I've been collecting and reading books on the coming collapse (aka the Long Emergency, end of Civilization, Transapocalypse, or XVI = The Tower). Most of these are nonfiction and fairly obvious, but send a note if you want titles. More surprising are fiction and occult titles that address the same issues.
Little, Big, or The Fairies Parliament is a long fantasy novel by John Crowley published in 1981. My feeling on reading it is along the lines of : Where have you been all my life? It's amazing that I missed it, but wonderful because there's so much more to ready by this author. Little, Big is a sort of family epic focused on an extended family that traffics with Faery. It's located in a space similar to upstate New York and NYC and covers approximately the 20th Century. The plot is slow and meditative, with much interior rumination by the characters, and conversations often full of pauses and omitted information.
The latter part of the action takes place in a nation that is falling apart, under the sway of an incompetent dictator, a lost medieval Emperor who presides over a collapsing economy, communication grid, and energy systems. It has nothing to do with the Collapse we now face, but the specific details of life under the Lecturer Eigenblick are all too relevant, like the block of formerly-elegant New York townhouses converted to a small farm , with the facades and front rooms of the buildings encircling the crop rows, and goats housed in the former garden apartments. A beautiful, transporting book.
