Just because I was editing my previous comment to add this in when you replied: the other analogue suggested to me by the hundred-year gap in the timeline is the Spanish flu, but I have never heard of Spanish flu denial. I have encountered people who've never heard of it. It has a much lower profile in my understanding of mainstream history than you'd think from its last-time-I-checked-still-current position as the second deadliest pandemic in human history. But ignorance is different from active disbelief and I have never heard of people suppressing or disclaiming records of the flu pandemic as it sounds as though this fictional society has done. So we're back to the Holocaust—or COVID allegory, which doesn't seem to fit either since it sounds as though the survivors were really, really clear about the Lovecraftian horror as opposed to trying to conspiracy-theorize it away until it vaporized them or ate their souls or whatever it did. [edit edit] It's not a COVID allegory; it was written well before.

[edit] Not meant as a criticism of this book, just spinning off thinking about disasters, but the post-apocalyptic memory hole is a very old trope of the genre and I feel as though it is based on pop-culture myths of the "Dark Ages" and not actually on how human memory works.

That's the part I was missing: who benefits from the disbelief?

Dunno! Someone else who has actually read this book should please chime in!

I know lots of people hate "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and "The Lottery," but for me those work because they hit that sweet spot of being clearly not intended as realistic, but grounded enough that they don't float off into abstraction.

Makes sense to me. I also don't hate either one of them.