Stephen Markley, in his 2023 novel, The Deluge, captures the essence of what he calls capitalism’s “ultimate endgame”: “All the years of talk about the end of the world, but that’s not what’s happening. It’s the beginning. And no one can wrap their minds around what it’s the beginning of yet.”

This endgame is not an apocalyptic finale. There will be no Avengers style battle between heroes and villains, but an ongoing, cascading series of crises, a chronic condition. “Sea levels would rise by 230 feet eventually,” Markley writes. “Earth was on its way to four, five, or possibly six degrees of additional temperature rise. It was an endgame that would push the planet past anything a human could conceive of.” This might now happen sooner than even the bleakest models suggest, and those alive to witness it would see “civilization entering its violent disintegration with a breakdown of the social order, mass starvation, disease, and armed conflict over water and arable land.”