Published by Tachyon Publications in September 2026
Review by Meghan Ellis
Humanity is ugly. We’re frightened, close-minded and misinformed. We blame others when things go sideways; we’re full of rage. Peter Watts digs into these dark, unsavoury corners of the human spirit in Fold Catastrophes, a collection of short stories dissecting our collective psyche and the way it reacts to adversity.
First and foremost: these are not stories to read and feel good about the world, but it’s a series that might make you realise you’re not alone in feeling uneasy about the way things are. Dystopian science fiction is at its best when it amplifies present anxieties, and Watts attacks this uncomfortableness with merciless precision, touching on ecological collapse, biowarfare and algorithmic control.
And that’s just in the first story. ‘Gut Feelings’ is a brutal opening salvo, featuring a man who falls into psychotic, blackout rage at the mere sight of the Google logo. Tackling our current society’s headlong slide into corporate surveillance, ‘Gut Feelings’ untangles why a man deemed algorithmically unlikely to commit such violence might do so, resulting in a stark examination of how much data these tech monoliths have on each and every one of us. And perhaps most interesting of all, the story’s insistence on using real-world names and organisations refuses to let the reader pretend it’s a warning for someone else.
Alphabet and Sony are coming for you, Watts says. What might fighting back look like?
Though it’s at its bluntest in the beginning, each story in Fold Catastrophes uses the future to comment on the now. ‘Defective’ is a story about humans building a giant space gun to ward off immigrant aliens, much to the dismay of a linguistic specialist. ‘Contracting Iris’ examines the lengths someone suffering from chronic illness might go to to feel normal in their own body. ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ turns the reality of global communication into a game of where to drop the nuke, and ‘ZeroS’ takes bodily agency away from the desperate.
These aren’t easy reads, and Watts doesn’t shy from the uncomfortable truth that emerges in Fold Catastrophes: as humans, we really like ‘othering’ people.
This otherness extends to people in the nonhuman sense too, as ‘Test 4 Echo’ puts a sinister spin on the question of ‘What if the Mars Rover had feelings?’ In an era of AI uncertainty marked by distrust, poor legislation and intellectual property theft, ‘Test 4 Echo’ plays with what we might think acceptable artificial intelligence might look like, and then turns that perception entirely on its head. Without spoiling it, the eventual conclusion looks at whether things want to survive because they’re conscious, or whether they’re conscious solely because they want to survive. In amongst all the hard science, Watts has some intriguing thoughts about philosophy here.
But for all that these stories have something to say, my personal favourite is ‘The Twenty-One Second God’. It’s a perfect mix of the philosophical musing and science exploration that threads its way through Fold Catastrophes as a whole. Watts is clearly preoccupied with the consequences of intrusive technology and our ability to think independently, and this worry is explored through the tale of a short-lived deity born from millions of linked-up human brains. As Richard K. Morgan’s introduction says, it’s Watts at his most ‘desert prophet’, shouting into the void about what tech is going to do (and is already doing) to our cognitive capacity.
‘The Twenty-One Second God’ doesn’t spend too long on the obvious consequences of mass Neuralink failure: surgeries halted, millions of people dropping into a vegetative state, the fear of what an artificial supermind could achieve in less than half a minute. That would be where many other authors would spend their time in their stories, but what makes ‘The Twenty-One Second God’ stand apart is the way it dissects the aftermath. The protagonist, deemed an important investigative piece due to his compos mentis assimilation into the deity, is thoroughly poked and prodded by company researchers in a bid to test the effect of being linked to so many other human minds. His agency is restricted more by these brilliant corporate scientists than it was by a superintelligence. Isn’t that terrifying?
There are a few stories I’ve left to be discovered but I’d recommend the entire collection, even ‘Giants’, where the hard science was monumentally complicated. The Chimp, the story’s clever-but-limited artificial intelligence, would certainly beat me when it comes to comprehending intrastellar transportation.
In his own words, Watts says that Fold Catastrophes is bound together by a consistent sense of optimism. For a compendium of stories about the darker lengths we’ll go to as a species, this seems like a far-fetched claim, but his argument revolves around the idea that we’ll be, in his imagined futures, space-faring tech savants instead of roaming the ruins of our civilisation.
It’s a cold kind of optimism, but in the face of today’s plutocrats and megacorporate surveillance, I’ll take it.
Meghan Ellis is a Glasgow-based journalist covering internet culture, anime, gaming and speculative fiction. She has written for Eurogamer, The Guardian, All the Anime and many more culture sites, and has BBC appearances covering fandom topics for the general public. Meghan is a member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers’ Circle, and was longlisted for the Cymera Prize for Speculative Short Fiction in 2025 and 2026. Read more of her writing on her website.