“A Disaster Always About to Happen”: Environmental Sustainability in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge and Stephen Markley’s The Deluge

In this essay, my aim is to show that the delineation of environmental issues in Bleeding Edge to a significant extent prefigures The Deluge’s concern with humanity, the planet, and the more-than-human world. To this end, I will analyze the novels specifically through the lens of sustainability within the bigger framework of the Anthropocene and ecocriticism. In the wake of the peak oil and the importance of a sustainable future for (non)humans, such an analysis is all the more compelling as no work to date, to my knowledge, has investigated Pynchon’s or Markley’s fictions from the critical viewpoint of sustainability.