Deluge by S. Fowler Wright

Ahead-of-its-time post-apocalyptic thriller

S. Fowler Wright (1874–1965) was a British author of genre fiction active from the 1920s through the 1950s. His science fiction novel Deluge was published in 1928. The book was an immediate bestseller and Wright’s first big commercial success. Deluge was adapted into a Hollywood movie in 1933.

The novel opens with a brief prelude that informs us that the Earth has been struck by a catastrophe of unusual seismic activity causing land masses to sink and sea levels to rise. This cataclysm is accompanied by fierce storms delivering pouring rain, stronger-than-hurricane winds, huge rogue waves, and fires caused by broken gas lines. After the prelude, the narrative backtracks to day one of this disaster and follows an English family as their daily life is disrupted by this apocalypse. As the novel progresses, other characters are introduced, their experiences related, and eventually all their storylines become intertwined. England, where this novel takes place, is reduced to a scattering of small islands separated by miles of water. A few buildings remain standing, and some livestock survives. The human survivors of these islands are rapidly forming themselves into gangs that may be the seeds of a new civilization, but the absence of government, law, and essential services has brought out the worst in humanity.

Considering it was published almost a hundred years ago, I was impressed by how bluntly realistic this novel is. Rather than a story from 1928, Deluge reads like it could have been a 21st-century post-apocalyptic thriller. In fact, I found this more intelligent and compelling than many recent movies about dystopian futures. There are no mutants or zombies in Deluge. Wright concentrates on what happens to human nature when mankind is thrust back into Iron Age living conditions. One consideration Wright explores very frankly is what would happen to women in such a situation. They are outnumbered by male survivors, who want to possess and use them like property. Wright doesn’t shy away from the distasteful aspects of this dilemma, but confronts it matter-of-factly. Women of the 1920s, I would assume, enjoyed less independence and had fewer opportunities to kick ass than women of today. Nevertheless, here Wright delivers a realistic female lead who is admirably intelligent, resourceful, athletic, and can hold her own in a battle against men.

The first half of Deluge is excellent as Wright unfolds his vision of what life would be like after such a doomsday scenario. At about the halfway point of the novel, however, Wright goes into some extended action sequences of siege, abduction, and escape that just go on way too long. Like a drawn-out chess game, he examines every facet of these encounters in minute detail. Where is each character standing at a given time? What happens if they move in this direction, or that? Whose carrying what gear on which horse? It’s just too much logistical minutiae. These chaotic action scenes distract from the larger issues of how human nature and morality change when survival becomes the primary motivator. The new society is ruled by might makes right, until a small community decides they want to adopt a form of government. Wright’s wishful-thinking solution to that problem—a variation on the benevolent autocracy of a philosopher/king—is neither believable nor attractive. The ending of the book is also a bit of a let-down in the too-convenient way in which potentially thorny issues are wrapped up neatly.

The story is told by an unnamed narrator of the post-apocalyptic future who occasionally offers up commentary on aspects of our present society: capitalism, women’s rights, capital punishment, environmental devastation, the frivolous entertainments on which we waste our time, and so on. This aspect of the book is very well done. Overall, the strengths of Deluge outweigh its disappointments. I was impressed by Wright’s writing; his sci-fi reads more like our contemporaries (2025) than his contemporaries (1928). A year after Deluge, Wright published a sequel entitled Dawn.