The Last Day

This is becoming a genre of its own. Twenty-first century not-so-cosy Wyndham-esque catastrophes The Wall, Doggerland and now this.

It’s undoubtedly a page turner and is a strangely bleak set up, not just the end of civilisation, but the end of Mother Earth herself (potentially).

Some of the world-building and set up worked really well and was evocative and disturbing.

The tar-smelling London of Children of Men, the rig.

Some of it didn’t work quite so well - bakelite telephones? It’s a tricky set up to say ‘70 years in the future the world has moved 150 years backwards’. It’s a common pattern (mistake) I think, when writing about civilisation collapsing - you don’t just reverse down the timeline, you end up somewhere completely new. It’s true that lower energy, lower tech level solutions might be reintroduced, or take the same shape as the first time round, but also they might not.