Posts Tagged ‘armageddon’

Announcing THE PETROVITCH TRILOGY, now an eBook Omnibus!

Philip K. Dick award winning The Samuil Petrovitch Trilogy by Simon MordenThe Philip K. Dick award-winning series, THE PETROVITCH TRILOGY (UK | US) by Simon Morden is about to be released as an ebook omnibus for the first time.

This is ahead of the release of  brand new title from Simon called THE CURVE OF THE EARTH (UK | US | ANZ) – also coming in March.

All these novels star Russian émigré and super-genius Samuil Petrovitch, whose incredibly low tolerance for fools and penchant for getting on the wrong side of pretty much everyone makes him the most unlikely hero the world has ever seen.

Or what’s left of the world, anyway.

See, there’s the small issue of the apocalypse. London as we know it has suffered an Armageddon . . . but hey! Life still goes on right?

If you’re entering the Metrozone for the first time, we’ve put together a handy guide to its genesis, and what sort of things you might expect to find there . . . (more…)

If there is an apocalypse, it will probably be soft…

Will McIntsosh is the Hugo Award-winning science fiction author of SOFT APOCALYPSE and HITCHERS (both released as digital editions this Thursday in UK and ANZ), as well as the up-and-coming LOVE MINUS EIGHTY (released worldwide in June 2013). Will tells us below about exactly what kind of apocalypse he envisages . . .

Soft Apoclaypse, an apocalyptic science fiction novel from Hugo award-winning author whose other novels include HITCHERS and the up-and-coming LOVE MINUS EIGHTY

I’ve had a longstanding interest in the end of the world. I’m not a True Believer – I don’t have a six month supply of freeze-dried food and a ten year supply of ammo stored in a bunker under my house – but I do believe the likelihood of an apocalypse is greater than most people think.

In most apocalyptic literature, the apocalypses are caused by sudden, surprising, cataclysmic events, like nuclear weapons, meteors, or killer viruses. I wrote a novel about a “soft apocalypse”, where things unravel slowly, over the course of decades. Rather than one event, a series of events cause a long, slow decline, and the world population dies off gradually. If there is an apocalypse, I think this is how it will happen. Here’s why.

A social psychologist named Dan Gilbert pointed out that the human mind has evolved to react primarily to immediate threats, especially if those threats have a clearly identifiable cause, and especially if that cause is an identifiable person or group of people. In other words, we’ve evolved to react to immediate threats perpetrated by human villains. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were exactly that kind of threat. During the cold war, the threat was nuclear annihilation, and the villains were the leaders of the Soviet Union or the United States, depending on where you lived. These sorts of threats scare the hell out of us. We sit up, pay attention, and take action if we can. (more…)