How could we go from the highly mechanized, profusely wired world we live in today to a postmechanical Planet Earth sometime in the future? By getting hit by an asteroid, nuclear war, disease epidemic, or other apocalypse. How else?

Well, actually, there might be other ways. They’re hard for us to imagine, but then so was the internet to people living centuries before it was invented.

Therefore it’s not necessary for speculative fiction that takes place on a future postmechanical Planet Earth to assume that an apocalypse caused the transition. For that matter, it’s not necessary to assume any particular agent of transition at all. In fiction, the setting doesn’t need to be explained. It can just be so.

It sure would be interesting, though, if some writer besides me could imagine a nonapocalyptic path to a future Planet Earth where most machines have been broken up for scrap and the rest are museum pieces.