This book stressed me out more than any fiction I’ve read in recent memory. It’s ambitious, bold and frankly genius.

The book is confusing for a long time – not only are there a half-dozen different stories being told in alternating chapters, there are news collages and magazine articles included. Markley does an incredible job of making it fairly easy to follow it all, using different narrative styles for each storyline. It still takes about 150 pages to begin to see how they might come together. You need to commit to this thing.

It pays off though, holy cow does it pay off. There is so much sustained tension in this book, so much anger and cynicism at the current state of politics and culture in the US, that the book actually upset me. Markley’s characters are (almost) all fully-developed, the science seems plausible and the politics all-too-real. Think the first chapter of The Ministry for the Future, drawn out over hundreds of pages.

Markley has his sights on writing a climate-change riff on The Stand. The book itself is mentioned early on, and there are more subtle references throughout. In my view, this is considerably better.

Some reviewers think this book drags, or the characters are too thin, but I don’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and will do so long after returning it to the library.