Read an Excerpt From The Salt King by Natasha Pulley

There’s a deliciously uncomfortable idea at the heart of *The Salt King*: that the apocalypse isn’t a cosmic accident but a narrative we collectively author. Pulley’s novel treats belief, religion, and myth not as comforting fictions layered over a cold material world, but as active agents in shaping what comes next. As science journalists, we often chase the weirdness of quantum entanglement or the multiverse—but here’s a wilder thought: what if our own stories are entangled with reality in ways we haven’t yet formalized? This is where the novel gets genuinely provocative. In physics, we’ve learned that observation collapses wavefunctions, that information seems to be conserved, and that the universe might be a hologram. But we rarely ask what happens when *collective* observation—faith, shared myth, religious fervor—collapses reality into something new. Pulley’s apocalyptic vision flips the script: instead of a deterministic universe heading toward heat death, she imagines a reality where belief is a kind of dark energy, accelerating our end not despite our stories but because of them. The excerpt, featured on Reactor, doesn’t just ask “What if religion is true?” It asks something weirder: “What if religion is *operational*?” That’s the kind of question that keeps us up at night—the possibility that our deepest myths are not symbolic but causal, that the Salt King isn’t a character but a mechanism. As a thought experiment, it’s as mind-bending as any cosmological model, and far more human. In the Weird & Wild spirit, we don’t need to choose between hard science and wild speculation. We can hold both: the equations and the incantations, the data and the dread. Pulley’s work is a reminder that the most interesting frontier isn’t just the edge of the universe—it’s the edge of what we’re willing to believe. [Read the excerpt yourself](https://reactormag.com/excerpts-the-salt-king-by-natasha-pulley/) and ask: what story is your reality telling right now?