Apocalypse stories are a guilty pleasure of mine, so I was eager to dig into Salvation Reigned. It’s a bit of hard book to categorize, and that’s part of its charm. On the surface it’s a science fiction disaster story, but underneath it’s something closer to a fever dream about the end of the world and what’s left of humanity once the countdown clock hits zero. At just under 100 pages, it doesn’t waste a single one of them. It’s more of a novella than a book, but contains so many cool ideas within its brief length that I sort of wished it was longer.
It’s the rare book that feels both unfinished and complete, leaving you hungry for more while still telling a whole story.
The premise is deceptively familiar: astronomers discover a rogue planet, Nyx, on a collision course with Earth, and humanity has exactly ten years to do something about it. Pete, a brilliant and increasingly unstable physicist, is tasked with building “The Big Fucking Gun,” a weapon that uses black holes to obliterate Nyx before impact. Around him, a satirical, morally bankrupt government spirals into propaganda and spectacle, while his former partner Marla documents the collapse as a journalist.
Meanwhile, a spiritual leader named SP Tun builds a following of people abandoning civilization entirely, embracing a “feral” existence in the wild. When the weapon finally fires, it risks tearing a hole in reality itself, unleashing something from another dimension that begins transforming both the planet and the people on it.
The prose here is somewhat experimental, and I mean that as high praise. Peterson could easily have told this story in a more straightforward way—asteroid, countdown, heroic scientist, weapon fires, roll credits. Instead he leans into fractured, stream-of-consciousness narration, hallucinatory visions, and a voice that more than once blurs the line between drug-addled perception and genuine science-fictional weirdness. It’s a bold choice, and I appreciated that the author trusted the reader enough to make it.
The countdown to the end is our puppet master. Night and day are indistinguishable under dirty office light. Politicians watch the clock. They remind us in anxious shouts.
“WE ARE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE!”
It also, crucially, doesn’t waste your time. This is a concise 94 pages, and every chapter earns its place. There’s no padding, no filler subplot, no forty extra pages of worldbuilding for its own sake. You’re in and out, and the ideas linger far longer than the page count would suggest.
Tonally, this sits in an interesting space between disaster-movie spectacle and arthouse bleakness. There are obvious echoes of the “asteroid is coming to destroy Earth” genre. Think Armageddon, Deep Impact, Melancholia, Don’t Look Up. I also got real Aniara vibes at points: that same sense of a doomed vessel (in this case, a doomed planet) drifting toward an ending nobody can stop, with humans distracting themselves with ritual and hedonism instead of facing it. Maybe I’ve just seen too many films but the heavy satire of politicians and media feels cut from the same cloth as those films, with the president in particular reminding me of Mark Ruffalo’s character in Mickey 17.
Beyond the unusual structure and satire, what stuck with me most was how the novel frames its two “opposing” belief systems, Pete’s hard science and SP Tun’s mysticism. Pete’s weapon is funded and celebrated, and it’s also the thing that literally rips a hole in reality. SP Tun’s spiritual path is mocked by the establishment as animalistic nonsense, and yet his followers are the ones who end up inheriting the planet. It’s 100% the kind of sci-fi that has a lot of meaning behind it, and is more satisfying on a second read of the chapters than most twist-driven novels are.
The experimental time jumping structure is a double-edged sword. This is very much a “vibe” book. You’re not always meant to track every plot beat with precision on the first read, you’re meant to sink into the atmosphere and let it wash over you. There is a coherent plot but if you’re the kind of reader who wants a clean, linear throughline, you may find yourself rereading passages to figure out whose perspective you’re in, or exactly what is actually happening. It rewards patient reading.
The brevity, which I praised above, is also a bit of a trade-off. Because the book moves so fast and hops between perspectives, there’s not a lot of room to sit with any one character long enough to get truly attached. Pete’s arc is the most developed, but Marla, SP Tun, and the later cybernaut sections all feel like they’re gesturing at deeper emotional stakes the format doesn’t quite have space to deliver. The political satire, while often very funny, is also laid on pretty thick, maybe a little too thick in places. With that said, I would love if the book was expanded into a full-length novel, perhaps in which we get more details on the post-apoclaypse world.
One more small note: it’s just my opinion, but the cover, while not bad, doesn’t do the book many favors. It reads more like a comic book or graphic novel cover, when the contents are more closer to literary fiction or experimental sci-fi.
Overall, Salvation Reigned is a bold, inventive read that earns its ambition. What it sacrifices in tidy clarity, it more than makes up for in voice, imagination, and sheer nerve; this is a book that takes real creative risks and, more often than not, pulls them off. For a book this short to leave that much of an impression is impressive, and it’s exactly why I’d recommend it.
Final Verdict: For fans of Aniara, Don’t Look Up, and Philip K. Dick, Salvation Reigned is well worth your time. It’s ambitious, slightly strange, and confidently written, even if its writing style asks quite a bit of the reader.
You can get your copy of Salvation Reigned or read for free on Kindle Unlimited here!
