In this startling literary debut, the page has turned on humanity's utopian appetites, and a new chapter is underway-one of hunger turned inward; of collective anxiety, auto-consumption, and quantum mechanics run amok. Engineers plunge from balconies. Publishers fall in love with cultists. Severed limbs appear in parks. Language models commit libel for profit. And game shows just aren't the same anymore. Through this complex and often hilarious history of a critically panned, seemingly unclassifiable work of art, A.G. Valentine picks at the human threads behind millenarian hysteria, mass-market publishing, emergent neuroscience, artificial intelligence, automation, and class relations under late capitalism. Epic in scope despite its page count-spanning half a century and twenty-plus diverse character arcs-The Apoptotic Era is a story of the West as it careens headlong into its own gaping maw.