It remains the method of most sci-fi novels to imagine a kind of heightened present, combining and extrapolating extant technologies (an MP3 player … in your brain!) to demonstrate their psychological and political effects. The post-catastrophe novel does the opposite; it takes away the MP3 player, and almost everything else. It liberates the violent potential of technology (and its enemy, nature) to create an altered world whose chief characteristic is a bewildering lack of technology. This in turn means a severely winnowed human population, and plenty of hardship and casual brutality. This future doesn't intensify the present moment, it contradicts it: What would happen if we didn't live in an overpopulated, technology-saturated world in which travel by foot is considered eccentric, tacos cost forty-nine cents, and the prerogative to commit violence—despite an amazing profusion of handheld weaponry—lies entirely with the state?
[…] Post-catastrophe novels remind us that the end of the novel may come about another way.
The novel, after all, is one of our modern industrial technologies, bound up with all the rest. This is true in a thousand trivial, if world-destroying, ways; novels are printed on pulped trees, and after they're printed they get shipped via oil-burning planes and trucks to the Barnes & Nobles near our homes—except Amazon is cheaper, especially with SuperSaver shipping, and so another set of vehicles delivers the book from Amazon, while the unsold books at Barnes & Noble are shipped back to a warehouse to be marked as remainders, and shipped out again, and so on. The book business is like the rest of our businesses—global, profligate, and controlled by a small and still-consolidating group of conglomerates. You can distribute your work on the internet, sure—but then there's the ecological cost of making a MacBook, and the fact that no one will read you.
I believe that the novel is going to stop to become the most popular form of books if it isn’t already because people going to become even more obsessed with reality, its complexity, and finding ways to overcome it. This obsession is going to make them gravitate towards memoirs (fake or not), self-help books, and other types of non-fiction.
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