I want to be charitable to Stephen Markley's extrapolation of the American future, circa 2023. When he sent this honking great slab of eco-fiction to the galleys, Trump and Covid were in the rear-view mirror, generative AI was just a concept, and the Metaverse was the next big thing. So it makes sense that in Markley's attempt at the Great American Climate Change Novel, we get, post-Biden, an establishment woman Democratic pres followed, in 2028 as things are hotting up, by a black socially conservative Republican, also a woman, who's keen on decarbonisation. American democracy proves robust — even when the shit really hits the fan in the late 2030's, we still have presidential debates, swing states and an electoral college. Markley's very aware of the fault-lines in American society, the frailty of democracy, and the poisonous influence of corporate cash, but reading this book in 2025, his doomsday timeline feels comically optimistic. But that's forgivable — anyone setting their book in the immediate future is going to get custard pied by events one way or another. What's harder to overlook is a kind of naive, cozy belief in liberal institutions that seems to permeate Markley's vision. The New York Times and, even funnier, NPR continue to define the discourse for years to come — in 2028, a couple of the characters celebrate getting Big Carbon ads pulled from the Colbert show and the NYT, as if YouTube and Facebook didn't exist. Which in fact they don't — all social media now takes place on a VR platform idiotically named "Slapdish", in "worldes" (personal spaces) and "xperes" (interactive stuff). This is the future Zuckerberg wanted, back in lockdown days when I was gallumphing round my living room playing VR ping pong with my pal Baulty.

The narrative is split between eight or nine characters, most of them educated and more or less privileged, with a supporting cast of thousands of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ representations of American Diversity. Markley proudly shows off his writing chops with a mix of first, second, and third-person narration and some gimmicky offset boxed chunks of text that don't say anything that couldn't have been said less flashily. Among the principal cast, there's the authorial stand-in character, a chickenhearted writer dude who's too bland to be more than mildly annoying, there's an autistic Arab-American savant whose climate emergency status reports to politicos are Markley's way of politely dumping info, a single-mom eco-terrorist of Hispanic descent, a celebrity climate scientist who tells it like it is, an advertising flack who greenwashes for Big Carbon before getting into hedge funds, a bunch of activists who banter and bicker and bang one another, and their leader, a mercurial/insufferable chick of Jamaican-Navajo-Swedish descent who gives the lie to the notion that a flawed character is an interesting one. There's also a token poor person (with an opioid problem, obviously) whose sections are our only respite from the activist-political class. I've skipped a few, but there's a curious flatness to the lot of them, like they've been steamrollered by the weight of the theme; cut from climate-calamity cookie dough.