In his best-selling 2020 novel, The Ministry for the Future, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson opens with a deadly heatwave in India which kills millions of people.
The sky blazes like an "atomic bomb", the heat from it is a "slap in the face", the eyes sting and "everything was tan and beige and a brilliant, unbearable white". Water doesn't help because it is "hot as a bath… worse than the air". People die "faster than ever".