The word “midapocalyptic” is doing a specific amount of work, and I want to explain what it is.
Apocalyptic fiction is usually about the moment: the end, the event, the catastrophe. The bomb dropping, the pandemic spreading, the asteroid hitting. Everything we had, and then not. Post-apocalyptic fiction is about what comes after: survival, rebuilding, the world in ruins.
Oldie is neither of these things.
The world of Oldie didn’t end. The candles went out one morning — the seven Dreamers who had been holding things together for a thousand years were suddenly gone from themselves, their memories extinguished, their identities scattered like birds startled from a tree. And then the morning continued. The world, which had been leaning on those seven for so long that it had shaped itself around them, lurched. Shattered into pieces. Lost its coherence.
But it kept going. In the way that a person keeps going after something breaks inside them. In the way that cities keep going after floods, or communities keep going after grief. Broken, but not finished. Still very much in progress.
That’s the mid. Not before, not after. During.
I’ve been trying to write this book for most of my adult life, and I want to be honest about why it took this long.
Part of it was technical. I knew the world before I knew the story. I knew the Chain — its seven islands and their distinct characters, the Dreamers and their ancient bonds, the night the candles went out. I just didn’t know what the story was yet. I’d written my way into the world dozens of times and come out the other side holding a character study or a piece of world-building rather than a novel.
The story turned out to be simpler than I’d expected, in the way that all the stories underneath elaborate stories are simpler than expected. It’s about seven people who have lost their memories and are trying to find out who they are. It’s about what we are when everything that made us who we were is gone. It’s about the terrifying freedom of starting over when you don’t have a choice about starting over.
It’s about what it means to be a person in a world that broke, and how you make something worth having out of the pieces.
I started writing it seriously after a year in which I also lost some things I’d been leaning on. I don’t need to be more specific than that. Most of us have had years like that. The world doesn’t end. It just changes shape, and then you have to figure out how to live in the new shape it’s made.
The term “midapocalyptic” also does a second thing, which is that it signals what kind of story this isn’t.
It isn’t a survival story. The characters in Oldie are not primarily concerned with staying alive, though that does come up. They’re concerned with something more complicated: figuring out who they are now, in this broken world, and what that version of themselves owes to the people around them.
It isn’t a post-apocalyptic triumph narrative — the heroic reconstruction of something better from the rubble. The world in Oldie might get better, or it might not. The question isn’t whether civilization recovers. The question is what kind of people these seven are going to be, in whatever civilization or absence of it they happen to inhabit.
And it isn’t grimdark — the mode in which the world’s darkness is the point, the misery a feature rather than a context. The Chain is a strange and difficult place, but it is also beautiful. It has Redwoods that remember everything and cities that predate memory and a ship that is alive because someone loved it into existence. The Dreamers are damaged and afraid and occasionally awful to each other and also genuinely, specifically, warmly human.
Midapocalyptic means: the world broke, and then it kept going, and so did we.
That’s the story I’ve been trying to tell for a long time. I’m finally writing it. I’m glad you’re here while I do.