Category: apocalyptic stories

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The Root of All Our Problems

Every day we’re all asking the same questions about the future. Amid rampant pessimism, what is the root of all our problems, and what happens next?

Will AI empty our bank accounts and spell our doom in its own impenetrable code? What madness is this? Are we spiraling ever further down a misinformation maelstrom that denies science, lies about reality, and defies logic? When is a war not a war? If humans are basically good, how is it that so many believe that might makes right? If the pendulum of politics swings back and forth, when’s the revolution, and what will our daily lives look like when the smoke clears? Are there better days ahead? Is that even possible now?

Here’s the ad break, but hey, it’s relevant!

New release! Better Days Ahead.

What is the root of all our problems?
Here’s your universal link to read Better Days Ahead now.

For years, we turned our technology off and on to reboot it. Now technology is rebooting us.

When a mysterious signal circles the globe, Deborah Goodwin’s Drone Life is over. Many results are lethal. Some are hopeful. What happens next depends on the survivors.

If you loved Station Eleven or you’re curious about artificial intelligence bringing about the end of the world as we know it, this short story is for you.

I’ve been reading a lot of shorter fiction lately. Better Days Ahead is a short story I had on the back burner. I recently revisited it, made some additions, tweaks, and edits and decided to publish it on Amazon. As I write this, it sits at #44 on the 30-minute Science Fiction & Fantasy Short Reads list. (At 99 cents, it would be cheap entertainment at twice the price, so enjoy!)

And now, back to the news/circus

In high school, my social studies teacher thought my worldview was too grim. When I pointed out my reasons, she said, “You have to have faith!” To which I replied, “Why?”

I’m still asking why. True, the privileged enjoy wonders once only dreamed of in science fiction. The cell phone in your hand is a miracle packed full of the world’s knowledge. Unfortunately, that same technology arrives with a dull thud in the thick skulls of hostile apes. Steven Pinker and Bill Maher can assert all they want that there is no better time to live than now. Sure, if you aren’t in Gaza. I’m not in love with how good we have it. My focus is on how much better we could be.

One of my favorite bits from This Plague of Days is, “You’re still fighting the wrong war.” Currently, the United States is waging three wars (four, if you count the economic war on Canada; more if you take into account piracy and other incursions.) But, you see, it’s incredibly expensive to stop Iran from having the nuclear program it didn’t have that Trump repeatedly asserts he’s already destroyed.

The president says the country is rich, rich, rich! But somehow, the US is the only industrialized nation that cannot guarantee healthcare for its citizens. Cancer and heart disease are Americans’ highest threats, but the budget is for bombs.

“But socialism and communism!” If those words make you think of totalitarianism and long bread lines instead of, say, Nordic countries with peaceful mixed economies where tax dollars are used to care for citizens, let’s save some time. Shut the fuck up.

How will it all end?

In 2018, I published a collection of short stories about several ways the world might go poof. Killer meteors, nukes, and pandemics, oh my! In those stories, I did not depict scenarios where big problems get solved. Instead, I focused on individuals facing the end. When you’re in a military bunker in Colorado and the pressure wave from a big meteor strike is rushing your way, how do you react? Or suppose the end of the world is lasting longer than that. How do you get along with your fellow would-be survivors in tight spaces underground? When do the murders begin?

Read now.

Our three futures

Imagining the future in the abstract is interesting and fun. The timeline could have many branches, but let’s break it down to three basics:

1. Dystopian AKA The Star Wars Future. You can tell because many of the spaceships aren’t in great condition. Having Wars in the title is another hint.
2. Utopian AKA The Star Trek Future. There are still wars, but the main mission is exploration and expanding knowledge. Also note that the spaceships are super spiffy!
3. Apocalyptic. We follow the path that has been trod before: Extinction.

But how do we get to better days ahead?

We address the root of all our problems. What’s that? Our addiction to the circus. It’s not looking great on several fronts at the moment, but politics could be how problems get solved. Comedian Jimmy Carr once said that debate solves nothing. His answer is not debate, but deliberation.

That shift from Me to We flips the spirit of the work entirely. Actual good work might get accomplished if we don’t go at it as if we’re stepping into the ring. Of course, that’s not the current zeitgeist at all.

We suffer an infection of contrarians and sophists.

Sometimes I wonder if there is anything some people won’t say. RFK Jr. is still spouting conspiracy theories about chemtrails.

JD Vance muses about UAPs being demons, and paraphrasing, “I try to do God’s work, but if it leads to the End of Days, well, okay.”

Donald Trump insists prices are coming down, the war is won (more than 100 times), and everybody loves him, and everybody knows it. Ignore the polls, your lying eyeds, and anyone who criticizes him is a threat to national security and his massive insecurity.

Don’tcha miss when politics was boring? Instead, people who care less about other people treat politics, not as a way out, but as bloodsport. People who think they’re good and righteous practice casual cruelty and blatant racism. Children are suffering, but “well, okay.”

The root of all our problems is found in a Peanuts cartoon.

Lucy’s doing her underpaid and unlicensed psychologist bit on Charlie Brown.

“Do you know what your problem is?” she shouts.

“Your problem is you don’t want to hear what your problem is!”

And there it is: The first step out of addiction is admitting we have a problem.

We can’t begin to solve any problems if we can’t even agree on what the problems are. To veer away from disaster, we must acknowledge our addiction to the circus. Aggression gets clicks. Name-calling has replaced elucidation, deliberation, and problem-solving. To combat decay, regression, and extinction, we need sober and boring.

Or we could listen to the Ringmaster shrieking, “Eyes on the center ring! The world’s circus features monkeys with machine guns!”

Sure, there are great people pursuing solutions and working on the cure for terrible diseases. I just wish they weren’t so outnumbered. This is why I still don’t have faith. Reality as it now stands sucks, but at least there’s still fiction that knows it’s fiction.

Speaking of which:

I just released two new psychological thrillers. Where the Night Takes Us and When the Night Finds Us.

Get them both now. Makes a great gift. Buy in bulk! 🙂

5 out of 5 stars

An excellent serial killer/psychological thriller

Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2026

(reviewed on Amazon by Teresa Collins)

Where the Night Takes Us is an excellent serial killer/psychological thriller that lingers for days after you turn the last page. It will take up bandwidth in your brain and just make itself at home. The characters are so intriguing and realistic that they feel like real people. The story is engrossing, and I found myself reading much longer than I should have, but I couldn’t put it down.

Mr. Chute’s writing flows so smoothly and is so easy to read that I got completely lost in the story. I also found myself wiping away tears and, then, a few pages later, laughing out loud at Simon’s dry, sarcastic humor. This is the first of Mr. Chute’s work that I have read, but it won’t be the last. I can’t wait to read the next in this series. I highly recommend it to fans of serial killers and psychological thrillers. I received a review copy from the author via BookSirens, and this review reflects my honest and voluntary opinion.

~ I’m Robert Chazz Chute, the suspense novelist who writes apocalyptic epics with heart and crime thrillers with muscle. Please allow me to put visions in your brain box.

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I was in a war with AI before it was cool

Get ready to fight to the death. You might even have to fight beyond death.

AFTER was constructed to save us. When the medical biotech is weaponized, AFTER becomes an agent of warfare. Infected humans transform into rampaging killers. No one is safe.

Task Force Officer Daniel Harmon has one job: Stop the epidemic before it escapes a military research lab. As the body count rises, he’ll discover a dark conspiracy that will change our fate forever.

They will call this Apocalypse. We call it Revolution. On which side will you fall?

From the author of This Plague of Days comes a fresh zombie trilogy about technology gone horribly awry. It will feel too real.

GET YOURS NOW (AFTER Life: Inferno is free to download from Amazon.com until Thursday, July 24, 2025.)

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Our Brains and Why All Empires Fall

One of the strangest turns in the news came this week when an alarming and easily predicted future became mundane history. Trump posted, “Long live the King.” That wasn’t surprising. However, some of his cult members backed him by celebrating. “Trump is king!” Many of these same folks post 1776 in their social media bios. Knuckleheaded knuckledraggers may know their country’s history. It seems they’ve abandoned the values they claimed they most cherished. Monarchy is back, baby! Get used to it!

Reminds one of the so-called evangelicals who, last year, decided to let go the gentler teachings of Christ. Jesus was “too woke” for our troubled times, apparently. They still call themselves Christian, just meaner and in a roid rage, I guess.

What feeds this nonsense? Bias.

There are many types of cognitive bias that affect us. There is hindsight bias, loss aversion bias, the gambler’s fallacy, and the beastly Dunning-Kruger effect. The D-K effect plus confirmation bias is a lethal combination, dangerous to civilization. Those are the better-known afflictions. I have a couple of favorites that may not be on your radar:

Survivor Bias

Survivor bias goes like this: “We live in a land of opportunity! I make a lot of money, so why can’t everybody else?”

This bias plays into the myth of the self-made individual. It ignores a plethora of historical, systemic, and personal variables. This bias turns the principle of fair financial compensation into a cruel game of keep-away. When interviewed, successful people often extol the virtue of hard work. Only a few self-aware ones say, “I worked hard, but I got incredibly lucky! I made it, but I’m not altogether sure how, but I know I’m an outlier.” It’s much more tempting to believe “I built X and now own a couple of yachts because I’m a genius.”

Lots of people work hard and are never adequately compensated. If success were so easily replicable, more people would attain it. For instance, if you’re a nepobaby who won the genetic lottery, the path to stardom is paved with pillows. Nobody who catches those breaks talks about that. When asked the secret to their success, I’ve heard actors say, “I know my lines and I show up on time.” Learning a script can be difficult, but showing up on time? You mean like every other employee on the planet? That’s blind privilege talking, you handsome dunce. That’s survivor bias.

Survivor bias doesn’t come up first as one of the more lethal societal ills, but it is dangerous. It feeds a delusion that’s used as a cudgel on the oppressed and unfortunate. If the poor deserve to be poor, you only care if you’re poor. Not much room for kindness and mercy there, huh? Survivor bias makes its believer a terrible person and everyone else worse off.

Normalcy Bias

An author friend messaged me to ask, since I write apocalyptic novels, does our current political situation feel like I’m living in one of my books? I’ve written about the many ways empires fall. My back catalog includes zombies, vampires, AI domination, killer robots, alien invasion, meteors, climate crises, disease, nuclear conflagration, mass poverty, and famine. Lots of fun to explore in fiction, right? What’s unfolding now, though? I couldn’t write it because so much of it sounds outlandish, too dumb, and replete with hissy fits. Nuclear stockpile inspectors and warhead assembly experts getting fired en masse sounds too silly, doesn’t it? That happened. Then somebody said, “Oopsy! Get them back! Where are their email addresses? What do you mean you deleted their email addresses?”

The doomsday clock is now 89 seconds to midnight. The world is teetering toward all your worst nightmares. Still, we carry on, believing that cooler heads will prevail. That, my friends, is normalcy bias.

The courts decided they couldn’t allow a presidential candidate to go to jail for even one day for his crimes. He should have been confined for contempt and endangering officers of the court, at the very least. Didn’t happen. Couldn’t happen. That was normalcy bias at its dark and dirty work. You’ve always been told no one is above the law. Obviously not so.

The objection always comes to changing circumstances: “X can’t happen because it’s never happened before. It would be unprecedented!”

This is a recurring theme in my fiction (and my answer to this complaint):

Everything is unprecedented until it’s not.

Normalcy bias keeps you dangerously comfortable. It assures you that the health insurance you have relied on will always be there for you. Why? Because it always has been. To lose it would be unprecedented! (See above.)

Normalcy bias kept endangered people from fleeing Germany before World War II broke out. Normalcy bias assures people that all their investments are safe until the stock market collapses. Normalcy bias made Canadians, Mexicans, and all NATO allies feel that the United States government would be their friend. The news reveals the truth: People have friends. Governments have interests.

Human behavior, mental illness, and neurobiology are interests I try to monetize by writing novels with flawed characters. Sometimes, they suffer mental health issues like mine (anxiety, for one instance). Other times, they use their knowledge to manipulate others. It’s fun in fiction. When cognitive biases dominate our media intake and the political sphere, ignorant people transform into monsters and innocent people suffer and die. Our biases make us more vulnerable to personal and systemic failure. Ignorance can be cured easily, but stupid is much more complicated.

Biases kill.

(On the other hand, when I meet with literary agents in April, I’ll pull from my bag of tricks in the pitch meetings to sell my next book, but that’s another post. Villainous laughter: Mwah-ha-ha-ha!)

In the meantime, have you read All Empires Fall yet?

Why all Empires Fall
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Why The Grapes of Wrath Still Resonates in 2024

Rereading The Grapes of Wrath after many years, it hits differently now that I’m older. The novel hits so hard, it could have been published yesterday, eerily relevant to our world in the present.

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was originally published in 1939. That is startling given its empathetic allegory about forced immigration and the dangers of unbridled capitalism. This was written long before laypeople had the vocabulary of “late-stage capitalism.” Certain passages are worth reviewing many times.

I was especially taken with how people are transformed into cogs in a machine. When the bank takes their homes, there’s no one to resist. Responsibility falls like a hammer on the most powerless. Evicted from the land they’d worked for generations, the farmers are ground under the weight of an uncaring bureaucracy.

In another passage, car salesmen take advantage of desperate people. The sole focus is money. In pursuit of profit, the salesmen’s contempt for their hapless customers is ferocious. People are dehumanized. The system only serves itself and a select, faceless few. The victims are oppressed, but they don’t understand that which uses and abuses them.

The Grapes of Wrath reflects problems that are easy to see today. You’ve watched the news. The mercilessness of the American health insurance system is evident. A health insurance company denies 32% of claims and becomes startlingly wealthy. It’s an unusual funeral they give their victims, isn’t it? The afflicted are buried in paperwork first, then they die. Kill someone with a gun, and the press goes mad. Kill ill people with paper, and all we get are shrugs of “Well, it’s legal.”

Most frustrating, I still hear media people and pseudo-intellectuals pretend to be mystified when the public shrugs off the assassination of one CEO. They aren’t discussing why people are so fed up they don’t have the spare energy to care. The media isn’t delving into the why of that stance. They aren’t showcasing any of the many cases where people in need are denied tests and treatments they need to survive. Instead, the public’s lack of empathy has become the story. We have twenty-four-hour news channels, but they make no time for the bigger story.

A bunch of pearl-clutching journalists and commentators need to read The Grapes of Wrath. Maybe they’ll glimpse themselves reflected within those pages. Maybe then they’ll better understand our wrath.

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Fall of Empires: The Psychology Behind Apocalyptic Fiction

You know I write novels about apocalyptic events. I’ve always been fascinated by the ways in which empires fall. But what’s at the root of end-of-the-world stories? I saw the seed of it so clearly during the pandemic. Too many fools who failed high school biology and claimed to be big strong patriots were unwilling to suffer the mildest inconvenience of wearing a mask.

That’s how you get this:

And this:

A former CIA agent was asked what will cause the downfall of civilization. He answered, “Sophistry.” Add in a dearth of empathy, and I think he’s right. Too many people figure, “Hey, it’s not happening to me, so I don’t care.” They are too confident they aren’t next on the chopping block. For instance, universal health care doesn’t poll so well with Americans who have not dealt with private health insurance companies. Those must be the same folks who are mystified by the lack of interest in prosecuting the killer of a health insurance CEO.

People who do deal with private health insurance companies understand. There are too many horrific stories out there. The main cause of bankruptcy in the United States is medical debt. That’s a broken system.

The best metaphor I’ve heard comes from the Cognitive Dissonance podcast:

An emergency room doctor was treating a patient. You run in and pin the doctor’s arms to their sides. You’d be responsible for the patient’s death. Stopping doctors from doing their jobs is too often what private health insurers do.

Farther afield:

IDF snipers shoot children in the head. They target children, yet there are barely whispers of objections in the mainstream press. For those who do object to the murder of children are told, “That’s war. Grow up.” Children are conflated with terrorists. Meanwhile, it’s clear Israel’s leaders care nothing for the hostages. If they cared, they wouldn’t bomb Gaza to rubble.

That level of carelessness is how you get this:

Let’s try a little thought experiment:

If a terrorist is using your mum as a human shield, do you shoot, or do you try to find another way?

Sit with that a moment before you answer. It’s a monster test. Are you a monster?

Meanwhile, closer to home:

Donald Trump disrespects Canada and threatens our sovereignty. Too many write it off as a joke. The melon felon also wants to end birthright citizenship and weaken American forces by expelling democrats and transgender people (among a plethora of other offenses to morality and reason).. Many democrats who serve are officers, but damn the consequences so the Dear Leader’s fee-fees aren’t hurt.

The point is not whether DJT can or will do these things. The point is he wants to do these things and is threatening his best ally. He is careless with his words and actions. That is not something anyone sane wants to see from anyone holding the nuclear codes.

I predict a wave of regret much bigger than Brexit. FAFO.

Idolizing elites is how you get this:

My fiction explores the psychology of the underbelly of society. When I watch the news, I’m so often reminded of a Christopher Titus joke:

Civilization is a train. All the doctors, engineers, builders, and scientists are up front in the locomotive. The engine pulls a long train of cars carrying the goofs, the conspiracy theorists, the science-deniers, and flat earthers. One smart person at the back of the engine is looking down at the coupling responsible for hauling all those dumbasses. And he’s thinking, if I pull that pin, we could go so much faster and farther.

Yeah. The only thing saving the smooth brains is our empathy as we desperately try to drag their heavy asses into the future instead of retreating into the dark past.

If you’re looking for hope in the end, there’s this:

And this:



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It’s beginning to look a lot like Book Christmas

Looks like we’ll get our first real snow here tomorrow. The malls are packed with shoppers, but people don’t go into panic-shopping mode until the weather turns and it really looks like Christmas is coming. Now that December 25 is just a few weeks away, it’s time to order your Christmas books.

Find my author profiles using the links below:

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Amazon Canada

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The Year Ahead: How to Deal

Endemic is live on Amazon!

I recently watched Things to Come, a movie from 1936 based on the work of HG Wells. It’s not a great film, but the subtext feels prophetic. The world of the 1930s devolves into a decades-long war that destroys civilization. Warlords take over. Scientific progress is lost. When a movement rises to bring a troubled hellscape back to modernity, those in power resist change. The good guys — in this case, an army of scientists — win. They improve on what came before the apocalypse and build a utopia. However, a hundred years later, angry mobs rise up to bring scientific progress to a halt.

At every tick of history’s clock, some people will try to hold back the hands of time. No matter how good the future might be, they want to return to a time when they thought things were better, perhaps simpler. The worst part is they want to choose for you, not just themselves. I’d prefer to order off the menu myself, thanks. Leave me and that bright, hopeful future alone.



HG Wells never watched a political debate on TikTok at 3 a.m., but he saw the anti-intellectualism coming. That’s been going on for a long time, of course, but the US election year will ramp up the nonsense, and plenty. We have a rough road ahead in 2024. I won’t list all the frets, but you’ve seen the news. You know what piles on the stress. We call it doomscrolling now, but we used to call it “watching the news,” or “being aware of current events.” You’re going to hear a lot more arguing. Don’t expect well-mannered debates on the road to truth, just stubborn parroting of propaganda impenetrable to facts. Motivated reasoning is not reasonable.

You’ll also get exposed to some happy, slappy messages about how everything’s fine or will be. When crises go on too long, misery becomes normalized. The worst is when you point out an injustice and some clod mutters, “That’s nothing new.” Yeah, ya lazy dick! We should have fixed it by now, huh? But we haven’t. I fear we won’t fix much of anything.

Whatever your cause, there’s a good chance some experts are working on it. Just as surely, a bunch of idiots are maintaining the status quo or wrecking the DeLorean’s transmission by throwing Time into reverse.

So, what to do? You’re going to go to bed each night, heave a heavy sigh, and say in a thick Southern accent, “Mama’s had a day.” I say that to my wife each night because we’re going to have to hold on to our sense of humor through it all. I don’t have a solution to the climate crisis, threats of war, or a (legal) way to convince flat earthers they’re wrong. Maybe afflict the comfortable and write letters to whoever’s in charge of the circus? In your off-time, rest and recover.

Here’s my rest and recovery protocol:

  1. Guard your peace from those who would rob you of it.
  2. The usual: Sleep, eat well, and exercise.
  3. Put your phone down more often.
  4. Avoid trying to reason with unreasonable folks. Helping anyone out of ignorance is noble, but fuckwits will just waste your precious time, and time is life.
  5. Watch Stanley Tucci in Searching for Italy. This will reinforce your belief in the hope of a common humanity that is kind, curious, and appreciative.
  6. Binge-watching Modern Family will ease your mind and bring you comfort.
  7. If childhood was a better time for you, revel in nostalgia. I watched an episode of Barney Miller last night.
  8. Read fiction. It will pull you out of the forest fire that is your existence, at least for a while.
  9. Gather with the like-minded and enter the bar back to back, heads on a swivel.
  10. Laugh at determined fools. When reason fails, laughter is often the more effective weapon.

    Finally, and most importantly:

    Read my fiction. Mama’s had a day, and I need money.