Last month, an energy think tank released some rare good news for the climate: The world is on track to install 29 percent more solar capacity this year than it did the year before, according to a report from Ember. “In a single year, in a single technology, we’re providing as much new electricity as the entirety of global growth the year before,” Kingsmill Bond, a senior energy strategist at RMI, a clean-energy nonprofit, told me. A decade or two ago, analysts “did not imagine in their wildest dreams that solar by the middle of the 2020s would already be supplying all of the growth of global electricity demand,” he said. Yet here we are.

In the United States, solar accounted for more than half of all new power last year. But the most dramatic growth is happening overseas. The latest global report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) notes that solar is on track to overtake all other forms of energy by 2033. The world’s use of fossil fuels is already plateauing (the U.S., for its part, hit its peak demand for fossil-fuel energy way back in 2007). Energy demand is still rising, but renewables are stepping in to make up the difference. “The really interesting debate now,” Bond said, “is actually: When do we push fossil fuels off the plateau? And from our numbers, if solar keeps on growing this way, it’s going to be off the plateau by the end of this decade.”

The advantages of solar speak for themselves. Solar can be built faster and with fewer permits than other forms of energy infrastructure, mostly because the panels are flat and modular (unlike, say, a towering wind turbine or a hulking gas-fired power plant). It’s also adaptable at any scale, from an individual erecting a single panel to a utility company assembling a solar farm. And now, thanks to remarkable drops in prices for solar panels, mainly from China, simple market forces seem to be driving an all-out solar boom. “This is unstoppable,” Heymi Bahar, a senior energy analyst at the IEA, told me.

Globally, some 40 percent of solar’s growth is in the form of people powering their own homes and businesses, Bahar said. Perhaps nowhere is this better illustrated than in Africa, where Joel Nana, a project manager at Sustainable Energy Africa in Cape Town, has been leading an effort to help countries regulate and integrate the explosion of small-scale solar. When Nana and his team started quantifying just how much new solar was around, “we were actually shocked,” he told me. In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts, Nana said. But in the first quarter of 2023, when researchers used satellite imagery to count all of the solar installations in the country, they estimated that solar was producing a combined 5,700 megawatts of energy—only 55 percent of which had been declared to the government. That story of rapid, invisible growth is being repeated across the continent. Kenya now has about 200 megawatts of rooftop solar installed, representing 9 percent of the country’s total energy use, Nana said. Namibia has about 96 megawatts of rooftop solar capacity in its system, he said—a whopping 15 percent of its energy mix. “It’s been happening for three or four years, maybe five years, completely off the radar,” Nana said.

[From the March 2020 issue: Thy neighbor’s solar panels]

Solar seems to have passed a tipping point: In many countries, the low cost of the technology is propelling its own growth, despite little government help. In South Africa, businesses such as shopping malls and factories have historically run diesel generators to deal with frequent power outages. Many still do, but now others are saving money by installing solar panels. Electricity from a diesel generator costs about 10 rand per kilowatt-hour, Nana said; with solar panels, it plummets to about two rand. “It’s literally a no-brainer for a business owner,” he said. Businesses make up 80 percent of small-scale solar capacity in the country, according to his research. Soon, Nana hopes, arrays and batteries will become cheap enough that more homeowners across the continent will be able to afford switching to solar. And, as the journalist Bill McKibben has reported, some homeowners in African countries who have never been connected to the grid are getting electricity for the very first time via solar-panel kits, skipping over a fossil-fuel phase entirely.

Across the global South, solar is capturing unprecedented portions of the energy market. Pakistan, for example, imported the equivalent of a quarter of its total energy capacity in Chinese solar panels in just the first six months of this year. Many countries in the global South lack significant fossil-fuel resources, and importing them is expensive. “By far the easiest way to obtain economic growth in a country with a lot of sunshine and no fossil fuels is by exploiting your own domestic resources,” Bond said. Already, in countries including Brazil, Morocco, Mexico, and Uruguay, solar and wind make up a bigger share of electricity generation than it does in global-North countries. By 2030, RMI predicts, the global South will have quadrupled its solar and wind capacity.

That estimate doesn’t account for China, which is experiencing an unparalleled solar boom. In addition to supplying the rest of the world with panels, China installed more than half of the planet’s new solar capacity within its own borders in 2023, and the Ember report says it’s on track to add a similar amount this year. In 2023, the country more than doubled its own solar capacity year over year. “Nobody was expecting that it would be so high,” Bahar said.

[Read: Why America doesn’t really make solar panels anymore]

Last year, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP28, in Dubai, 132 countries and the European Union pledged to triple the world’s renewable-energy capacity by 2030. According to Bahar, it’s the only promise of the many made in Dubai that’s likely to even be close to fulfilled: The world is on track to add 2.7 times its renewable capacity by then, and 80 percent of that increase will come from solar. To make use of all this growth, the world will have to add much more storage and transmission capacity, neither of which are keeping up with solar’s pace. The IEA, where Bahar works, will advocate for new pledges on those two fronts at COP29 next month. A world that mostly runs on solar power will also need something else—such as hydropower, nuclear, or geothermal—to generate energy when the sun isn’t shining in the evenings and winters. Jessika Trancik, an MIT professor who models clean-energy development, told me that governments need to steer investments toward storage and alternate forms of energy to compensate for that inherent downtime. That way, the world can have a reliable energy mix when 50 or 60 percent of electricity generation comes from solar and wind. That may seem far off, she said—solar made up about 5.5 percent of global energy in 2023—but with the exponential growth of cheap solar, “before you know it, it’s upon you.”

For Africa’s quiet solar boom to meet its full potential, governments will need to regulate and subsidize the technology, Nana said. Federal departments in Namibia, Kenya, and Eswatini have largely ignored the ascendance of solar technology within their borders, Nana said. Yet in South Africa, he’s seeing bright spots. Last year, the government began providing subsidies for solar for the first time. This year, its updated energy plan acknowledged that small-scale solar will be the biggest player in the country in the next decade. If South Africa is any indication, a solar revolution will arrive in more countries in the coming years. It may even sneak up on them.

Michel Houellebecq’s skills as a stylist don’t get the respect they deserve. Yes, he has been called France’s most important novelist, but praise is generally lavished on his ideas, not their expression. Maybe that’s because he’s a ranter whose prose can feel dashed-off and portentous. He’s the opposite of an aesthete, putting his fiction to work savaging ideologies he despises. There’s a long list of those: feminism, self-actualization, globalization, neoliberalism, commercialism. In short, the man writes like a crank.

What Houellebecq does get credit for is prescience. To give only two examples: In his 2015 novel, Submission, a seemingly moderate Islamist party exploits a parliamentary crisis to take over the French government, then imposes Sharia law. Submission came out the same day that two Algerian Muslims stormed the office of the satirical Parisian weekly Charlie Hebdo and killed 17 people; the magazine had published profane cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Houellebecq’s next novel, Serotonin, published in 2019, depicted French farmers blocking roads to protest agribusiness and the European Union, whose policies were putting them out of work. A few months before the book reached the public, but well after it was written, workers in yellow vests, later known as the gilet jaunes, took to the highways, initially to protest taxes on fuel but eventually also French President Emmanuel Macron’s tax cuts for the wealthy and other vicissitudes of his neoliberal agenda.

But Houellebecq doesn’t just forecast current events; he satirizes them, dryly, with perfect pitch. His mimicry of the inflated language of marketing, bureaucratic euphemism, and hypertechnical mumbo jumbo finds the exact midpoint between amusing and appalling. The France of his recent novels has been a devastating parody of itself. The countryside, emptied of farmers and colonized by second-home owners, is a dying theme park; the cities are often as deserted as a shopping mall in the age of e-commerce; and people aren’t having enough sex to repopulate the void. This is “what the world would look like … after the explosion of an intergalactic neutron bomb,” Houellebecq wrote of a French village in The Map and the Territory. In his latest novel, Annihilation, his protagonists wander through that barren world, disoriented, looking vainly for an exit.

Houellebecq’s men—he doesn’t do female leads—are misanthropic and sexually dysfunctional and have more success with consumer products than they do with women, or most anyone else. They dilate lovingly upon the makes and models of cars and appliances, and the subsidiary brands of hospitality and conglomerates. You can almost hear the author swirling around in his mouth the fake compounds dreamed up by naming consultants—Canon Libris (a laptop printer), Ibis Styles (a hotel chain)—savoring the evocative gobbledygook. One of the great scenes in The Map and the Territory involves a close reading of the instruction manual for the Samsung ZRT-AV2 camera, which features absurd settings such as FUNERAL, OLDMAN1, and OLDMAN2, as well as BABY1 and BABY2, which will reproduce the freshness of babies’ complexions as long as you remember to program in each baby’s birthdate.

Satirists are famously also moralists, and Houellebecq is no exception. Indeed, he’s a religious writer, even though his scabrous novels usually scoff at established religion. His notoriously pornographic breakthrough novel, The Elementary Particles, trafficked in masturbation, flashing, orgies, and child rape but really amounted to a diatribe against a godless materialism. Submission was received in some parts of France as a warning that the nation would succumb to Islamism if it didn’t watch out. Houellebecq sometimes reinforced this interpretation, saying at one point that he was an Islamophobe. Yet he has also said he believes that religion has a social role. In a Paris Review interview, for instance, he suggested that the novel expressed a “real need for God.” Which God would that be? Houellebecq doesn’t know: “When, in the light of what I know, I reexamine the question whether there is a creator, a cosmic order, that kind of thing, I realize that I don’t actually have an answer.”

[Read: The rise of anti-liberalism]

Annihilation is another conversion novel, this time about a secular Frenchman’s awakening to that same ineffable cosmos. Paul Raison—the surname means “reason”—is a bureaucrat who lives at a vacuum-sealed remove from ordinary human intercourse. Before he joins his siblings at their father’s hospital bed after a stroke, Paul hasn’t seen his sister for seven years—or is it eight?—and last saw his brother so long ago that he isn’t sure he’ll remember what he looks like. And although Paul shares an apartment with his prim wife, aptly named Prudence, they rarely see or speak to each other. Houellebecq recounts the phases of their marriage as a series of skirmishes between brands. One day Prudence fills their refrigerator with ready-made tofu and quinoa meals from Biozone, leaving just one shelf for Paul’s St. Nectaire cheese and other beloved artisanal products. Roughly a decade later, he has been reduced to eating solitary microwaveable poultry-tagine dinners from the gourmet section of the supermarket chain Monoprix.

Paul works for France’s finance minister, Bruno Juge—“judge” in French; never underestimate Houellebecq’s willingness to hit readers over the head with allegory. Bruno is a classic technocrat, calm and, yes, judicious, untroubled by doubt or other emotions. He serves a president widely thought to be modeled on Macron, France’s neoliberal leader. (Bruno himself may be modeled on Macron’s onetime finance minister Bruno Le Maire.) Like God, who judges from on high, a finance minister has the power to determine who shall thrive and who shall struggle. Bruno’s main accomplishment is turning the ailing French automobile industry into a force capable of making luxury cars that are competitive with Germany’s. Bruno refinanced French industry by means of a whopping tax cut designed to stimulate investment. There’s no point in trying to revive the mid-range auto market, because it is disappearing along with France’s middle class—which Bruno doesn’t consider it his job to shore up. He deals with industry. Social problems don’t fall into “his field of expertise.”

Houellebecq ambles through Paul’s and Bruno’s bell-jar lives and political maneuverings at a languorous pace, but enlivens the narrative with irrupting counternarratives: hallucinatory communiqués from—well, where exactly they come from is the theological conundrum of the novel. These missives are of two kinds: dreams and videos. Houellebecq recounts Paul’s dreams in inordinate detail; they are, alas, as hard to sit still for as the ones you might hear around the breakfast table. The second counternarrative involves progressively more terrifying videos going viral worldwide. One of them shows men in hooded robes cutting off Bruno’s head in a guillotine. The videos provide a running commentary on the main plot. “The choice of decapitation, with its revolutionary connotations, only underlined his image as a distant technocrat, as remote from the people as the aristocrats of the Ancien Régime,” Paul thinks.

The scary thing about the videos is that they are eerily realistic. As a leading special-effects expert says about one depicting a vast meadow, “no two blades of grass are identical in nature; they all have irregularities, little flaws, a specific genetic signature. We’ve enlarged a thousand of them, choosing them at random within the image: they’re all different … it’s extraordinary, it’s a crazy piece of work.” Who’d be capable of making these, and why? The mystery thrusts the novel into Black Mirror territory—which, given Houellebecq’s real-world record of predictions, is actually kind of alarming.

But then the mystery more or less fades from view, to be replaced by another that comes and goes in a flash but lingers like an afterimage. It’s the template for a spiritual revelation that is slowly (very slowly) processed. As a teenager, Paul was obsessed with the Matrix franchise, a series of four dystopian cult-classic movies sermonizing conspiratorially on the possibility that evil AI entities have enslaved humanity by plugging us all into a simulacrum of reality. During a visit to his childhood home, Paul comes across his poster of the third movie, The Matrix Revolutions. It features Keanu Reeves in the role of the hero, Neo, who uncovers the Matrix’s terrible truths. He’s “blind, his face covered by a bloody bandage, wandering in an apocalyptic landscape,” Houellebecq writes. Sure enough, we’re about to see Paul encounter his own matrix. Confronting mortality, he will begin to suspect that what seems unreal is realer than known reality; he will wander through his own hellspace.

[Read: The controversial book at the center of Charlie Hebdo’s latest issue]

The operative verb is wander. Annihilation ponders and meanders. Perhaps its pensiveness heralds its 68-year-old author’s shift into a mellowed, late-style phase of his career. Paul’s spiritual quest steers him surprisingly close to New Age creeds that the author, as a young man, would have made fun of. I found myself missing the curmudgeonly Houellebecq. But he can still perform his literary tricks. His digressive riffs convey sociopsychological truths better than the action does, as in his gloss of the mygalomorph spider, which “does not tolerate the company of any other animal, and systematically attacks any living creature introduced into its cage, including other mygales.” He pauses to offer pleasingly cynical social commentary. I liked the story of how the local council pimped out the village Belleville-sur-Saône, changing the name to Belleville-en-Beaujolais because “Beaujolais” would hold more appeal for Indian and Chinese tourists.

Annihilation’s best bit of shtick involves the overuse of acronyms. The government analysts get their briefing at the General Directorate for Internal Security, four words mostly replaced by the letters DGSI, which are then repeated over and over. Soon we’re being shot at by a firing squad of lettrist nonsense: BEFTI, FNAEG, PEoLC, and so on. I don’t think I took this typographic gibbering for cant just because my French is out of date. Houellebecq doesn’t like experts—that’s what Bruno comes to show—and rebarbative acronyms are the language that experts use to put the rest of us in our place.

“What do you know about PVS and MCS?” a medical pooh-bah demands coldly when Paul, in the course of a briefing on his father’s condition, ventures some acronyms he picked up from the nurse. “Oh nothing, I must have read something on the Internet,” Paul says sheepishly, trying to appease her by sounding stupid. The matrix is a prison of the mind, and Paul is its prisoner; Houellebecq is not wrong to accept the premise that, to a greater or lesser degree, we are all hooked up to it. But I trust his sarcasm, more than his mysticism, to free us.