Mark Sommer Cherish

Cherish is a different kind of war story. Instead of describing the chaos and destruction inflicted by blowing things up, it centers on what happens when everything shuts down. The setting is a Midwestern college town as it adapts to a cyberwar. A massive national and global power outage paralyzes supply chains, communications, transportation, food production, and other vital components of modernity. The story focuses on the intimate dynamics of a challenging but essential transition from privatized lives to community resilience and renewal. Cherish focuses on how one small-town farming community learns to grow its own food when supply chains break down, shares the labor and harvest, and responds to natural disasters. It also describes the destructive behavior of individuals, gangs, and repressive upper echelons of power alarmed by the breakdown of centralized authority. The war begins when adversaries in both superpower blocs paralyze each other's critical services in continuous cyber strikes on prime military, technological, and civilian targets. Designed to disable rather than devastate, this kind of attack disconnects the fragile infrastructures of centralized modernity. The locales that function most effectively in such circumstances are those that have already developed the components of resilience, self-reliance, sustainability, and mutual aid that enable them to come to one another's aid in the absence of outside help. Cherish is a post-apocalypse drama with a very different outcome. Thrust away from our cellphone and computer screens, we're thrown back on each other to make it through. Yet when forced to turn to one another, we often discover the best side of ourselves. We discover how much we need and yearn for connection with one another and learn to appreciate what each of us brings to our common effort. Cherish is a human-scale drama of breakdown, breakthrough, and rebirth from our roots, with all the emotional struggle and intimate openings such transformations entail. "In contrast to 'walking dead' apocalypse porn, Cherish is a refreshing celebration of human possibility, reciprocity, and generosity. What first appears as an acute crisis breaks open a community's deep capacities to fall in love with life, land, and community." Chuck Collins, author of the eco-novel, Altar to An Erupting Sun and Burned by Billionaires "Cherish is part thriller, part communitarian manifesto. This is not a survivalist manual but an extraordinary book of wisdom about how to cherish strangers, neighbors and even our antagonists. You will cherish this book with the same delight that Sommer's characters discover as they come to cherish each other. A much needed, beautifully crafted book to heal the deepest maladies of our era." Charles Derber, author, The Wilding of America, Fighting Oligarchy, and Wired for Authoritarianism For a recent interview about the central themes of Cherish, see The Main Street Journal (https://mainstreetjournal.substack.com/p/how-communities-can-embrace-independence)