We Are The Deluge Podcast

It was the brink of annihilation, it was the brink of resurrection. Matt Markley — err, Stanton Farooki — is freaking me out with these psychological reconstructions of individual terror, multiplicitous emergence, and system change with climate change. He tells stories fabricated from complex systems modeling, taking an interest in people, exploring, spinning yarns, being […]

Tony fights a potentially futile battle for the future, for his kids and grandkids, for peckerwoods and surly fucks and maybe for us all, while refusing to fight his own cancer; all his dreams, memories of Gail, and creeping oceanic feeling flood over him and flood over us. AKA: In this chapter, the reader is […]

A vortex has opened you don’t understand what’s happening. You know love, you take leaps of faith, you can be easily squashed, you negotiate. You see the burning eyes of angels. You witness people reveal themselves to you over and over and over, and somehow you manage to reveal yourself to the world. Does that […]

Ash records for posterity this time, the democratic conflagration mirrored by the burning forest, with a lifetime of observation converted to persuasion, but the question remains, can we do it? Are we unvarnished-ly recording for posterity? Are we the podcast to unf*ck the world? — — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See […]

Jesus, Kate, take the wheel. Jackie’s willingness to believe in the meaning of wealth falters, as she reckons with her selves and with the foil she’s been for Kate. She cracks the fourth wall as the ugly bifurcations of this chapter drive Jackie to new horizons, making discoveries about change, climate change, and self-definition, all […]

Hop on a party bus to St. Pete and press play on our bonus episode on the 2012 masterpiece Spring Breakers written and directed by Harmony Korine. Sex, the male gaze, violence, whiteness, hilarity, Faith and temptation, truly inspired editing and sound and lighting choices, film literacy, we cover (or is it bare?) it all. […]

Behold our gruesome and just judgments. The Deluge is our Roman Empire. — — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

Shane loses sight, maybe, of her position on violence; coming back to Kate, or maybe they were always together; she joins the ranks of the many vanished, but not in the way 6 Degrees imagined. Where do you go in a world on fire? P.S. F*** off, nothing left to steal. P.P.S. Who is telling […]

A Year of Horrors: The Metastasization of this Civilizational Crisis. Why does this chapter feel a bit off (no, it’s not only because there’s even more epistemology talk than usual)? Might it be the civil wars failed states xenophobic politics typhoons behemoth storms heat wave monsoon the coup the occupation the power outage the splinters […]

You are hungry and you recognize the danger, the danger of others, of fear, of uncertainy, of hunger. You retain your humor and your highly selective bullshit detector. You cannot forget. You know empty is so much bigger, and yet you know that maybe there is a power vibrating in every atom in this eternal […]

Don the latest version of your favorite AR/VR glasses, turn your ASMR fractal visuals to high and enter the DELUGE-CAST XPERE OF DISCUSSION ™. Who is writing this novel, where AI generators imitate humans constructing virtual realities, asking are we even here, what is this all for is this even a real podcast?Brought to you […]

Jackie wrestles with guilt, dread, and unease as the contradictions of her life become unbearably (and increasingly) impossible to ignore, all while the financialization of everything continues apace. Greenland mining, amirite? — — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out […]

VP McGuirk the most recent public figure to claim “nothing could be done but please forgive me” — — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

Ash hungers, mourns, fears. He yearns to understand, feed, and protect people as he struggles to make sense of another loss. The domestic and global political (which is also personal, natch) dynamics intensify the skyrocketing action. — — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We […]

Crandall researches Six Arms, Fortress Europe, and Siberian anthrax. McMahon attempts meagre political musings. Once again, it must be asked, are this headlines about now or 2034? — — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

May 20: In an assemblage of seemingly ever radical and not-so-radical moments from the shared pool of myths and dreams, the Siege gets beat by and beats back state violence June 30: Our new main character, The Heat, debuts: sweltering, scorching, burning, searing, murdering as Victor Love prepares his battle plans. July 31: The siege […]

April 1: The Concert for the Climate becomes a deluge of occupying creativity and power… but will it become a trickle and go down as the most embarrassing protest action in modern memory April 4: The occupation of DC builds to critical mass and Kate issues her demands to the state. We have split “The Siege” […]

Matt’s secret reunion with the FBF crew and the breaking apart of his relationship with Kate open up an exploration of green capitalism, the security state, love and gender, and narrative. Plans, deception, misdirection, and friendship tangle and untangle. — — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by […]

Tony, preoccupied with impending clandestine plans and thoughts of his daughters, is frustrated by another useless encounter with law enforcement, only to realize, perhaps too late, how threadbare (his) rights have become. Is it Hobbes SZN? It IS Hobbes SZN. — — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” […]

The women of 6Degrees stage a coup – but a new leadership structure, new relationship to funding, and a new mission clarifies something about fear for Shane. No one knows what she is capable of. Is this is a shambolic mess or did things go exactly to plan (wait is that about the podcast or […]

What follows here, we fear, will be less than helpful, and will cover the major events of Ash’s chapter of 2032 and the impact of already anomic American polity on Ash’s greatest fears, his relationships, his insistence on the existence of sound science, and radicalization as this global emergency barrels forward. It concludes with a […]

Struggling to define her self (our selves), Jackie’s “realism” looks a lot like denial as warning signs of the flood (might we say the deluge?) to come pile up around her, pooling at her ankles until, finally, she can’t look away. Join us as Jackie explores new (old) trauma horizons of her own. — — […]

Our brains cannot even wrap around the explosive and [redacted] chapter about [redacted], the FBI report, and the surprisingly [redacted] nature of the report. — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

Tony – who should have believed in the omen of his dreams – sees his academic and personal lives collide as climate disaster shifts from something he has been warning us about to something threatening his family, where action on climate looks a little different than what he has imagined. Action hero, questionable means, valiant […]

Once again, state violence in the novel have Emily and John pondering catastrophe and reality in our own world as readers… — — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

As climate legislations fails and devolves into police state hell, Matt flails in his relationships with Kate, and interrogates the nature of agency, love, and sex along the way. — — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

Escalate. This podcast insists there is no accountability for lazy thinking in a boondoggle. EmilyIt wasn’t like she didn’t share the chapter’s disdain for the quasi-celebrities the climate non-movement kept spitting up. This wasn’t about Morris, though. For her to think about Fanon, the different registers and meanings of violence, and the gender politics of […]

An LLM political analyst leans too hard on the weather puns to report on the political upheaval impacting climate legislation in the US — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

You push the boundaries of possibility for redemption as you once again fall into — but also explode — your familiar patterns.You feel the weather, the light, and the infinite sadness.  — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s […]

Jackie spearheads a counterintuitive ratf*** of an advertising strategy for the worst corporations in the world as she navigates her sex life and fights off an anti-nostalgic nostalgia — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

Join your hosts Emily Crandall and John McMahon as they interview climate fiction podcasting experts John McMahon and Emily Crandall about Kate Morris’ interview on The Conversation podcast. They dive deep into right-left cancel culture horseshoe theory, the media, notions of violence and non-violence, ecofeminism, and more. This episode is brought to you by AeroFresh […]

Alienated Young Men in 2029 Marveling at Markley’s Metafiction Multiplies Gaza as an “auto-kill” zone: when and how do people get politicized? — — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

Ash struggles with the tension between the adequate and the possible — challenging coalitional concerns with dispassionate empiricism, disappointing climate hardliners, and ultimately presenting an assessment of Pres. Randall’s climate plan including a forecast of 7-15 feet of sea level rise by 2100 and 550 ppm by midcentury. — — Our theme music is from […]

The Climate Old Guard Forges Ahead As They Exit the Stage, But Have They Learned Anything About Politics? — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to follow us – and Shane – down the surveillance and dataveillance rabbit hole of copious Panopticon references in order to rendezvous with Murdock. This summit occasions discussion about the weather as a character yet again, the crossover of motherwork and activistwork, revolutionary ethics, those pesky […]

Energized despair. Fugazi. Climate politics on the inside and the outside. Machiavelli and Hanna Pitkin. This self-consciously literary chapter situates the reader (and your hosts) in the midst of social movement decisions and strategizing as Kate and the FBF crew grapple with a surprise political offer…and conflicts around hierarchy in movements. What are Matt and […]

Your hosts follow Tony up and down the Magic Mountain to Davos to ponder billionaire shenanigans and unseriousness, the politics of reality, and the use and abuse of identity for politics. Plus they ask the crucial question (no, it’s not what Thomas Mann character they are): is Tony a good dad (and does that need […]

A Fierce Blue Fire’s Kate Morris Finds Beauty and Joy in Rejecting Partisanship as Usual, in her “last stand” Against Climate Change Once a pastiche of seemingly disparate characters and experiences of climate change, through Kate Morris and A Fierce Blue Fire, Stephen Markley defied the political limits of the novel, upended the plot of […]

You manage to loop in the Book of Ezekiel, William Faulkner, and the epistemology of whiteness into an episode about this Keeper chapter. You discuss the writing of addiction and the writing of Keeper’s associative thinking style. The geographies, climatic and otherwise, of late capitalism in the account of Ohio — not to mention Keeper’s […]

Feds Reconfigure Terrorism to Include Dissent; Billionaires Baffled by Failure of Money to Thwart Bombs — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

Is this chapter about POV character Matt, about activist Kate Morris, about ecofeminism, or about Markley himself? Trick question — it is all of the above. Join Emily and John as they decipher Kate’ ecofeminist day-to-day life and sick burns on white male writers, strike out on an excursion into the myths of wilderness and […]

Why claims that environmentalists are socialists will never go away. — Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

Today, Emily and John had a conversation that excavated the analytical reactions they’ve experienced due to this Ashir chapter, Ash’s views on human relationships, math, and finance, their academic training in Aristotle, the movie Uncut Gems, and, for reasons they try to articulate, the National Basketball Association. Consider this an effort to understand the ways […]

You podcast about Keeper. You hear yourself discussing the use of the second person, casual cruelty, the challenge and compulsion Keeper poses for the reader. You note the heat, the saturation, the drugs, the post-financial crisis hangover of it all. You raise the issue of Nine Inch Nails and Markley’s novel Ohio and Requiem for […]

“This situates us right in late-Obama years and also raises key themes.”  “I had to look up the Breaking Bad quote.”  #dailywriting yo this must have taken so much research. Our theme music is from “I Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore” by Alex Rudnick. We heartily encourage you to check out Alex’s music.

This chapter seemingly has little to do with being A Climate Novel, but after some classic (over)reading, your faithful hosts diagnose the overlapping political economy, millennial, cultural, and gendered landscape of Jackie’s twentysomething life in a climate-changing Midwest. Emily and John — despite not necessarily knowing what a pitch deck really is — secure the […]

Our first encounter with Shane Acosta (if that is even her name…) is as much about Murdock, her one-time comrade whose psyche is exposed through the WTF of the text boxes throughout the chapter. Shane tries to recruit Murdock for a mysterious mission, but can they bridge their two different standpoints on war, American nationalism, […]

Emily and John go through a phase transition of their own in this first full episode of the podcast. Much like the methane hydrates that give the chapter its name and its POV character Tony dread, they are bubbling to the surface…the surface of Deluge podcasting. Your hosts explore the contested meaning of science and […]

Welcome, prospective listeners, to the We Are The Deluge podcast, a spoiler-free chapter-by-chapter podcast about the climate change novel The Deluge by Stephen Markley. In this prologue episode, your hosts for our climate fiction journey, Emily Crandall and John McMahon, introduce the novel, the show, their podcasting vibes, their political theory nerd-dom, and the over-ambitious […]

Flooding your podcast feeds starting on November 19: We Are The Deluge, a spoiler-free, chapter-by-chapter podcast about the climate change novel The Deluge by Stephen Markley. Brought to you by Emily Crandall (Stuck in Stoneybrook) and John McMahon (Not Quite Great Books: A TV Podcast).