Books Seeds of Story Ixnay on the Post-Apocalyptic Cannibals: Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell Recognizing that disasters and tragedies tend to bring out the best in people is the first step toward real progress. By Sarah | Published on May 5, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, a book that every author should be required to read before writing about apocalypses, disasters, and crises of all types. Possibly also every journalist. Or maybe just everyone. What It’s About We all know this script: the seas have risen, the meteors have struck, and society has collapsed. A small band of survivors, probably led by one hard-headed cold-equations man following “lifeboat rules,” fights off looters and leeches and cannibals. Most of the world has descended into panic and riot. It’s a war of all against all, and life has become nasty, brutish, and short. This is not, it turns out, how disaster works in real life. Solnit brings together anthropological research and her own reporting to show that actually, most people become more prosocial following disasters. They pull together. They help each other. They share resources. And they create temporary communities that find joy and solidarity in the face of destruction. There are exceptions, and those exceptions mostly come from those who dominated the social structures disrupted by crisis. Too often, authorities fear the “threat” from ad hoc disaster response communities, and are more eager to control survivors than to help them survive. And media looking for dramatic stories are eager to perpetuate the narrative of trauma-driven savagery. These pressures, along with the exhaustion from chronic stress that can supplant initial momentum, too often break down these “paradises” of mutual aid and social connection. When they don’t, Solnit suggests, remarkable things can result. Her first example comes from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, where community members came together to feed, heal, and shelter each other in a situation where half the population had become unhoused. Many reported later on the sense of solidarity and fellowship, and the freedom found when human connection mattered so much more than possessions. Meanwhile the National Guard came in with orders to kill “looters,” which they followed with enthusiasm. Convinced that they were forestalling mob riots (of which there was no sign), they “protected the city from the people” and murdered those trying to requisition medical supplies, gather groceries with full permission from grocers, or dig survivors out from the rubble. They actively interfered with firefighting attempts, causing even more destruction than the original quake. These descriptions echo those from Hurricane Katrina, which Solnit added to the book at the last minute. I remember a particularly pointed comparison of press coverage describing people of different races “looting” versus “gathering” supplies from flooded stores. Likewise, the occupying military—and heroic everyday responses—are extremely familiar to anyone following the present-day news from Minneapolis. Solnit shows similar patterns after the Halifax Explosion of 1917, the Mexico City Earthquake of 1985, and 9/11. But there are differences as well. The worst of the disasters, the Mexican earthquake killed over 10,000 people and left 800,000 homeless. It highlighted the effects of government corruption and shoddy construction, and provoked lasting changes—sparked by those who came together during the disaster. Labor unions and housing rights collectives organized to improve conditions that had put so many at risk. The government tried to use the destruction as a pretext for relocating poor communities; communities pushed back. The solidarity formed in disaster lasted, and while Mexico continued (and continues) to have extensive problems, people held onto what they learned and used it to make real progress. Disasters bring together people on the ground—those in the best position to help each other and share resources. They also threaten elite leaders, who often fear more for their extensive property than for human lives. Disasters also draw attention to leadership failures. Credit for successes is also an option (recall the Roman response to Pompei from Four Lost Cities), but only if leaders focus more on providing real help than on panicked defense of their own power. As disasters become more common, the rest of us need to pay attention to our own communal power, and build past the initial moments of mutual aid. Buy the Book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster Rebecca Solnit Buy Book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster Rebecca Solnit Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget It’s 2001, and I’m driving into grad school on the morning of September 11th. By the time I get there the second plane has hit the World Trade Center, and this is clearly no accident. We’re on Long Island and everyone knows somebody near Ground Zero. I comfort my professors, and join the other students pulling together to figure out what we can do. Everyone is being kind and finding ways to help—as long as you don’t look Muslim. It’s 2022 and I’m finally watching the Parable of the Sower opera at the Kennedy Center. It’s based on one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors, but I’m struck by how very obviously it predates Solnit’s book. Even Octavia Butler—visionary, clear-eyed, and imagining paths through fascism and climate change—wrote a crisis that looks like a white-flight fantasy about the horrors of walking through Central Park. Why should cooperation take a messiah? It’s 2026, and I’m thinking about the self-contradictory nature of crisis response. The initial solidarity and selflessness after 9/11 ultimately faded into bigotry and surveillance and war. The initial solidarity and selflessness of the COVID-19 pandemic ultimately faded into bigotry and fascism and war. But Solnit’s right about long-term effects. We’ve held onto some of the mutual aid institutions founded in 2020, and are moving away from the valorization of overwork despite employers’ best efforts. Authorities will always try to leverage fear and stress—how can we preserve and expand our first, most social responses to those things? How can we resist being redirected toward exclusion? The exhaustion of chronic crisis too often undermines our better natures. And yet, and yet. Even with those worries and limitations, Solnit tells us something that we often see in person, and rarely see elsewhere. Stories and media tell us, too often, that crisis brings out our worst natures. That you’d better bar your door against looters and violent gangs. And these fears make us easier to control. If you don’t go outside, you never see what people are building. If you do go outside, you need to know that what you’re seeing isn’t a wild exception to the barbaric rule. I have a long list of stories that do it wrong. Disaster movies and thrillers would prefer the drama of fighting off cannibal gangs (Where do they all come from???) than the drama of figuring out how to feed your block on a portable grill—or of fighting off police to get at needed medical supplies. People in shelters holding off invaders, fighting each other, held together only by alpha “captains.” Charismatic madmen getting from Point A to human sacrifice in a matter of days. It’s just not how most people actually work, and it’s time we realized that and move on to the business of figuring out how to do better after the first few weeks have passed. Why is it so easy to believe that our neighbors (or the people on the other side of town) are held back from mob violence only by a fragile veneer of normality? The story shows up again and again, most often told by those who benefit from telling it. Anxious authorities want to be the only organizing force, and to protect property more than people. Media news falls into the trap of seeking excitement and engagement over truth, and has done so since long before social media algorithms exacerbated that tendency. And even in the age of climate change, we encounter more disasters on screen and page than in real life—if we’re not careful, we believe their tropes over our own lying eyes. A Paradise Built in Hell is a much-needed counternarrative, and once you’ve read it you’ll never see disasters, or humanity, quite the same way again. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories The Real Villains. Admitting that a good disaster tale needs human conflict, it’s time to replace post-apocalyptic biker cannibals with post-apocalyptic police militias. (They can still be cannibals, I guess, if you really want.) In San Francisco in 1906, the National Guard exacerbated fires with explosives and killed people working in the rubble. Almost a century later, police shot Black men in flooded New Orleans, ostensibly to prevent “looting.” After the 1985 earthquake, the Mexican government tried to bulldoze collapsed buildings from which people were still pulling children; students lay down in front of the construction equipment to block them with visible bodies. Time and again, power fears solidarity, and protects itself lest “order” collapse. We need more cinematic versions of these very real threats—stories that show everyday people simultaneously dealing with disaster recovery and occupation from above. Learning from Paradise. Stories about hopeful futures sometimes stumble over “how we got there.” Solnit shows how valuable it can be to leverage the solidarity of immediate disaster—and how much work is required to keep that momentum going. It’s doable, but it’s not easy. How does a sheet metal soup kitchen turn into feeding each other long-term? Once we’ve combined resources to pull people from flood waters, what more can we do? How do we can hold onto our crisis-born sense of connection? I’d love to see more solarpunk and hopepunk and cli-fi about building movements from the rubble. New Growth: What Else to Read Rutger Bregman’s Human Kind: A Hopeful History also talks about situations that have brought out the best in people, and argues with cynical narratives about human nature. If you want to look at the how-to of building long-term from disaster solidarity, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care talks about the mutual aid work that’s growing from COVID responses. We Will Rise Again, an anthology edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older, is full of stories about speculative protest and solidarity movements. I’ve mentioned it here before, but Izzy Wasserstein’s “The Rise and Fall of Storm Bluff, Kansas” feels particularly relevant, not so much because of disaster as because of a clear-eyed sense of elite panic. I really like the communal responses to a catastrophic meteor impact that start off Mary Robinette Kowall’s The Calculating Stars. In a very different sort of story, I also love the communal versus authoritarian communities in Mad Max: Fury Road, which has all the scary-awesome biker gangs anyone’s heart could desire. Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds and follow-up Those Beyond the Wall riff on Mad Max tropes, and imagine very different communities that can grow in the wake of disaster. One of my favorite musicals is Come From Away, based on an oral history of how Gander, Newfoundland took in stranded plane travelers in the wake of 9/11. Jim DeFede’s The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland offers the full non-fiction version of the same story. Please feel free to share your thoughts on the book, your own recommendations for further reading, or your favorite non-cannibalistic disaster responses in the comments![end-mark] The post Ixnay on the Post-Apocalyptic Cannibals: Rebecca Solnit’s <i>A Paradise Built in Hell</i> appeared first on Reactor.