His heroine is born of a dalliance between northern and southern air off the coast of Japan. After a rapid gestation she quickly begins to grow, devouring atmosphere. “Like a person,” Stewart writes, a storm “even takes in food, exhausts it of energy, and casts out the waste,” drawing moisture from the ocean and expelling it as rain. A meteorologist at the Weather Bureau, developing “a fatherly feeling” for the storm, christens it Maria (pronounced Ma-RYE-a) because he feels that he “must name the baby.” (Inspired by Storm, the National Weather Service would begin naming storms in 1953.) The baby eats and sleeps and makes babbling noises, but it does not stay cute for very long. Soon it grows teeth.

In her infancy Maria develops character, a personality, and even something that resembles feeling. “A storm,” writes Stewart, “seems to sheer off from a high-pressure area much as the human hand shrinks from the touched nettle.” Maria even develops an anatomy. She carries herself along “bodily,” sticks out her “long tongue,” and in a single mixed metaphor gains all four limbs: “long arms of rain ran miles ahead.” By the time she debuts on the Pacific Coast, she has left her youth behind; becoming “powerful and sedate in maturity, [she] moved with the steady, sure pace of majesty.” Maria comes to resemble “a middle-aged person who has grown too individualized, not to say crotchety, to fit any rules.” After a one-night stand with a mass of tropical air in the South Pacific, her “eastward bulge” begins to give “a distinct suggestion of mammalian pregnancy.” To the Junior Meteorologist’s grandfatherly delight, Maria delivers a new storm, Little Maria: “‘Why, I’ve known your mother,’ he [finds] himself thinking, ‘since she was a little ripple on a cold front north of Titijima!’” After she expends her vital energies on the Sierra Nevada—her life’s crowning achievement—Maria mellows into a toothless senescence and a quiet death, while her daughter, in search of new thrills, heads east, to New York City.

A superhuman character demands a superhuman setting and timeline. Storm begins, and ends, with a cosmic view of earth—as seen from outer space. The same image of the earth, adrift in blackness, would first appear in a photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 8 in 1968, a symbol that would launch the modern environmental movement. Stewart, uncommon for novelists who, as he would later complain, “want to emphasize the connection of people all the time,” defiantly takes the global perspective. He traces the narrative of his heroine back to the history of the glaciers that forged Donner Pass, the influence of the sun’s passage on the trade winds, and the effect of the earth’s rotation on polar air. “If the earth had not been revolving,” writes Stewart,