There’ve been a lot of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels published in sf recently. I suppose that’s to be expected, given the harsh news of the times. Most of them follow increasingly predictable paths – the bomb falls, the terrorists take over, the machines take over, viruses run amok, the free world becomes more and more repressive – and so, after a while, they make for ho-hum reading. I’ve seen several of those scenarios in recent year’s Campbell Award hopefuls. But now and again some author surprises us with a new version of how things fall apart. Two years ago, Paolo Bacigalupi won the award for the absorbing tale of how Big Agra might take over the world.
One new novel I just finished, that I think stands out from the crowd while still dealing powerfully with the problem we sense that our civilization is in dire straits, is Will McIntosh’s
Soft Apocalypse, published by Nightshade Books. No nuclear fireworks here, or terrorist plots, or annihilation by celestial object, just a little-by-little sliding into a dissolution of the free society we prize today that is all the more believable and terrifying because it is so relentless. We get to follow a group of very likable (though flawed) group of people for ten years in the Southeastern United States as they form a loose tribe of wanderers, trying to stay one step ahead of the collapse of civilization that we – like these characters – have come to take for granted.
The novel has all the hallmarks of the best science fiction: the future gadgets are there (though as part of the scenery and not too many of them, thank heavens), but the story of real people struggling to maintain real lives is front and center. Birth, death, friendship, love, brutality, starvation, even the role of pets in our lives, all are considered here. And at the end, we find ourselves confronted with a very painful dilemma: What does it mean to be human? And how much are we willing to sacrifice of that “humanity” in order to stay alive?
Highly recommended.