Soft Apocalypse

My sometime student Will McIntosh (Taos Toolbox 2008) has published his first novel, and it's a very fine work indeed. Soft Apocalypse — the very title of which introduces a useful idea into science fiction— is what happens when your civilization starts to crumble and then just keeps on crumbling.  There's no bang, there's no war, there's no great dramatic moment when the cities burn, there are no armies of zombies, there's just a slow and steady erosion of everything that makes your society...