The Eros Apocalypse

It's sometime in the near future. A comet the size of Alaska hurtles across Earth's orbital path. In the mother of all near-misses, it passes so close that our planet floats through its great, long tail, creating the most spectacular celestial event mankind has ever witnessed. But afterwards, it soon becomes apparent that every man on Earth has lost absolutely all interest in sex. The condition is named Arrested Libido Syndrome [ALS] and a global effort to find its cure is launched. An international task force of medical experts confidently assure an anxious world that a cure will be found.

But finding that cure takes time: enough time for relationships between men and women to break down. Tsunamis of divorce, domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse, depression and suicide sweep across continents, swamping police forces and drowning legal systems. Millions of sex trade workers find themselves unemployed, soon to be joined by legions more from the entertainment, fashion and publishing industries. Economies teeter. Societies unravel. Political power shifts. Years pass and no cure is found. The question of who will survive and who won't begins destroying governments and creating militants. And yet it's a personal rivalry between two women that ultimately decides mankind’s destiny.

Hilary Brandt is the coldly calculating CEO of a pharmaceutical firm now profiting handsomely from ALS thanks to its wildly popular do-it-yourself artificial insemination kits. Profits aside, Brandt believes that ALS is the best thing that ever happened to the world. As she sees it, men are history and the future belongs to women.

Juliana Monroe, the poster girl for a female Viagara, works closely with Hilary Brandt but their characters are light years apart, especially in the bedroom. Where Brandt is demur and reluctant, Monroe is an accomplished artist, accustomed to maniacal sex with her long-time lover, a free-spirited ethno botanist named Wade Geddings.

Sadly, like so many other men devastated by ALS, Geddings retreats, joining a scientific expedition that will take him deep into the Amazon basin. And it is here that he and his colleagues will eventually stumble upon a cure for ALS. When Hilary Brandt learns of this incredible discovery, she plots to have Geddings and his entire expedition murdered before they can return from the Amazon. Monroe discovers Brandt’s treachery and their simmering rivalry explodes into a final, fateful clash.

Speculative fiction at its sparest, "The Eros Apocalypse" is a novella of just ten chapters, each representing one year of the first decade after the coming of ALS. A cunning spoof of popular Doomsday fiction, as dark as it is risque as well as a tantalizing exercise in what-if thinking; "The Eros Apocalypse" is above all, a refreshingly original bit of story-telling.