Things We Didn’t See Coming Study Guide

Steven Amsterdam was born in New York City, where he attended the prestigious magnet Bronx Science high school. After graduating from the University of Chicago, he worked in several different industries (including as a pastry chef, a map editor, and a producer’s assistant), before moving to Melbourne, Australia in 2003. Once in Melbourne, Amsterdam started to hone two parallel careers, balancing his time as a novelist with his training to be a palliative care nurse. Amsterdam published Things We Didn’t See Coming, his debut novel, in 2009, to great acclaim (including a nomination for The Guardian First Book award). He has since written two more books, What The Family Needed and The Easy Way Out, the latter of which draws from Amsterdam’s experience in palliative care. Amsterdam now continues to write and work as a nurse in Melbourne, where he lives with his partner.

The latter parts of the novel are speculative, though they have roots in real crises, like the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 and the escalating political tensions between U.S. rural populations (largely conservative) and U.S. urban populations (largely liberal). The first chapter, though, is set in a completely recognizable historical moment: New Year’s Eve 1999, a date often associated with “the 2000 problem,” or the “Y2K scare”. Early computer programmers used only two-digit numbers to refer to dates, which could mean that systems would break down at the end of the millennium (as the years 1900 and 2000 would be indistinguishably coded as “00”). As journalists reported in the mid-1990s, if major systems were to fail, massive parts of global infrastructure could collapse. Though information technology experts were able to remedy this error before anything could go wrong, some in the general public—like the narrator’s father in Things We Didn’t See Coming—felt great anxiety about the possibility of a civilizational collapse, stocking up on supplies and weapons in case chaos broke loose.

On its initial publication, Things We Didn’t See Coming earned comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—both share survivalist themes and a focus on father-son relationships, though Amsterdam’s novel is both lighter tonally and less linear in its plotting. The book’s unusual structure, which lands somewhere between a novel and a collection of linked short stories, recalls other formally similar works, particularly Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, about the Vietnam War. Thematically, Amsterdam’s work also shares DNA with The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, which similarly emphasizes quotidian, intimate experience in the midst of large-scale catastrophe. And in the years since Things We Didn’t See Coming was published, Amsterdam’s wryer, everyday approach to apocalyptic storytelling has continued to catch on, particularly in novels like Ling Ma’s 2019 zombie novel Severance.