Downmind by VO Blum

2025. Suicide is rampant, people are gasping in the streets, and planes fall from the sky. 

Medicine and technology can reverse the course, but humanity can't seem to rally. By chance, a young Kiwi chemist stumbles across evidence that suggests that gravity and the air, indeed consciousness itself, are responding to a dispiriting force. But who or what is directing this energy? And can the mystery be solved before humanity sinks into the abyss? 

"Cognitively estranging, richly imagined, and splendidly paranoid, its vision of contagious hegemonic despair works its way into the mind and settles there."

 - Dr Dougal McNeill, Victoria University of Wellington 

Best novella in 2012 SpecFicNZ/Steam Press manuscript