Final Great War

Final Great War

Final Great War (2007) All That Remains (2011) Into Ploughshares (2015) Presented On High (2017) Beast of Seven Heads (2020) Next Great War (2022)
Author	Mychal Geronato
Country	Urcea
Language	Julian Ænglish
Genre	Epic science-fiction
Publisher	Enterprise Publishing
Published	19 July – present
Media type	Print (paperback & hardcover) Audiobook E-book

Final Great War is a series of epic science fiction novels by the Urcean novelist and screenwriter Mychal Geronato. He began writing the first volume, also called Final Great War in 2002, publishing it in 2007. The series depicts a post-apocalyptic setting brought about by a digital great war between Caphiria and Levantia, and deals with themes of loss, personal core values, endurance, and divergent perspectives. Within this setting, survivors of the great war struggle on an individual and societal level at varying scales, ranging from individuals trying to stay alive to groups of survivors attempting to rebuild civilization.

The series is well known for its unique narrative structure, which combines a nonlinear narrative with unreliable narrators to convey an uncertain sense of events within the world it creates. This format, now known as Geronatic literature for Final Great War's author, has become widely emulated throughout Urcean and global literature.

As of 2032, more than 200 million copies have been sold. The series was adapted into a 2025-2030 made-for-streaming television adaptation that proved extremely popular. The success of the books and series resulted in an additional set of movies written within the world of Final Great War by Geronato, the first of which debuted in February 2032.

Plot synopsis

The events of the Final Great War series generally take place after the events of the Third Great War. Through the narrative, it is revealed the Third Great War took place roughly between 2096 and 2099 and was fought between an alliance primarily based around Caphiria on one side and an alliance centered around an entity known as the Levantine Social Republic (generally thought to be a consolidated Levantine Union) on the other. In the pre-war world, most people were fitted with consumer brain implants, allowing a great range of new abilities as well as wireless connection between consciousness and the rest of the world at all times. During the Third Great War, most of the conflict was fought using digital hacks and viruses of brain implants rather than actual force of arms, though it is implied some limited traditional fighting occurred. At the end of the first novel, it is revealed that the continued use of hacks and viruses created a worldwide digital plague, which functionally killed every single person whose brain implants were exposed to the plague, and that the implants then took motor control of human bodies, creating a very huge number of cybernetic zombies. This plague functionally destroyed all human civilization and most governments. Throughout all of the novels, the protagonists struggle against the cybernetic zombies, but their inability to spread the plague to non-implanted individuals leads to a significant decline of the zombie population by the end of the fourth novel, Presented On High.

Against a destroyed world civilization and large numbers of cybernetic zombies, the novels focus on the efforts of humans to survive and eventually move past the events after the Third Great War. The first novel primarily deals with small numbers of survivors and individual survivors; the focus gradually scales as new alliances, tribes, and social institutions are built among survivors, such that by the end of the third novel, Into Ploughshares, the main conflict shifts from survival from hunger and cybernetic zombies to conflict between groups of survivors and, eventually, newly formed states. By the time of the fifth and final mainline novel, Next Great War, most cybernetic zombies are gone and society has largely rebuilt, and thematically the novel depicts the so-called "Final Great War" and apocalypse as just another event in human history as the post-war states shed their "survival alliances" of convenience and prepare to resume war and conflict.

Novels

Beast of Seven Heads (2020)

Beast of Seven Heads was published on 19 October 2020. It is a prequel to the rest of the books, and provides an in depth treatment of the events of the Third Great War as well as a survey of different characters and the kinds of people that would ultimately survive the Third Great War. The novel reveals that most of the survivors of the war were largely marginalized people, preppers, or otherwise extremely remote rural people, none of whom had brain implants in large numbers. Controversially, Beast of Seven Heads included sequences wherein the protagonists of the previous novels, or their ancestors, kill, steal from, and otherwise commit violence against those who had once been their "social betters" (the rich, politicians, etc.) in an act of vengeance rather than of survival.

Beast of Seven Heads was the worst received of the Final Great War series. Critics described the vengeance sequences as "gratuitous", with several arguing that they introduced extreme moral ambiguity and subversion of moral expectations into a series that heretofore excluded both. Geronato, as well as some more positive critics, argued that these introductions were necessary to make the characters "more interesting", and Geronato extensively quoted the Pauline Epistles ("for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God") on social media and in interviews without further elaboration. Nevertheless, the events which occur within Beast of Seven Heads are not referenced again in the follow-up novel, Next Great War, beyond some general occurences of the Third Great War as described within Beast. When the series was adapted for the 2025-30 television show, the content of Beast was largely omitted.