THE WORD "cataclysmic" has been bandied about a little too lightly of late. Terrorists, the environment, financial meltdown: all have provoked fears of a general meltdown. But Greg Michaelson has spent the past few years imagining what a real end-of-civilisation catastrophe might look like, and what it might be like to live in this world after such a disaster. His new novel, The Wave Singer, depicts a barely recognisable world in which most of the land is poisoned or submerged beneath water, while the technology we take for granted is almost useless.

That last point is somewhat ironic, given that Michaelson is professor of computer science at Heriot-Watt University, a job that would be entirely redundant should the sort of tragedy he has envisioned ever come to pass. The irony, in The Wave Singer, is that man's long-foretold downfall is caused not by over-use of fossil fuels, but by an attempt to get round using them. Meeting Michaelson in Edinburgh on a particularly dreich day, I can't help but think a touch of global warming wouldn't go amiss just now.

Seated in a comfortable café while rain lashes and scars the windows, Michaelson and I begin by talking about the end of the world - or rather the end of the world as he brings it to us in The Wave Singer. Patriotic pessimists will be glad to know that parts of the north of Scotland are among the few places left habitable in Michaelson's imagined future.

"Ah, the Event", says Michaelson, a serious-faced man in his 50s. In The Wave Singer, the Event occurred around 700 years before the story begins, a now almost mythical happening that brought down mankind.

"There has been an attempt to generate energy using the sun," he says after a gulp of hot caffeine. "They turn on a series of satellites that are meant to convert light to energy, and it goes horrendously wrong. All the satellites except one have packed in, and this one that's left sends down an enormous bolt of energy. It knocks the Earth sideways, setting up huge standing waves. These tsunamis have wiped out 99% of the earth's population".

The Wave Singer is Michaelson's first novel. (Indeed it's his first stab at writing fiction, barring a play he wrote for the Fringe about a group of cohabiting 20-something young men who discover they are in fact robots. Cybermen behaving badly? It was never produced, more's the pity.) The narrator is a boy cusping adulthood. The community he has grown up in may be the only group of humans left in the world. Although surrounded by heaps of what is by now ancient technology, they have lost the knowledge and the means to make the devices work. Without gadgets, the people entertain themselves with singing - and reading. Any eBook sceptic will find Michaelson's vision of a world in which machines are scrap, but paper books have survived, to be weirdly heartening. Mere paper has proved hardier somehow than dishwashers, cars and the computers that Michaelson currently teaches the science of. His future people even understand the concept of the "airport book", long, long after the last plane took off.

"Ah, well, you've got to have these things that you hope people don't question too closely to make the story work," Michaelson admits. Despite living in Scotland almost all his life, Michaelson retains an English accent. He was born in Shepherds Bush and lived there until he moved to Edinburgh, aged nine.

In the book, quayside basements at Fort William are full of books, stashed away from former libraries and municipal museums. "Today," says Michaelson, "if you go into old churches, old cathedrals, you'll see 12th-century books preserved. You can see the Book of Kells, you can see the Lindisfarne Gospels; old stuff survives."

One of the authors whose books have survived this second flood is Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. His 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor Of Evolution has become a sort of bible to the survivors, to the extent that Kropotkin's birthday is celebrated as though he were a saint.

"I think co-operation is important if people are to survive harsh circumstances," says Michaelson. "There's evidence from pre-history that that is how early societies organised themselves, holding everything in common and working together.

"Those ideas really aren't current," admits Michaelson. "They've been smashed alongside the working-class communities that supported them. Anarchism now is seen as eccentricity. And yet, the Inuit in the Arctic still live a collective existence. If you look at tribes you might call primitive, they generally hold land and goods in common; there's a division of labour but they share all their produce. It's not a hippie fantasy; it's how people in those circumstances organise themselves."

Anarchist ideals clearly appeal to Michaelson, who he has been involved in politics of a non-party nature since a young age. He recalls that as a child his mother took him on the CND march to Aldermaston, and that he grew up with the doomy possibility of nuclear war hanging over him. Perhaps The Wave Singer is a distillation of that childhood fear finally pushing its way into his imagination.

"I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of peace and love and doing your own thing. There was the idea you could make your own way; you could hitchhike to India, join a commune, you didn't have to become a lawyer and put a suit on or whatever. Actually, the choices weren't real at all. Ultimately everybody did what they were brought up to do, apart from the casualties. I grew up in a time of illusion".

After attaining his first-class degree from the University of Essex, Michaelson returned to Scotland to study at St Andrews. "It was very weird", he says of Scotland's oldest university. "I came from Essex, which had been a hotbed of student upheaval. You could get the St Andrews left into a telephone box in those days. I took part in an occupation of the library to demand the students have a post on the senate. We were in turn picketed by Tory students, wearing gowns and carrying signs written in Latin. Imagine that, students protesting against being represented! It was a strange place, a holiday camp for the wealthy. After Essex, it was a real shock."

As the interview winds up and the weather outside our cafe looks ever more Armageddon-ish, I wonder what people 700 years from now would make of The Wave Singer; whether books, or even people, will exist. Optimistically, Michaelson suggests that: "It's a cliché that disasters bring out the best in people. But it's true."

The Wave Singer is published by Argyll Publishing at £8.99