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Soft Apocalypse [Paperback]

Will McIntosh
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)

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Book Description

March 29, 2011
What happens when resources become scarce and society starts to crumble? As the competition for resources pulls America's previously stable society apart, the "New Normal" is a Soft Apocalypse. This is how our world ends; with a whimper instead of a bang.   New social structures and tribal connections spring up across America, as the previous social structures begin to dissolve. Locus Award finalist and John W. Campbell Memorial Award finalist Soft Apocalypse follows the journey across the Southeast of a tribe of formerly middle class Americans as they struggle to find a place for themselves and their children in a new, dangerous world that still carries the ghostly echoes of their previous lives.

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Soft Apocalypse + After the Apocalypse: Stories + Lost Everything
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 239 pages
  • Publisher: Night Shade Books; First edition (March 29, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 9781597802765
  • ISBN-13: 978-1597802765
  • ASIN: 159780276X
  • Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #149,741 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this moving debut from Hugo-winner McIntosh, the prosperous world of 2023 ends not with a bang but with a crackle, the sound of genetically engineered bamboo growing overnight and destroying roads and buildings. Naïve college graduate Jasper struggles to trade charged batteries for food as his "tribe" wanders the Georgia countryside, dodging local cops and designer diseases. Settling in Savannah, they try to find some stability in a crumbling city beset by anarchist gangs and the "scientist-rebels" who release tailored organisms to hasten societal collapse. In the end, each member of the tribe must decide what to give up in order to survive. The novel, expanded from a short story, shows some unevenness in tone, but McIntosh strongly delineates his characters and makes Jasper's struggles very affecting. Though it may be soft, this apocalypse has plenty of sharp edges. (Apr.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Review

Bottom line: If Soft Apocalypse isn't nominated for a Hugo or Nebula Award, I will eat the entire book page by page...
--Paul Goat Allen

(McIntosh) has written a first novel that's compelling, credible, and relentless, who's best and most disturbing moments will stay with the reader for a long time. --Locus

McIntosh's first novel is a grim glimpse into a future that is not all that improbable...This is the sort of thoughtful sociological SF we see too seldom today--the kind of work Pohl and Kornbluth did in the 1950s. Well worth a read.
     -Peter Heck, Asimov's

Product Details

  • Paperback: 239 pages
  • Publisher: Night Shade Books; First edition (March 29, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 9781597802765
  • ISBN-13: 978-1597802765
  • ASIN: 159780276X
  • Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #149,741 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Will McIntosh is a Hugo award winner and Nebula finalist whose short stories have appeared in Asimov's (where he won the 2010 Reader's Award for short story), Strange Horizons, Science Fiction and Fantasy: Best of the Year, and many other venues. Soft Apocalypse, his first novel, is a finalist for the Locus Award for best first novel, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel, and the Compton Crook award for best first genre novel of 2011.

Will's second novel, Hitchers, was released on 2012. In Hitchers, half a million Atlantans become possessed by the dead.

His story "Followed," which was published in the anthology The Living Dead, is being produced as a short film directed by James Kicklighter. You can check out the trailer here: http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi513579801/

A New Yorker transplanted to the rural south, Will was a psychology professor before retiring to write full time. In 2008 he became the father of twins, Miles and Hannah.

Customer Reviews

Yet hope remains throughout, and especially at the end. Alberto Vargas  |  9 reviewers made a similar statement
It seems that their impervious to everything bad happening to those around them. Henry  |  6 reviewers made a similar statement
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
34 of 37 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars The world ends with a whimper, not a bang... April 29, 2011
Format:Paperback
Jasper and his tribe of formerly middle class Americans describe themselves as nomadic rather than homeless: they travel around the Southeastern U.S., scraping together the bare minimum to survive by spreading out solar blankets or placing small windmills by the highway to collect energy from passing cars, then trading the filled fuel cells for food. Fewer and fewer people want to deal with the "gypsies" who use up dwindling resources, and often they meet with indifference or even violence. Jasper was a sociology major, but those skills are no longer in demand in 2023, about ten years after an economic depression set off the Great Decline and society as we know it gradually began to fall apart. So begins Will McIntosh's excellent debut novel, Soft Apocalypse.

One of the most interesting aspects of Soft Apocalypse, and something I've rarely seen done so well in a dystopian novel, is the fact that it shows society in the early stages of dissolution. Many post-apocalyptic stories show a finished end product, an established dystopia in which the Earth has already been torn apart and people are trying to survive the aftermath. Other stories show the events right before and during the actual earthquake/meteor strike/plague, with people trying to make it through the disaster as it happens. Soft Apocalypse instead happens during a period of gradual but inexorable decline: as the back cover says, the world ends "with a whimper instead of a bang." If Robert Charles Wilson's excellent Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd America is set in post-collapse U.S.A., when enough time has passed for society to fall back into established structures and classes, Soft Apocalypse could almost be set in the same world, but a couple of centuries earlier and during the gradual collapse of the previous system.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I loved this book because it is one of the best disaster and post-apocalyptic novels. Most of them tend to describe some sudden and drastic disaster (plague, comet, bomb, whatever) and how humanity copes afterwards. What makes this novel different, fresh, and interesting, is that it considers the different and more likely scenario that human civilization will slowly collapse under the weight of overpopulation, increasing scarcity of natural resources (like oil), and derivative causes like famine, disease, and criminal breakdown of social order. Although such a scenario seems slow and mundane, the author manages to actually make it very vivid through the eyes of the narrator and interesting cultural vignettes.

The novel is set in and around Savannah, Georgia, in the late 2020s through 2030s. It features a mix of all elements you could possibly expect in a novel about the collapse of civilization: global warming, peak oil, epidemics (with human-designed viruses), rampant gangs, curfews, breakdown of large organizations, genocide, propaganda, fringe groups forcefully pushing various agendas, guns, gold, nomads, urban tribes, civil war, and so forth. There are even some romantic and sexual relationships to keep just about any reader interested :) Overall, the mood in the book is grim. The future world starts recognizably similar to our society, except that most amenities are gone from common people's lives, out of reach of anyone but the wealthy. Unemployment, poverty, and crime are rampant. The way people live, travel, feed and entertain themselves, is not nearly as easy and pleasant as today. There is a sense of profound loss: from major characters who gradually leave or die to the mere lack of what we today consider normalcy.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Out With A Whimper June 20, 2011
Format:Paperback
In Will McIntosh's debut novel, Soft Apocalypse, the world as we know it ends with a whimper, not a bang. The end of America and the rest of the world comes out of our over indulgence, use of resources and all of the problems in society reaching a dull roar that tears down the world as we know it. This story takes a small cast of characters and looks at them over a much longer point of time than more novels, providing a unique perspective on what the future might hold.

Unlike most post-apocalyptic fiction, there's no dividing line between what was then, and everything afterwards, where stalwart survivors push on to rebuild a broken landscape the day after the world ends. In this future, everything is far more subtle: there's one instance that changes everything forever: no nuclear attack, change in the climate, overbearing governmental officials driving society into the ground, but a multitude of small factors (including the ones just listed) that drags society down into the depths, and takes the main characters, Jasper, Colin, Sophia, Phoebe, Cortez, and Ange, (and the various others that come and go) along with it.

Starting in 2023, Soft Apocalypse stands out because it takes its time to tell the story over a much longer period of time: chapters jump ahead days, weeks, months, hours and years at a time, pulling the characters along as they work to continue living in this new world as the world falls down around them. There are a lot of speculative fiction elements here: science, dystopian and post-apocalyptic parts are all here, as well as some intensely personal stories from the vibrant cast of characters that rotate in and out of sight. This is a story that takes a lot of the big events and science and shoves it into the background in favor of a strong character story.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars Wimpy protagonist...
My apologies to the author, since it's a lot harder writing the book than criticizing it. I had planned a lengthy critique, and I kept cutting it down, and I still wound up with 3... Read more
Published 19 days ago by Lupus
4.0 out of 5 stars Not exactly "soft" ...
There's nothing soft about "Soft Apocalypse" (Night Shade Books, $14.99, 248 pages). Will McIntosh's near-future description of the slow slide of modernity into barbarism is soft... Read more
Published 28 days ago by Clay Kallam
5.0 out of 5 stars Very good end of the world novel.
One of the best novels I have read this year. The story follows along Jasper, a college educated normal guy trying to make it through the end of the world. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Dollar Conscious Shopper
4.0 out of 5 stars Very good read.
Instead of zombies eating us all, or an asteroid killing half the poulation at once, Soft Apocalypse is just a slow decent into chaos. Read more
Published 2 months ago by wjnorthridge
5.0 out of 5 stars A character-driven ride through the world's slow demise... Loved it
This is not a story full of epic characters doing epic things... at least not on purpose. The protagonist Jasper is an average twenty-something man living an aborted middle class... Read more
Published 7 months ago by M. Mola
5.0 out of 5 stars Loved It, Sadly Plausible
Will McIntosh's book is a facinating and wholly original take on post-apocalyptic fiction. It makes me think back to War Day, by Whitely Strieber and James Kunetka. Read more
Published 9 months ago by J. Russell
4.0 out of 5 stars The slow denouement
In the end, this is an action story. Although it is the end of the world (and the human race as it has evolved) there is no specific villain just as there is no specific hero. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Avid Reader
5.0 out of 5 stars Apocalypse Due to Economic and Social Chaos
Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh, which is based on a previously published short story by McIntosh, is a very frightening book about the end of civilization as we know it. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Clark Hallman
1.0 out of 5 stars A dismal, bigoted failure
If Joseph McCarthy were a lefty, he would write a book like this. And not just any lefty (there are plenty of liberals writing good SF) but the sort of lefty who believes we're one... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Chris Clukey
3.0 out of 5 stars It's not for me.
Hard to follow, weak and pathetic characters, unrealistic story line that reunites people separated by years or decades to a finale that tortured on for 20 pages. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Grantbo
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Topic From this Discussion
How did this book not win anything?
I think the book is overlooked because it's a first, and it's slim.
I wish we had learned what Cortez did about Ange.
Apr 27, 2012 by Claude Bissonette |  See all 4 posts
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