I recently read two books I really didn't feel like I could adequately review, but I did feel they were of a piece thematically about what comes after the current crisis facing humanity. Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh and A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green both seem to posit plans to tame humanity of its baser instincts. The former through a viral infection that forces you to be cooperative and agreeable, the latter through VR worlds that keep us entertained. I recommend both these books, each providing some fictional horror to distract from the last year of actual apocalypse.


They peek at a troubling idea. I feel roiling just behind a lot of popular science fiction. It seems to signal fatigue with the constant future shock and a growing pessimism that things will worsen. Both stories are about forces that believe the only way to save humanity is to tame it and convert baser instincts into compliance. Granted, Green says that it doesn't have to be this way. That people could find ways to express their better nature, show some creativity to solve our problems. We might have made this mess, but we could be inventive enough to clean it up. The central conflict Green works from is about acceptance versus paranoia. They are open to learning and growing or operating from the fear that everything new is here to destroy what you love. I'm grossly oversimplifying; Green deftly makes these points by positioning characters to act out the debate through their actions. He is fantastic at crafting characters that let the narrative feel natural, even the aliens. But our failure mode is someone else's exhibit.

McIntosh takes a different path to these ends. Society is already falling apart at the beginning of his novel. Economic, social, and environmental disasters begin to pile up. The number of options is eroding for young people, and the amount of money to stay ahead of the calamity gets more and more expensive. McIntosh has a slightly different idea on who will thumb the scale, but the conclusion is somewhat the same, someone has to intervene to save us from ourselves. There are some characters who refuse to be tamed, but it's clear from the narrative that survival of the entire species relies on removing our violent and emotional tendencies. There's some clever world building here, even if the narrative ended up losing me in some places. His on the ground approach to the story spends a little too much time in personal lives, but I did like the structure of jumping forward through the collapse to get a complete picture of how things unravel.

Though Green's book isn't a post apocalypse, it's the sequel to a first contact novel, it does share the same underlying fear. These novels are both about the fact that someone is going to need to wrangle our base desires if we are to survive. Green's a bit more of an optimist and at least gives us a fighting chance, McIntosh only gives the choice of compliance or living in the desolation between cities as everything else breaks down. I want to avoid making too much of this premise as authorial intent, I think that it's weight came from reading them back to back during the middle of the pandemic.

At the moment, it really feels like the culture needs a time-out. Soft Apocalypse is a decade or so old, so it's not channeling the current moment. The sort of social internet that Green works deeply into his narrative didn't even exist yet. Yet, he still seemed to get that culture wasn't set up to deal with big problems. Green seems to think that we are, and shows the ways that people can transcend the things tearing us down. Yet, he calls out that we need leaders willing to get in and do something, and not even political ones. He shows that technology can empower as much as it can numb and insulate. The communities being built by people can fix things. I am unsure if I share his optimism after that last year and a half.

Image Credit: Nature Stock photos by Vecteezy