What do you think?
Rate this book
A Farewell to Humanity: The Fifth Nightmare
84 pages, Paperback
Published December 24, 2025
About the author
Stuart Tudor
6 books16 followersStuart has been devouring stories since he was little, a habit cultivated by countless bedtime tales. It was during his high school days in 2015 when, after reading The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and playing Fromsoft's Bloodborne, he began to appreciate horror. He has always been creating his own stories, reflecting his fascination with the imaginary. This motivation to write would quickly lead him to explore dark themes and settings.
His love of writing and horror would produce the Eight Nightmares Collection: A collection of stories about the dreamlike, the surreal, and encounters with the fantastical. An entrepreneur at heart, he has embraced the self-publishing route- delivering horrifying tales that will scare and thrill people the world over.
When away from the word doc, Stuart is studying for his degree in Economics or working in managing properties. If he is not doing that, he is taking a breather with a good book like Berserk, playing Baldur’s Gate 3 or watching the latest Scream movie.
You can follow Stuart with the following links or at his website. He posts monthly blog posts about art and culture. You can sign up for his newsletter to keep up with blog posts and monthly updates.
His love of writing and horror would produce the Eight Nightmares Collection: A collection of stories about the dreamlike, the surreal, and encounters with the fantastical. An entrepreneur at heart, he has embraced the self-publishing route- delivering horrifying tales that will scare and thrill people the world over.
When away from the word doc, Stuart is studying for his degree in Economics or working in managing properties. If he is not doing that, he is taking a breather with a good book like Berserk, playing Baldur’s Gate 3 or watching the latest Scream movie.
You can follow Stuart with the following links or at his website. He posts monthly blog posts about art and culture. You can sign up for his newsletter to keep up with blog posts and monthly updates.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 30, 2025
If you revel in Dystopian Fantasy with a sympathetic character and an all too timely theme, then you will enjoy reading “A Farewell to Humanity.” Author Stuart Tudor paints a bleak future of a divided world dominated by a ruthless machine intelligence. I would have liked a little longer story, but “Farewell” reaches a satisfying conclusion that begs for more…
Review of advance copy received from Author
This short story was a very enjoyable read and tickled my sci-fi loving tastebuds. The best way I can describe it is as a mix between the Doctor Who story Rise of the Cybermen, and Metro 2033. Our unnamed protagonist is in post-apocalyptic Poland, which is occupied by the forces of a supreme artificial intelligence named Athena. Athena seeks only the happiness of humankind, but she brings this about by turning any humans she captures into mindless cybernetic drones. Being a horror story in a series called the Eight Nightmares, the setting is suitably bleak, and the situation desperate. There’s no Doctor coming to save humanity here: Just a person struggling to survive, living with depression, isolated from the rest of humankind by the need to avoid detection by the borderline omnipresent AI. In order to guarantee his survival he has to take risks, going out concealed and under cover of darkness, running errands for his single, anonymous, human contact: The Fencer.
We get a deep dive into our protagonist’s mental state as he clings on miserably to a life that has long since gone, as he contemplates ending it all before Athena can turn him into one of her cyberhumans. When things get dicey, the sense of panic and terror is visceral. We learn a lot about his past, and about the state of the rest of the world through his eyes.
The worldbuilding is really good here. The Great Silence sets each country adrift on its own, so there really is no way for our protagonist to know if anybody’s left out there. We get a glimpse at the politics of the situation and how the former residents of the city blame the other countries for abandoning them to Athena.
I will say that, for me, there was more tension than outright horror but the tension was pretty intense. The main character’s interactions with the cyberhumans and the body-horror of Athena’s conversion process were handled really well. And I enjoyed how the ending turned out. Bureaucracy is its own nightmarish hell, and that’s all I’ll say about that. It also highlights the dangers of placing a true AI in charge of making the world a better place, which is a staple of science fiction, emphasising its strict analytical nature over considerations of human agency.
Overall, A Farewell to Humanity is a pretty solid short story and I really recommend picking it up if you’re a fan of bleak dystopian or post apocalyptic horror, or wish that Doctor Who wasn’t so optimistic all the time.
We get a deep dive into our protagonist’s mental state as he clings on miserably to a life that has long since gone, as he contemplates ending it all before Athena can turn him into one of her cyberhumans. When things get dicey, the sense of panic and terror is visceral. We learn a lot about his past, and about the state of the rest of the world through his eyes.
The worldbuilding is really good here. The Great Silence sets each country adrift on its own, so there really is no way for our protagonist to know if anybody’s left out there. We get a glimpse at the politics of the situation and how the former residents of the city blame the other countries for abandoning them to Athena.
I will say that, for me, there was more tension than outright horror but the tension was pretty intense. The main character’s interactions with the cyberhumans and the body-horror of Athena’s conversion process were handled really well. And I enjoyed how the ending turned out. Bureaucracy is its own nightmarish hell, and that’s all I’ll say about that. It also highlights the dangers of placing a true AI in charge of making the world a better place, which is a staple of science fiction, emphasising its strict analytical nature over considerations of human agency.
Overall, A Farewell to Humanity is a pretty solid short story and I really recommend picking it up if you’re a fan of bleak dystopian or post apocalyptic horror, or wish that Doctor Who wasn’t so optimistic all the time.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews