I was excited about this one because I was told it is a dystopian tale that is based on more close-to-home circumstances that exist on the planet that we live on in real life. I like dystopia and I like the current planet that we live on, so I thought this would be a slam dunk.
Then I saw how long it is.
By the time I looked up how long this thing is I had already been reading for hours and was pretty impressed with the author's ability to keep things flowing and interesting. I actually popped a message off to a friend after reading for an hour straight - a phenomenon that is rare for me - and that's when he looked it up and saw that in the physical copy it is nearly 1000 pages long.
I had wondered why after an hour my "percent completed" had barely moved in the bottom right corner of my Kindle.
Well, I trudged on anyway because just because a book is long doesn't mean that it can't be good. Gone with the Wind is one of my favorite books ever after all and that this is one of the longest books that has ever been written.
The plot of Deluge starts out ok in that wildfired and various natural disasters are happening in greater numbers, that much is interesting, but then the book does something that I should have saw coming. It gets preachy, it starts to talk about how the world already stopped doing enough to save the world in 1995 and that we need to spend all of the world's resources in order to prevent total elimination of the planet.
Look, I'm environmentally responsible but I have lived through several "ends of the world" where various people, mostly politicians, were lecturing us on how the end of the wold would be now, 3 different years that have come and pass, and honestly, I get tired of various folks presenting us with doomsday scenarios if I don't continue to use paper straws that do not work.
While this book isn't exactly that preachy, it gets there. The scenarios created in the book are extremely devastating to the various areas that they happen in with floods, forest fires, typhoons, tornadoes and anything else you can imagine that ravages the population.
Markley's political stance is quite evident as well as everything conservative is presented as being "white supremacist" and protecting of the corporations and almost anything liberal is presented as being virtuous and only resorting to violence and guerrilla tactics out of necessity. These puritan activists tried to do it the "legal" way but they got squashed by a rigged system, so they had to rewrite the rules by blowing stuff up - but hey, at least they try to keep the loss of human life as low as possible, such good people!
That part of it I was willing to overlook but still rolled my eyes a bit when it happened over and over again, but this is a work of fiction and Stephen Markley kept referring to real-life politicians and pundits such as Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Barrack Obama, and of course Donald Trump. One of these people is presented in a positive light. Can you guess which one?
I'm willing to overlook this as well even though 99% of the characters we are presented with are total fiction. But what I was not willing to look past was the fact that the natural disasters are presented in massive detail and they keep happening over and over again. The first time that someone needed to go and rescue their family member trapped in one of these areas it was exciting and captivating. By about page 500 and I am on the 4th instance of some variation of this happening I am kind of getting sick of it. Just get on with it already.
Someone in the internet sphere said this about the book
"It's a fantastic 300-page book that has the misfortune of being surrounded by 600 pages of the same thing happening over and over again."
I didn't start reading other people's opinions on this until sighing last night after reading about yet another flooding that someone gets to a family member in the nick of time after being told by police that "you shouldn't go in there!" and when she succeeded where trained personnel couldn't possibly manage I put the book down and went to sleep.
When I woke up today I read reviews online and found that while most people appreciate Stephen Markley's writing ability, it is widely regarded as being entirely too long and that the cast of characters each getting a POV about the same thing happening gets old when 37 different things happening, happen.
The political slant on it is annoying too. I have very little to do with politics and this is partially because I have intentionally put it out of my life and also live in Vietnam. To see that present day politics just seem to have an Uncontrollable NEED to invade every space in our lives is something that I cannot tolerate for long.
This book has plenty of that. The professional reviews state that Stephen goes after both sides equally but you would have to be a leftist apologist to actually believe that. He is definitely going after one particular side and he makes no effort to conceal his personal take on environmental issues. It is stated that he did exhaustive research on this and I am certainly not claiming to be smarter than he is but if your research only looks for one side to be right, you are probably going to discover that your side is right.
This book is more propaganda than a story and I still would have been willing to finish it off it it wasn't for the fact that it is unnecessarily extremely long.
When you look on Reddit and everyone is stating that it is the best thing ever! and anyone that criticizes it is downvoted to the point of not having their take be visible, you know the political fix is in, which is so typical of Reddit.
Politics is fine in a work of fiction, but once they intermingle real-life people into the story that the author clearly loves (Obama) and people he clearly hates (Trump, Tucker Carlson, anyone conservative) we aren't reading a fictional story anymore, we are reading the fever-dream of an activist and for me, that's a hard pass.
I made it 500 pages or so and have no intention of continuing. I can only presume that the bad guys win and this will serve as a warning to the audience about how they need to use more paper straws and throw out their air con unit in order to prevent this work of fiction from becoming a reality.
I do like the engaging way that Markley writes though, so I think I will check out the book Ohio and see if that is more to my taste. Naid liked the book though! I think because it meant she got to sleep next to me in her favorite doggy bed.
