We are thrilled to be joined by Stephen Markley for a wide-ranging (and spoiler-filled) conversation about The Deluge!

We discuss the many forms the novel takes, the process of research and working on the novel, writing, reading, and existing amid climate catastrophe, prophesy, social movements (and fiction about social movements), violence and humor, the need for contentious human characters rather than simplistic perfect characters, Keeper, temporality, AI in our world and the world of The Deluge, parenthood in the novel, whether the book is didactic or not, and oh so much more.

Not to mention that Markley generously entertained our extremely particular questions about our favorite phrases and references in the novel.

Thanks to John’s Fall 2025 Climate Film and Fiction seminar for their contributions to the interview!

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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.

On our own long way home, we consider how and why Matt’s authorial voice turns over the end of the novel to its main character, Kate, in order to consider the climate fight and our reserves of energy, one’s legacy, the practical and metaphysical questions, and the Truth.

We also play (?) the super fun game (?) of exploring the novel as a whole in relation to Amitav Ghosh’s by-now-classic discursus on whether novels as such can think climate change.

While this is the end of The Deluge, much like Kate, we’ve always got one (or two) more in us. Later this week, we have our interview with Stephen Markley (!), which will be followed by, essentially, our audition to be co-casting directors for any future Deluge TV show.

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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.

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 the ghost in the machine, as a kind of time capsule, or maybe something we can’t understand. The horror has no conclusion, but it would indeed be nice if we could conjure the right kind of crisis.

We’ve always been reading Matt’s book (an inventory of Matt’s unmade bed and the epistemology of closure) all along…the book he can never finish. Can we?

(The answer is clearly no, because there’s another Matt V episode coming your way).

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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 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 presented with Tony’s last reflections on climate change, its politics, the great loves of his life, and facing death; simultaneously, the reader is confronted with the possibility that the form of this novel is not exactly as it seems.

This is what we dream of as factotums of the machine.

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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.

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 make you the trigger or the king? 

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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 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?

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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.

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 while the world hurtles toward financial collapse. Kate is made to fall away into an undiscovered void.

Somehow, this is real.

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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.

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.

Never fear, we also read the film as environmental political thought (it wasn’t *that* hard), and of course consider what Deluge characters would love and hate this cinematic extravaganza.

Stick around to the end to hear Regan Levitte, one of John’s co-hosts from his other podcast, provide us her instant reaction after watching this film for the first time.

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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.

Behold our gruesome and just judgments.

The Deluge is our Roman Empire.

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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 the story of “Shane Acosta”?

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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.