Soft Apocalypse: Twelve Tales from the Turn of the Millennium

by James Flint

A young office worker sees his life deconstructed by an online personality test; nanobots transform the victim of a rape into an eternal virgin; a clone discusses his clothing with his "father"; a child describes his journey across a planet that's become a vast mausoleum; a reincarnated Albrecht Dürer seduces a museum curator's wife... How do we conserve a thread of humanity in a world deformed by technological phobia and millennial angst? Simultaneously familiar and strange, these twelve short stories trace the air-conditioned nightmares borne of lives increasing mediated by science and information.


JAMES FLINT (www.jamesflint.net, facebook.com/flintjames, @jamesflint) is the author of three novels and one book of short stories. In 1998 Time Out magazine called his first book, Habitus, “probably the best British fiction début of the last five years”, and when it was published in France it was judged as one of the top five foreign novels of 2002. His second novel, 52 Ways to Magic America, claimed the Amazon.co.uk award for the year 2000, and his third, The Book of Ash, won an Arts Council Writers Award and was described by the Independent newspaper's leading literary critic as "a bold British counterpart to DeLillo's Underworld".

One of the stories in this collection, The Nuclear Train, was adapted for Channel 4 television by the film-maker Dan Saul in 2002.

97 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1968, James Flint is the author of three novels and one book of short stories. In 1998 Time Out magazine called his first book, Habitus, "probably the best British fiction début of the last five years," and when it was published in France it was judged one of the top five foreign novels of 2002. His second novel, 52 Ways to Magic America, claimed the Amazon.co.uk award for the year 2000, and his third, The Book of Ash, won an Arts Council Writers Award and was described by the Independent's leading literary critic as "a bold British counterpart to DeLillo's Underworld."

In 2002 his short story The Nuclear Train was adapted for Channel 4 television; he has had a long involvement with Port Eliot Festival and curated the film tent there for several years; and his journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, Sight & Sound, Time Out, The Times, The Independent, Arena, The Economist, Dazed & Confused and many others. From 2009-2012 he was Editor-in-Chief of the Telegraph Weekly World Edition, and he is currently the co-founder and CEO of the health communications start-up Hospify.