Ending with a whimper

Imagining the apocalypse is a fun thought experiment. How would you react when the world crashes down? What could bring the world down? How would people react? Though the post-apocalyptic tale is a staple of science fiction, the tumult of the last decade or so seems to have triggered an new wave of such novels, each with a unique reason for the crumbling of the walls of the world (zombies, war, aliens, climate change, disease), but sharing an nearly uniformly bleak outlook on the future of humanity. The best depiction of the end of everything is, for my money, Will McIntosh’s fantastic debut, Soft Apocalypse, released in 2011, when it still looked like we might never climb out of the global morass of the Great Recession.

Soft Apocalypse is one of those novels that is, for whatever reason, quite critically under-read; despite a warm reception from critics upon publication, I’ve rarely seen it discussed. In fact, I could say the same of the author’s entire oeuvre; he has gone on to write some really interesting sci-fi novels, including the alien invasion story Defenders and the cryogenic heartbreaker Love Minus Eighty– and has a really good one coming out in early February, Burning Midnight—but none have thus far have propelled him to bestseller status, though he certainly merits the attention (at least he can boast of an acclaimed short fiction career; he even has a Hugo Award, which he picked up for “Bridesicle,” a short story later expanded into Love Minus Eighty).

This slim novel is a great first encounter with his work. Taken from several short stories, it tells the story of a near-future world in decline. The global credit crisis of 2007/2008 extended for over a decade, and everything just circled the drain. It isn’t the dramatic sort of apocalypse, where you wake up one morning to find everything on fire or incinerated by aliens. This is a creeping apocalypse, the kind you only realize has taken place after you look back.

It follows a small group of friends who start off scrounging for money, slowly finding their way in this new world: holding odd jobs, succeeding, sometimes failing, but always moving forward. Everything is changing: climate shift has its impact, but so does an ecoterrorist group that releases a virus into the population (along with some fast-growing bamboo) that has the potential alter what remains of society in a much more dramatic fashion.

The really interesting thing about this book isn’t the destruction (or lack thereof), it’s McIntosh’s ability to recognize what would really happen in an end-of-the-world scenario. This is a book about relationships and the bond between friends as they overcome incredible odds—not to save the world, but to simply survive as everything changes around them. For that reason alone, Soft Apocalypse is a book I revisit every couple of years, and regularly press on people to read. I’m pressing it on you now.

What end-of-the-world novels truly chill your bones?