCC and the War Production Board as blueprints and curiously undersells a climactic legislative package passed in 2040 amid accelerating political and weather-related catastrophes as “one of the most radical reorganizations of American economic life in more than a century.” As society teeters on the edge of oblivion, the New Deal endures as the yardstick of social change in the United States. Even in a world remade, the past defines the present.

The Great Transition in particular is fundamentally concerned with what can be relegated to yesterday and what remains to be reckoned with, and there is no greater reckoning than the question of responsibility and blame. Some of the novel’s characters think that human civilization has been redeemed, while others believe that it will never escape its unjust and befouled past as long as the executives and financiers most at fault are still around.

A similar fear of ghosts haunts The Deluge. When an industry representative tries to secure immunity from legal liability as part of a final legislative package, the advisers in the room balk. “What happened here is a crime,” says one, “and that very well may require serious restitution.” Another goes farther: “If you leave those companies alive,” he says of a coalition of corporate interests, “then you leave them to fight another day. We should wipe them out now.” The theory that a few dozen companies are largely responsible for climate change informs many of the characters in both novels.

At other moments, the circle of accountability expands considerably. In The Deluge, the bomb throwers of 6Degrees start to see misdeeds wherever they look. “No one in that room is innocent!” rages one particularly self-righteous operative about a dining hall filled with both adults and young children. Even Kate Morris is willing to make a vast indictment. “Civilization isn’t careening into an ecocide because a few people are getting rich—it’s because we are acquiescing to it,” she explains. And then there is Jackie Shipman, a public relations manager turned hedge fund executive turned environmental activist. “I live with an astonishment, a rage, a grief at the woman I was,” she confesses late in the novel. “And I know intimately a guilt most people don’t even know they carry.”

Like contemporary discussions of climate change, The Deluge waffles between anger at the transgressions of “those companies” and heartache about the behavior of “most people.” But unlike many contemporary discussions, the novel allows for the possibility that these sentiments are not mutually exclusive. It also avoids the pitfall into which novels like The Overstory too easily fall—providing each character with a moment of trauma or revelation or childhood experience that neatly explains their environmental commitments. The characters in The Deluge are permitted to look at the world with fresh eyes and find it broken.

Foregrounding climate change creates an irresolvable tension. The enormity of climate change generates a conceptual boundlessness that can outstrip any single writer’s capacity for inventiveness, at the same time as the specificity of climate change as a frame for understanding the world inevitably leaves a great deal out of the picture.

Maybe not surprisingly, then, The Deluge is a remarkable work for its scope and, at the same time, for how much it must neglect; it is the product of prodigious research and also of significant omission. There is, for instance, little sense of how fossil fuels and climate change contribute to gradual, invisible, and deadly harms—what the scholar Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” These creeping forms of carnage are at the center of Imbolo Mbue’s estimable How Beautiful We Were (2021). They are also foregrounded in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a fictional film inspired by Malm’s work of nonfiction. In climate assessment dramas like The Deluge, the ravages of climate change are usually headline-grabbing cataclysms, and less attention is paid to the sort of persistent and insidious processes that may, in the end, record more casualties.

There is also a notable lack of nonhuman animals in climate assessment dramas, despite the intertwined nature of the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis. The genre is almost exclusively focused on the plight of human beings. To be fair, writing nonhumans into the story is not easy. Still, Say Hello to My Little Friend (2024), a remarkable novel by Jennine Capó Crucet that uses climate change as a point of reference, features a captive orca that is sapient and apparently telepathic and yet somehow believable and also deeply sympathetic.

There will be more climate assessment dramas. Climate change is not just an unfathomable subject but a protean one, and its real-world plot twists will require new stories. The erratic pace of climate change and human responses to it makes The Deluge feel at once prescient and dated, filled with descriptions of frighteningly possible futures while drawing from the limited science and politics of the 2010s. In that sense it is a work of imagination and also of chronicling. It can be read today as a warning, and tomorrow as a reminder of our own blinkered point of view.