'To Be Taught If Fortunate' and 'The Second Sleep'

'To Be Taught If Fortunate' and 'The Second Sleep'

Postby Bruce Mardle » Fri Feb 07, 2020 10:05 pm

More by chance than design, I've been reading 2 novels that feature apocalypses.
I should warn readers that this message contains spoilers.

The 1st novel is 'To Be Taught If Fortunate' by Becky Chambers. It's about a team on a decades-long space flight who stop receiving messages from Earth. Eventually, they hear from another spaceship that's just returned to Earth and discovered that civilisation has collapsed due to a giant geomagnetic storm.

The 2nd novel -- I haven't finished it yet -- is 'The Second Sleep' by Robert Harris. It's set 800 years after The Apocalypse, when the quality of life is similar to The Middle Ages. The protagonist reads a copy of a letter written in 2022 whose author thinks civilisation will collapse from 1 of 6 different causes. (The novel is surprisingly funny, though it's mostly a thriller.)
Bruce Mardle
 
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Re: 'To Be Taught If Fortunate' and 'The Second Sleep'

Postby Bruce Mardle » Sat Feb 08, 2020 9:10 am

In case anyone's interested in the 6 possible causes of the apocalypse given, they're:
    Climate change
    A nuclear exchange
    A super-volcano eruption, leading to rapidly accelerated climate change
    A asteroid strike, also causing accelerated climate change
    A general failure of computer technology due either to cyber warfare, an uncontrollable virus, or solar activity
    A pandemic resistant to antibiotics
Bruce Mardle
 
Posts: 18
Joined: Wed Jul 27, 2016 1:14 pm


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