RADIO LIFE

HOW TO SURVIVE WHEN THE WORLD END

- Saxon Bullock

Author Derek Miller

Publisher Jo Fletcher Books

Post-apocalypse stories often focus just on the nitty-gritty of how to survive when the world ends, but there’s a more challenging question: what happens when familiar knowledge gets left behind? Radio Life tackles this question head-on and has new insights into what could easily have been familiar territory.

Strongly influenced by the classic post-apocalypse novel A Canticle For Leibowitz, it’s the tale of the Commonwealth, a society eking out an existence centuries after nanotech accidentally devastated the world. The Commonwealth’s mission is to excavate and preserve all the knowledge it can find, but when one of their explorers happens upon an archived version of the internet, it sets off a conflict with the Keepers, a rival society who want all traces of the “Gone World” destroyed.

While author Derek Miller doesn’t completely avoid cliché (there are extensive echoes of