How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters

The apocalypse can take many forms. Possibly our end will come by way of an addictive cell phone game that manipulates its users into a crowd-sourced mass murder. Or perhaps our downfall involves aliens drugging us into bliss and then taking it away. Maybe it'll be technological redundancy that leaves loved ones without a purpose, or corporations replacing the natural world with creatures more amenable to market pressure. 

All these apocalypses and many more can be found in Erica L. Satifka's debut collection, which gathers together twenty-three short stories from the past decade.

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How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is my first collection! Released on November 9, 2021 by Fairwood Press, it includes 23 stories, most originally appearing in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Interzone, Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, and Lightspeed, as well as two new ones that have never been published before.

You can order a paper copy of How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters on the Fairwood Press website and anywhere else fine small-press books can be special-ordered, or a digital copy on Books2Read. (Ask your library to order it too!)

WINNER OF THE 2021 ENDEAVOUR AWARD!!!

Praise for How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters:

The stories in Satifka's debut collection are inventive and gritty, bleak and satirical, hilarious and horrifying. Her work is reminiscent of Philip K. Dick at his best in revealing the struggles and resilience of everyday people caught up in the machinery of the future."
     — Tim Pratt, author of Prison of Sleep and the Axiom series 

"Satifka is one of the most exciting writers around and still sadly under the radar. Her mordant stories grapple with technology and society in a way that brings to mind the cyberpunk greats. The tales in her first collection range from a grim story of dead children turned into flesh puppets for a TV show to an incredibly effective response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."
     — Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Washington Post

"Don’t look to Satifka’s stories for sunshine and daisies. Her tales are more like dried roses: although dead, they remain beautiful while retaining their thorns."

     — Manhattan Book Review

"The 23 stories gathered together in How to Get to Apocalypse display Satifka’s biting sense of humour, her appreciation of the bizarre and surreal, and her concerns, both political and social, at the pervasive nature of neoliberalism."

    — Ian Mond, Locus Magazine

"These are the apocalypses of automation and redundancy; social stratification and malignant ignorance. Satifka has an incredible—unparalleled, even—ability to pack each story filled with technological concepts and imaginative conceits. It is excellent world-building, with every element strange and wondrous, but all perfectly plausible and naturally woven. It is a wave of new ideas, but never once feels like an onslaught, because the stories themselves are character-driven; about deeply empathetic people in these recognisable, if unsettling, worlds. These are stories that are not only immediately relevant, but will stand the test of time. Science fiction—cyberpunk, even—at its finest."

    — Jared Shurin, Tor.com

"Immersed in viable, plausible speculative futures, How to Get to Apocalypse is an unforgettable collection."

   — Claire Foster, Foreword Reviews