Preparing to Survive in the Age of Collapse (2026) is an unsettling but ultimately constructive book that treats global instability not as a spectacle to fear but as a reality to confront intelligently. Dr. Drew Miller writes with the authority of someone who has lived inside the systems he critiques — intelligence, defence planning, and strategic forecasting — yet the tone never slips into bureaucratic jargon or hollow alarmism. Instead, the book reads like a serious briefing translated into language ordinary citizens can actually use.
What distinguishes Miller's work from the flood of collapse literature is its refusal to reduce catastrophe to a single cause. Rather than blaming social conflict alone, or geopolitics alone, or technology alone, he frames collapse as a convergence problem, a dangerous interaction between fragile political institutions, accelerating technological power, biological vulnerability, and cultural unpreparedness. This layered diagnosis gives the book intellectual credibility and prevents it from drifting into either utopian tech optimism or nihilistic doomerism.
The sections on artificial intelligence, biosecurity, and geopolitical fracture are especially compelling. Miller does not indulge in speculative sci-fi but focuses instead on how existing trends, AI-enabled cyberwarfare, fragile supply chains, pandemic risk, and strategic miscalculation, already strain systems designed for a slower, simpler world. His discussion of Taiwan, great power rivalry, and escalation risk is sobering without being hysterical, and his treatment of domestic political decay is sharp but largely nonpartisan, focusing on institutional failure rather than tribal grievance.
Where the book really earns its place, however, is in its practical orientation. This is not a collapse voyeur's handbook; it is a survival and adaptation manual. Miller moves decisively from diagnosis to prescription, offering concrete guidance on preparedness, community resilience, decentralisation, food security, and civil defence. His emphasis on local production, rural sustainability, and behavioural change feels less like retreat and more like strategic redesign, a shift away from brittle complexity toward systems that bend rather than shatter under stress.
Some of the policy proposals are deliberately provocative, particularly around foreign alliances and civil defence equity, but they function less as dogma than as intellectual stress tests. Whether one agrees with every reform is beside the point; the value lies in forcing readers to confront uncomfortable assumptions about national security, political accountability, and the moral distribution of risk. Miller's underlying argument — that elites cannot be insulated from collapse while the public absorbs its costs — is both ethically persuasive and strategically sound.
Stylistically, the book is clear, urgent without being hysterical, and impressively readable for a work grounded in serious strategic analysis. Miller avoids academic padding and ideological signalling, favouring directness and evidence-based reasoning. The result is a book that feels neither preachy nor performative, but rather like a long-form conversation with someone who has seen how systems fail, and wants to prevent the worst failures from becoming inevitable.
Ultimately, Preparing to Survive in the Age of Collapse succeeds because it reframes collapse not as apocalypse but as transition. While the risks Miller outlines are grave, the book is fundamentally optimistic about human adaptability and social redesign. Its central claim is not that catastrophe is unavoidable, but that unpreparedness is. For readers willing to think seriously about resilience, personal, communal, and civilisational, this book offers not comfort, but something far more useful: clarity, direction, and a framework for action.
https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-Survive-Age-Collapse-Preparedness/dp/1510785876