I asked Claude to rewrite the plot for Lionel Shriver's book The Mandibles, but make it more realistic; i.e., include the influence of the local church to provide humanitarian aid; include the influence of Bitcoin lightning payments as a way to do business; include the influence of Nostr as a means of uncensored communication.
Here's what it came up with:
'The setting: a near-future United States where a cascading debt crisis, a currency crisis triggered by loss of confidence in the dollar as reserve currency, and aggressive capital controls gut the banking system. Where Shriver's original leaned on total systemic collapse with almost no functioning alternatives (leading to scavenging, cannibalism-adjacent desperation, and a slide into feudal subsistence), this version assumes that people don't just have raw survivalism to fall back on — they have parallel networks that already exist today and would harden under stress...
Three changes to the mechanics of collapse:
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The parish as a mutual-aid node, not just a charity. As FDIC-insured deposits get frozen and EBT/SNAP systems seize up, the family's local Catholic parish (or an evangelical megachurch, depending on region) becomes the actual clearinghouse for food, medicine, and shelter triage — not out of ideology but because it already had the physical plant (kitchen, hall, volunteer roster), the trust network, and continuity of leadership when city and federal agencies stalled. Willing initially views this as quaint, then realizes the parish's food bank and its informal "who owes whom a favor" ledger is more reliable than any government program. A subplot: tension between the family's secular skepticism and their growing dependence on a network run by people who show up not because they're bureaucratically obligated to, but because they see it as vocation.
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Lightning-network Bitcoin as the underground medium of exchange. When capital controls freeze bank transfers and the redenominated "bancor"-style currency the government rolls out gets rejected on the street, informal commerce reroutes through Bitcoin — specifically Lightning, because it's fast and cheap enough for everyday transactions (a loaf of bread, a car battery, a haircut) in a way that base-layer Bitcoin never was in the original 2016 conception of the book. Willing becomes the neighborhood's de facto Lightning node operator — running channels, helping elderly neighbors set up custodial wallets they can actually use, converting odd jobs into sats. This replaces the original's gold-coin hoarding subplot with something that reflects how value actually moves under capital controls today: not a heavy metal you bury in the yard, but a liquidity network you have to maintain relationships to access.
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Nostr as the uncensored public square. As mainstream platforms comply with emergency "information stability" directives (rebranded misinformation controls that conveniently suppress bank-run panic and capital-flight advice), relays running on Nostr become where the Mandibles and their neighbors actually find out which banks are still solvent, which routes out of the city are open, where FEMA-adjacent aid is being distributed versus hoarded. Nollie, the world-traveling writer, becomes an unlikely evangelist for it — she'd used it years earlier to get uncensored reporting out of a foreign crisis zone and already has the habits (key management, following pseudonymous but verified-by-reputation sources) that the rest of the family has to learn from scratch, under duress.
Narrative effect of these changes:
The original's power comes from watching institutions fail with nothing underneath them — pure freefall. This version trades some of that horror for something arguably more realistic and, in its way, more unsettling: the sanctioned institutions fail, but parallel institutions (parish networks, peer-to-peer payment rails, censorship-resistant speech infrastructure) were already quietly running the whole time, mostly ignored or mocked by comfortable people, and it's only collapse that reveals who'd been building lifeboats versus who'd been trusting the ship. Willing's arc shifts from "the kid who hoards gold and can't be shocked" to "the kid who was already fluent in the alternative rails everyone else has to learn under fire" — same narrative function, updated toolkit.
A tonal note:
Shriver's novel is partly a satire of specific policy ideas (MMT, currency manipulation, generational entitlement). If you want this reimagining to land the same way, the church/Bitcoin/Nostr elements should carry their own ironies too — the parish's charity comes tangled with real theological expectations the secular Mandibles resist; the Lightning network Willing builds has its own scaling pain points and requires a level of financial literacy most characters don't have; Nostr's lack of moderation means the family also has to wade through genuine misinformation to find the useful signal. None of these are frictionless deus ex machina fixes — they're just more realistic parallel systems with their own costs.'
