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by Janine Shiota (Author)
Six lives. One signal beneath everything.
Set against a near-future of fractured nation-states, technocratic dynasties, and a quantum event called the Q that resets the global power map overnight, Stories From The End of the World is a composite literary speculative novel told through six point-of-view strands converging on a single civilizational threshold.
Lali is eleven years old, living in a post-collapse community and has been waiting her whole life for the Seventh Crossing - the Star Road that runs from underground to the farthest star. Malcolm is the last incarnation of an ancient cosmic intelligence keynoting a climate conference in Vienna on the day the world changes. Sabian is an AI engineer whose wife was murdered on their kitchen floor, and who builds an AI SIMulation from her data in a grief-locked crypt, together looking for her killer. BenBen is a smuggler moving between civilization's lit and dark zones through Soviet-era tunnels, carrying things across the seam between worlds. Prisha is a WE-V social media star, at the peak of her beauty and influence in glistening Mumbai. Joyce is a marine biologist who dies briefly and returns with a frequency she cannot name.
They will not meet. They are already connected by a signal running beneath every system - biological, artificial, cosmological - that each of them is receiving in a different language, without knowing the others exist.
Written across six distinct registers, the novel builds toward a single convergent argument about intelligence, extinction, and what it means to be part of the universe.
Stories From The End of the World is the first book of the Genesis Series. It is written as a complete, self-contained novel.
For readers of Cloud Atlas, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Bewilderment, Klara and the Sun, and There There.
