the frigid air might merely have moved out in all directions from the pole, pushing beneath the warmer air in somewhat orderly fashion, as ink spilled upon a blotter seeps out to form an ever larger circle. But actually the cordon of storms surrounded the polar air, holding it back by the force of their winds as a line of police, now jostled back a little, now pushing forward, restrains an angry crowd.

As far as Maria’s concerned, her only peers are the mountains and rivers she bestrides, the trade winds she navigates, and the atmosphere of which, for a brief reign, she is queen.

While Stewart endows Maria with limbs, intelligence, and a personality, his human characters, some of whom only appear once or twice, are as faceless, anonymous, and freethinking as the ants they resemble when seen from the troposphere. Most are nameless, denoted only by professional title: the Navigator, the Secretary of the Trade Association, the Chief Service Officer. The most prominent of the secondary characters, perhaps to neutralize their sustained presence in the novel, are further anonymized to abbreviations, the already lowly Junior Meteorologist reduced to the J. M., the humble Load-Dispatcher to the L. D. Confronted with the storm’s cunning, Stewart’s men and women respond with either blind self-interest or the brainlessness of deer. When the Road Superintendent inspects snow-buried traffic he encounters “one pair of eyes after another staring out stupidly, looking a little perturbed but just waiting for somebody else to straighten things out.” As an epitaph for our species, it’s hard to improve. “By God, by God, but civilians were a poor lot of mammals,” thinks the Flood Control Co-ordinator. “It might be a good thing,” he concludes, “if the whole valley (or the whole world perhaps) should become only a far-stretching welter of brown waters with a few heads bobbing about here and there for a little while.” Those final four words are especially good, a gratuitous sadistic twist.

As Stewart elevates the storm to protagonist, and demotes his human beings to animal passivity, what seems at first a high-concept premise develops into something more radical. Stewart’s biographer, Donald M. Scott, calls Storm “the first ecological novel,” which is fair. The term “ecology” was coined in 1866 by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel to describe the study of the relationships between living organisms—including human beings—and their environment. Storm’s drama hangs on the influence of environmental conditions on human fate, on the revelation of indirect but profound connections between erosion, ice melt, and vermicular digestion on the intimate lives of Americans who give no thought to the natural world beyond the daily forecast. Though they don’t tend to realize it, they are as beholden to the world’s biological cycles as are trees or sow bugs.