the quiet at the end of the world by lauren james

There’s some short term fear and dislocation sure, and the inevitable riots that come with any social change, but eventually people get back to going to work, paying bills and going on holidays and the eventual doomsday is consigned to the backs of peoples’ minds, their hope resting in the ability of scientists to defuse the infertility bomb ticking silently among them. It takes some time for everyone to fully grasp that this is happening. I have to shout and fight and give everything I have to make sure this isn’t the end.” (P. I can’t sit here, quiet at the end of the world. “If I thought that life wasn’t worth living, it was because I hadn’t found the way I could change things yet.īut I know now what I have to do. In Lauren James’s exquisitely-ruminative novel The Quiet at the End of the World”, the apocalypse arrives as always but it comes upon us slowly, almost glacially, when a virus that causes massive nosebleeds results in a worldwide epidemic of infertility.Īpart from the embryos stored in clinics around the world, humanity is without a way to continue the species, staring, however many decades into the future, into the abyss of oblivion.

John Mandel) and formulaic, which when you think about it, is rather ironic given how ruinously messy and cataclysmic the end of all things would be. R Carey, The Book of M by Peng Shepherd and Station Eleven by Emily St.

Same old, same old the stories may be well written but the end result is reasonably predictable (save for some notable exceptions like The Girl With All the Gifts by M. Some great cataclysmic event occurs, people die en masse (or rise up again), civilisation totters and falls, and the survivability of Homo Sapiens takes an almighty beating.

(cover image courtesy Walkers Books Australia)įor all the many and varied ways that humanity could slash its collective throat, the trip to the apocalypse almost always looks eerily the same.

The quiet at the end of the world by lauren james