Out now.
The trucks stopped at 2:17 a.m. on a Wednesday. Not because the engines failed. They still turned over fine. The world they were built to serve simply stopped existing.
That’s the first sentence of the book. It’s also the question the rest of the book tries to answer.
If you’ve been reading the Collapse Chronicles here, the entries, the dispatches, the late-night transmissions from a country that doesn’t quite work anymore, then you already know the territory. LISTENING is the novel that came out of those years of writing. It is not a sequel to Fracturism. It is what Fracturism was always pointing at: the question of what a person actually does, day by day, after the load-bearing myths give out.
A man sits in a parking lot outside Topeka and starts writing. That is the whole engine.
What the Book Is
LISTENING is a speculative novel told through recovered documents. Spiral notebooks. Sharpie-scrawled menus. Charcoal on a motel ceiling. Torn-out atlas pages with a route drawn in two colors of pen.
The narrator is a trucker named Geox. The world he was built to serve has stopped existing. He starts writing, at first to keep his hands busy, then because the writing is the only thing that still feels like work. As the entries accumulate, a signal emerges. Not metaphorical. Alive. It threads through the landscape of the American West and pulls him north through Wyoming, toward a tower that is either waiting for him or building itself from his arrival.
Following his trail six months later is Dr. Mara Ewell, a structural biologist sent to collect signal data who finds herself instead collecting a man’s unraveling. Her field notes frame each of his entries, cataloging what the locations look like now, what has grown in the silence, and what the documents refuse to say.
She starts as a scientist. She does not finish as one.
LISTENING is a novel about the quiet kind of collapse. The kind that doesn’t make the news because it’s too distributed, too slow, and too embarrassing to admit. The kind where a man in clean clothes decides his thirst matters more than a stranger’s child. It’s about the systems we build, the fault lines we pretend are not there, and what happens when the signal starts making sense to you and you don’t walk the other direction.
It is, in other words, Fracturism at ground level. What the philosophy looks like when a person has to walk through it.
Who It’s For
If you’ve read the Collapse Chronicles here and felt the entries were leading somewhere they hadn’t named yet, this book is where they were going.
If you’ve finished Fracturism and wanted to see the framework breathing inside a story instead of an argument, this is that.
If you don’t care about either and you just want a strange, quiet, unsettling road novel about a man who keeps writing while everything around him stops working, this book is also written for you.
It is not a survivalist fantasy. It is not a dystopia. It is closer to a transmission than a thriller. If that pulls at you, follow it.
Get the Book
- Title: Listening: From the Collapse Chronicles, Volume I
- Author: Geoffrey Taber
- Format: Paperback, hardcover, ebook
- ISBN (paperback): 979-8-9957962-4-4
- ISBN (hardcover): 979-8-9957962-5-1
- Available at: Amazon
If the book speaks to you, the most useful things you can do are simple ones: read it, lend it, sit with it longer than you think you should, and leave a review. LISTENING was written to be lived with, not consumed. It does not work in a hurry.
The signal is already here. The question is whether you’ll listen.
Geoffrey
A note for the readers who were following the original Chronicles entries here: those posts have been taken down. They were drafts in the truest sense, written week by week, and what they became is the novel. Most of them are in LISTENING in some form. Some were cut. A few survived almost untouched. If you read them when they were posted, thank you for being there while they were being figured out. Volume II is already underway.