Killing zombies and wearing spiked leather jackets is cool and all, but our collective fascination with the apocalypse has more to do with the wish to be free from the stress of modern life than actually wanting to live in a nightmarish wasteland. After all, the reality of dealing with irradiated water supplies and plague-ridden settlements is a lot less fun if you take the situation more seriously. At the end of the day, it’s more likely that regular folks like you and me would end up as decorative skeletons on some raider’s war wagon than as members of a badass biker gang.
Thankfully, there are some people out there who’ve decided to turn their obsession with our species’ tendency for self-destruction into something a little more constructive. That’s how we get projects like Off Protocol’s handy guide to all things apocalyptic, The 4: An Illustrated Survival Guide to 4 Apocalypses.
An independent publishing house and semi-anonymous creative collective, Off Protocol successfully ran an international crowdfunding campaign promising a realistic instruction manual meant to get readers through an assortment of catastrophic worst-case scenarios. Appropriately titled The 4, this unique piece of edutainment contains contributions by survival specialists like Marine veteran Dr. David Powers as well as award-winning genre authors like Stella Berry and Randi Harvey, with the end goal being to instruct readers on how to survive advanced global warming, killer pandemics, nuclear winter, and even a full-blown zombie outbreak.
While personal concerns surrounding the recent explosion of AI-generated content among crowdfunded projects meant that I was initially hesitant to endorse a product sold by a semi-anonymous internet collective, I was relieved to discover that The 4 is about as hand-crafted as a book can get. Not only are all of the illustrations made by real artists (with each apocalypse scenario getting its own unique art style ranging from edgy comic-book lines to realistic Photoshop collages), but each segment is also written from a unique voice representing a different kind of survivor.
While the book repeatedly claims that the information presented here is meant for entertainment purposes only, it’s pretty obvious that Off Protocol is merely trying to make sure that their ambitious debut project doesn’t get them into trouble with lawyers and overly concerned politicians. After all, once you get down to the meat of this thing, The 4 consists of about 1/4 speculation and 3/4 genuinely useful information.
It’s extremely unlikely that readers will ever have to deal with undead enemies or even radioactive raiders, but I’d argue that knowing how to butcher wild animals or how to improvise a fishing setup can be useful in any number of less-than-apocalyptic situations. Sure, you could also easily look this information up online, but the whole point of this project is to compile this knowledge into an easily accessible format presented in a way that’ll keep it from sounding like a boring old textbook.
If you ask me, Off Protocol knocked it out of the park when it comes to presentation. From the textured lettering on the cover to the high-quality paper, the whole thing feels appropriately sturdy (and possibly heavy enough to knock down an incoming cannibal). In the pages themselves, the formatting and illustrations are all top-notch as well, and I especially appreciate the copious amounts of detailed diagrams teaching everything from how to identify edible plants to how to tie seaworthy knots.
Of course, it’s the tongue-in-cheek setup that makes this such a fun read, with even a guide to edible mushrooms being entertaining when the segment is presented by a badass survivalist with a sense of humor. This self-aware approach doesn’t always work, and I would have appreciated some more detailed stories about these apocalyptic worlds and the characters that inhabit them, but the brief blurbs about the narrators’ past lives are serviceable enough.
And while flooded cities and dead forests can be terrifying in their own right, genre fans are likely to get the most entertainment value out of The 4’s final segment about a zombie apocalypse. This is by far the least believable scenario in the book (with a lot of the “advice” here having more to do with Z-movie tropes than real-life survival), but it’s also the most fleshed out setting from a narrative point of view.
Unfortunately, while the book’s aesthetic and informative qualities are commendable, the prose itself has quite a few issues. I personally don’t mind the occasional grammatical error, but the sheer amount of idiosyncratic phrasing and strange word choices makes it clear that large portions of this compendium weren’t written by native English speakers. On one hand, this is further confirmation that the project was a genuine international effort created by people instead of generative language models, but it’s also a little disappointing when you consider the effort that went into everything else. Some additional proofreading would have gone a long way here, especially since Off Protocol is selling The 4 as a premium product.
However, despite the hiccups, The 4 is a genuinely impressive piece of edutainment that succeeds in finding a glimmer of self-sufficient hope even in the worst of possible futures. While not all of the information here is both fun and useful in equal measure, just casually skimming through the book is already a rewarding experience, and an in-depth read will likely set you up with genuinely useful life skills that might one day save a life. That’s why I’d recommend this apocalyptic coffee table book to any genre fan who wants to learn a little more about what it might take to survive inside some of our favorite movies.
The 4 is available now on Off Protocol’s official website.
The post ‘The 4: An Illustrated Guide to 4 Apocalypses’ Takes Edutainment to the End of the World [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.