Notes from an Apocalypse

December 23, 2019
The end of the world portends right-wing vigilantism and left-wing nihilism, according to this bleakly comic tour of doomsday ideologies. Consumed by fears of climate change and beset by self-criticism—“my footprint is as broad and deep and indelible as my guilt”—journalist O’Connell (To Be a Machine) surveys several strands of apocalyptic foreboding. He treats the reactionary, survivalist varieties—including American doomsday preppers stockpiling food and ammo in anticipation of urban rioters, a real-estate developer peddling bunkers on a former South Dakota military base, and Mars-colonization enthusiasts who fondly invoke white settlers’ colonization of the U.S.—as pathological expressions of social paranoia, toxic patriarchy, and outright “fascism,” and makes clear that his sympathies lie more with progressive doomsayers. On a camping trip with deep ecology pessimists who refute the “myth” that humans are “fundamentally distinct” from nature and welcome the climate change–induced collapse of civilization, O’Connell communes with grass and sky and finds talk of human extinction “strangely cheerful.” Readers who agree that the U.S. is “a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and... terminal-stage capitalism” will be equally terrified and bemused by O’Connell’s musings, while those who are less credulous about narratives of ecological apocalypse will find much to dispute. The result is a wryly humorous if somewhat overwrought rumination that’s more a symptom than a diagnosis of Western civilization’s apocalyptic discontents.

Starred review from January 1, 2020

Irish writer O'Connell (To Be a Machine)here explores his obsessive fears about the future. Though overwhelmed by the many signs of looming catastrophe and collapse, O'Connell felt pressured, as a parent, to be less despairing about the future, and so undertook an investigation into what other doomsday believers were doing to prepare for impending disaster. His adventures took him deep into the guidebooks and videos of prepper, or survivalist, subculture; to the Black Hills of South Dakota to tour a massive underground bunker system for the wealthy; to New Zealand, where tech billionaires were buying property to escape the anticipated collapse; and to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a postapocalyptic wasteland. From his self-directed immersion in these doomsday scenarios, O'Connell emerged if not more optimistic about the future, at least able to live more easily in the present. VERDICT O'Connell is not only a sharp observer but a master at parsing the various subtexts underneath the surface rhetoric of these apocalyptic movements. This witty, profound, and beautifully told story will appeal to doomsday worriers and nonworriers alike.--Cynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Historical Soc., Flemington, NJ

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January 15, 2020
An around-the-end-of-the-world tour in the company of a smart, funny, and thoughtful guide. Near the beginning, O'Connell (To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, 2016) describes watching a video of an "emaciated polar bear" struggling to find food. "It occurred to me then that the disgust I felt was a symptom of a kind of moral vertigo," he writes, "resulting from the fact that the very technology that allowed me to witness the final pathetic tribulations of this emaciated beast was in fact a cause of the animal's suffering in the first place." To live in the modern world is to be complicit in its decline; nothing new there. But what can/should/will we do about it? The author makes no attempt to persuade us to drive electric cars and sequester carbon. Whether visiting underground shelters in South Dakota, billionaire refuges in New Zealand, or the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, he studies the end of the world from a decidedly detached perspective. About a retreat he attended in Scotland, he writes, "this was not the sort of explicitly romantic endeavor I would ordinarily involve myself in, what with the unwieldy carapace of cynicism I had allowed to grow around me over the course of my adult life." This kind of self-awareness around his project enables the humor O'Connell uses to cope with horror. His wry tone is effective in exposing the ridiculousness of many of the survivalists and technolibertarians he encountered. "If my portrayal of him [the owner of a luxury underground shelter] seems to be verging on the mode of caricature, even of outright grotesquerie, it is only because this was how he presented himself to me in fact." It might be a bit much if O'Connell weren't able to offer a sincere and life-affirming response to all the grimness: Things have always been bad and about to get worse. Nihilism can follow from that, but it doesn't have to. A contribution to the doom-and-gloom genre that might actually cheer you up.

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March 1, 2020
Possessed by "apocalyptic anxieties," O'Connell (To Be a Machine, 2017) undertook "a series of perverse pilgrimages, to those places where the shadows of the future fall most darkly across the present." From his home in Dublin, he journeys to the far reaches of the online disaster-prepper community. In the U.S., he meets a developer selling off former South Dakota military bunkers to the apocalypse-conscious, and attends a conference on Mars colonization in LA. He visits the New Zealand refuge purchased by an American tech billionaire, takes a daylong "nature solo" in a Scottish industrial wasteland turned wildlife refuge, and embarks on an undeniably strange and gripping adventure-tour of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. This combines far-reaching analyses of the predicaments we're in now, from sociopolitical and philosophical angles, with relatable, often funny, and ultimately hopeful personal moments (including affecting passages on raising young children). A more-than-companionable guide, O'Connell sets out to understand how we live under constant threat of climate change and political terror, and finds that the answer is, more or less, we do.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)