Things we didn’t see coming by Steven Amsterdam

This is an intriguing, curious, eccentric book. The story is driven by a series of near-future cataclysms, yet Amsterdam eschews any sense of doom or apocalypse; instead we have an unnamed narrator adapting and surviving and finding ways to live in an unpredictable, highly mutable world within view of our own.

Like David Mitchell’s Cloud atlas, Things we didn’t see coming is told in a series of disconnected vignettes, each one requiring the reader to reorient themselves in a new world. Amsterdam handles the exposition well (though less so in the later sections, I felt), largely because his character doesn’t ruminate on the disasters and what has caused them (Y2K looms in the first section, and there has clearly been a melting of the ice caps at some point, and a future war appears to leave parts of the population irradiated and riddled with cancers), and because Amsterdam is shrewd about placing his character in revealing, telling and cleverly intersected situations.

In the end, it’s not about disaster, it’s about the before and after. It opens with prophecy, a plea to open our eyes to impending chaos, and it ends with a transcendant acceptance, with eyes literally closed. It’s about our worries — how we worry about the wrong things, how worrying about anything at all is a burden we needn’t carry, provided we have the courage to change who we are, and perhaps even to forget who we are.

Amsterdam’s narrator has no answers; he survives by coming to a way of living that works for him in the moment, and by being prepared to change that way of living as soon as it becomes unsustainable or proves maladaptive. There’s a line toward the end about “good choices for the apocalypse”; I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a working title for the book.