Last year, sitting in a small dive bar in Bloomington, IN, I had the pleasure of hearing Larissa Lai speak on apocalypse. She had very graciously agreed to join us for the inaugural Bloomington Book Festival. The crux of the talk was a framing of how we viewed apocalypses, and then, through that framing, how we moved within the context of said apocalypse. Lai argued that many groups have faced these disasters already. That apocalypse has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen for the foreseeable future.
To briefly extrapolate from what she said, outside of the worlds of speculative media, like The Walking Dead or The Planet of the Apes, apocalypse looks very different. Apocalypse in reality has never been the end of the world for all but instead, often, just for marginalized populations. The reality of apocalypse is the end of a mix of three variables: specific times, places, or groups of people. In most cases, apocalypse has been the end of all three. For the Indigenous populations who were forcibly removed in the US, starting when the white man arrived and then with more fervor in 1831, that was apocalypse. For the people of Ukraine whose language, culture, and tradition have repeatedly been forced down by the Russian hegemony, that is apocalypse. For Palestinians living through genocide right now, they are in the midst of a second apocalypse post-Nakba. What’s come out of these moments has always been unique, and Lai offered that, after these apocalypses, there were some strategies we could all use. Strategies to move forward.
Luckily she plans to publish these strategies in a book sometime in the next few years, so keep an eye out for that. We will all need these strategies in our present reality. What the talk left me with though was a lingering internal conversation. A meandering on how the strategies for survival have been shared by these groups postdisaster. It left me wanting to find voices who have experienced an event like this to hear how they made it through.
Following Lai’s talk, given the book she plans to publish is a few years out and knowing our need for them in our present reality, I sought other sources discussing apocalypse in this way to hear how they made it through. First, I found We Survived the End of the World by Steven Charleston. In this concise text, Charleston recounts the Indigenous experience of apocalypse, defines the idea of apocalypse, and also offers the strategies that Indigenous folks found to grapple with the rending of their world multiple times. His definition of apocalypse is very profound, and I found it useful in the new lens Lai’s talk had started shaping for me: “Apocalypse is both event and vision. It is a process that recurs time after time in human history. It is a description of reality and an invitation to imagine a different reality—a reality coming to be. It is a revelation: an uncovering of our worst fears and highest aspirations. It is a look back, and it is a step forward”.1
It was a few months before I discovered another text that had the same intentions as Charleston and Lai. In January of 2025, I noticed a new release in the bookshop I work at— Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey. This was the book that brought full circle some of the thoughts I was having. Lynskey says, “Writers of fictional doomsdays all reveal what they love or hate about the world as it is, and what they fear. Such stories are like ice-core data for dating the life cycle of existential concerns”.2 I would argue that you can extend this to those who write around real doomsdays as well. Not only do the ice cores of a piece reveal what we love and hate but also what we dream for in both the past, present, and future.
These perspectives on apocalypse have convinced me that it isn’t all hopeless. Not to diminish things at all, because it’s bad out there these days, y’all—like really fucking bad—but, having broken through the massive, all-encompassing Western version of the end of the world, I can see there are still ways forward. These perspectives have also changed how I look at the specific family of stories that come out of these experiences. To imagine survival we shouldn’t look to the half-baked, white-exceptionalism survival narratives that have been the media’s bread and butter for too long. The way people have actually survived the end of the world is not by being islands—hoarding supplies, taking up some weapon, and building some isolationist fever dream of a world. Rather, they have survived through mutual aid, planting gardens, sticking it to the man, sharing good meals together, and still finding the hope to dream. Somewhere in all the rubble of the world around them, people have found shards glimmering to carry with them. Things sharp, and beautiful, and dangerous, and utile, and theirs. So many use that hope to put pen to page and present us with missives.
I have found that these postapocalyptic missives come in three flavors, and while they are similar to the three categories that have floated around the SFFH world for a while—usually attributed to Asimov, “what if,” “if only,” and “if this goes on”—I argue they are functionally different. The first group includes stories that reflect on the events that unfolded. These pieces grieve, decipher, recontextualize, illuminate, and observe their end of the world. Through these pieces, we bear witness together. The second group contains those that rewrite what happened. What if the world had cared more? What if this strategy had been tried? What if this person had never been given this power? Etcetera. Sometimes it feels good to imagine we won. This category of stories merges the ideas of “what if” and “if only.” The last group of stories imagines a way forward. The stories that create the futurities we can all dream of, or find the awful in the day-to-day and fix it. Sometimes these are utopic, more often they are better but not perfect. While “if this goes on” has an inherent pejorative bent as it’s asking the reader to witness what bad things might happen because of our current trajectory, the futurity centered version that these missives offer leans more toward “if we are able to” or “if we can continue.”
In these times of varied apocalypses, happening to groups around the world simultaneously, where can you find these missives? I present you with this list of texts that are easily accessible, diverse in strategy, and just plain beautiful. These are all short story collections with the shared goal of highlighting marginalized perspectives, and the stories within all do some version or mix of the three functional categories I described, gathering perspectives from postapocalypse. Hopefully, they give you direction for what’s next. Not just the sort of unfounded, directionless optimism that is too common these days but instead a hope filled with ideas for what we each can do.
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Thyme Travellers, edited by Sonia Sulaiman (2024, Roseway Publishing)
This collection centers Palestinian diasporic writers who masterfully weave together past and present to share the heart of Palestine.
Personal Favorite Story: “The Generation Chip” by Nadia Afifi
This story breaks me. Two grandchildren get their grandmother’s memories after she passes. One gets her actual memories, the other gets her dreams. Together they must wade through what made up their grandmother and negotiate those ideas with the woman they knew and loved. This story fits the vibes for stories that reflect on apocalypse.
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Amplitudes, edited by Lee Mandelo (2025, Erewhon Books)
Beautiful, funny, heartbreaking, real, breathing, queer futures coexist here. This collection is rife with the ways forward.
Personal Favorite Story: “Trans World Takeover” by Nat X Ray
Takes the meme, of “I’m gonna trans your gender” all too seriously. This piece excellently captures the snark and ambition of teenage rebellion and spins it in an entirely new direction. This story is one that imagines how we may find ways forward.
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Out There Screaming, edited by Jordan Peele (2023, Random House)
Edited by a master of Black horror and contributed to by some of the most incredible current Black speculative fiction writers, this collection is bound to get under your skin.
Personal Favorite Story: “The Norwood Trouble” by Maurice Broaddus
The reader is presented with an all-Black community existing near Indianapolis, IN. This community is seeking help from the spirits around us to protect themselves from those who seek to harm them. The setting for the story was a real historic all-Black community. This story is one that rewrites the apocalypse to try and understand it better.
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Love After the End, edited by Joshua Whitehead (2020, Arsenal Pulp Press)
Highlighting the dreams of a community who lost their world and then were asked to conform to the colonial expectations of both “citizenship” and “queerness.”
Personal Favorite Story: “How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls” by Kai Minosh Pyle
A group of Indigenous teens offer advice and life anecdotes to their reader on how other native girls can survive apocalypse. This piece plays with form and narration in such delightful ways. This story also imagines ways forward.
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Embroidered Worlds, edited by Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Olha Brylova, and Iryna Pasko (Atthis Arts, 2023)
Kickstarted into existence, this collection shares the small esoteric bits of what it means to be Ukrainian.
Personal Favorite Story: “An Embroidered World” by Yuriy Vynnychuk
Centered on the folk craft of embroidery, a wife shapes worlds with naught but her needle and thread. This piece embodies the magic of the everyday mundane, of the traditional, of the material. This story reflects on the culture that apocalypse has taken.
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Terraform, edited by Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans (MCD x FSG Originals, 2022)
A collection to help us pull ourselves back from the brink of Apocalypse if we aren’t already in the middle of it.
Personal Favorite Story: “Drones to Ploughshares” by Sarah Gailey
A drone who was built for destruction finds a new community and also a new path in life. When our protagonist heads to a small farming community, it is astounded by all the law breaking. Soon though, it grapples with who made those rules and how its own life is affected by an authoritarian vision of survival. This story imagines how we all find ways forward.
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- We Survived the End of the World by Steven Charleston, 2023, 18-19. ↩︎
- Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey2024, 14. ↩︎
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