WORLD'S EDGE

A cautiously hopeful view of the futuristic horrors headed our way is perfectly described by its subtitle: “A Mosaic Novel.”

The United States has gone the way of all those other empires, past and present, fragmenting into separate and variously dysfunctional regions, communities, and neighborhoods, many of them at war with each other not over ideological differences but in endless battles for the affordances that keep them alive. Sallis explores the implications of this disintegration, in which “foundations fall away, one after another,” in five stories. Their titles—“Dayenu,” a Hebrew word meaning “it would have been enough”; “Carriers”; “Settlers”; “Allotments”; and “Reconstruction”—seem to chart a path from destruction to rebirth, and readers who squint hard enough may see such a progression. What’s much clearer, however, is the repeated patterns among the stories: There’s the veteran who finds returning home more taxing than waging war, the medical provider facing impossible odds, the precocious children fighting their predators, the abrupt disappearance and occasional equally disconcerting reappearance of colleagues, lovers, and old friends, and the mentors whose nuggets of wisdom (e.g., “the only way we get through our lives is by imagining elsewheres and other times”) are ever more treasured as they become more inadequate to the moment. Lacking the razor-sharp premise of P.D. James’ The Children of Men (1993), with which it shares an equally elegiac sensibility, Sallis’ tale, or tales, depends for its power on individual insights and a thematic throughline: Apart from all those unbridled conflicts, the nightmare future it presents sounds a great deal like this morning’s headlines.

A supercut of videos and aphorisms that, like all dystopias, uses prophecies of tomorrow to raise hard questions about today.