My first love is historical fiction, but I’ve read a fair number of futuristic books as well. In the past year I’ve read at least five titles that take place in the future. What stuck out to me in all this reading was that A. I need to find me some Utopian Futuristic lit. and B. Dystopian Futuristic Lit and Post-Apocolyptic Lit isn’t fun to read anymore. Don’t remember seeing any post-apocolyptic titles here? I felt so mixed after reading them that I opted not to write a post about it.

Not so long ago, reading about futuristic societies like in Hunger Games and the Uglies were just a little jaunt into a place that would never exist.

Now, I read ideas about the future – a subsistence future where trade has collapsed, no one has enough, and groups who have survived are isolated from one another in a violent world where the government doesn’t have the people’s best interest at heart – all of that sometimes feels just a hair away from where we are now. You know, there but for the grace of God go I and the rest of society.

So with Tim Maughen. Infinite Detail brings us into a world where people are isolated from one another, trade has completely broken down, and those who have survived are barely scraping by. Something is broken, but we don’t know exactly what, and the details unfold slowly as the book scoots forward and back in time to reveal the story.

In real life it already feels like the world is falling apart. Like we’re moments away from our infrastructure falling apart and our cities descending into a chaos of looting and riots.

What if the electricity stopped working because the grid collapsed or we got hacked? If gasoline stopped being available before there is an affordable alternative? What if someone broke the internet? What if the supply chain that we take for granted will stock the shelves of our grocery stores broke down and our money was no longer worth anything? If the water stopped running?

I’m not a doomsday-er. I don’t have six months worth of food and water for my family in the basement in five-gallon buckets along with batteries, blankets, and a first aid kit.

If things really fell apart, we’d be in a rough spot. There’s a lot of us and it would be tough to manage.

A future where everything that works now, everything that keeps us afloat and in relative peace, just stopped working… it doesn’t feel that far-fetched anymore.

But I keep reading about that dystopian world of the future. As long as it’s a work of fiction, there is some safety there, no matter how uncomfortable reading about it makes me feel.

I know I usually talk about content issues, and I didn’t this time, so here’s a quick summary: This book contains frequent language, some scenes of intense violence, and zero sex.