Product Description: Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the harbingers of Armageddon - these are our guides through the Wastelands... From the Book of Revelations to The Road Warrior; from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Road, storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. Gathering together the best post-apocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today's most renowned authors of speculative fiction, including George R.R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King, Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon.
A Post-Apocalyptic Primer The individual stories that make up this collection are very good. Tastes differ from reader to reader, but there's something for everyone in this long, varied collection. The best thing about this book, as others have mentioned, is the range of stories included.
Most of us come to post-apocalyptic literature from one angle or another, and Adams provides a good mix of the range of ideas that have swirled around the sub-genre since its inception. If you're new to the sub-genre, this is a great place to start. If you're familiar with it, these stories (and the appended bibliography) tell you where to go among today's authors for contemporary visions of Life After.
Excellent Post-Apocalyptic Anthology. What an excellent anthology! I believe it takes a great effort and definitely talent and experience to create good anthologies. There are thousands of excellent short stories out there of post-apocalyptic nature. I am sure it takes an enormous amount of time to select few that encompass this greatly dramatic subject. John Joseph Adams has done an incredible job. Wastelands is definitely worth reading. The stories collected here are hopeful, hopeless, romantic, dramatic, and in some cases even comedic. The range of emotions I felt while reading these stories is incredible. Honestly, I am a bit too emotional sometimes, so reading "The People of Sand and Slag" by P. Bacigalupi has truly saddened me, I wish I skipped this one. However, there are other stories that are in some ways more optimistic and positive, for example "Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus" by N. Barrett and even "Judgment Passed" by J. Oltion (although I don't think many will agree with me on this one). And of course there are really scary stories like " Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels" by G. Martin and "Episode Seven" by John Langan. I think every person will feel a bit differently about each story. I really like reading post-apocalyptic books, so maybe I am a bit biased when it comes to this subject. However, I do believe that even for people who've never read any "end of the world" books before, this one would be an excellent first read. So, again Wastelands is a great anthology, and I 100% recommend it!
Apocalyptical fiction at it's best! I have long enjoyed apocalyptical fiction. What happens after the final disaster or war? Will mankind survive? How? How will he adjust to a changed world? What qualities will help him to survive? You will find answers to those questions and more in the pages of this well written book. Each story is a new world... a new adventure... a new beginning - after the end.
Tomorrow never comes. Somebody once said that after a disaster there is always at least one survivor to tell the story to others. But what if you are the sole survivor and there is no-one else on Earth to talk to?
Long ago I read a SF-story (or should I say a post-apocalyptic story? Oh well, what's in a name?) about a man who was not only the sole survivor of the human species but of all existing life including vegetation. Because of his injuries he could only crawl. After several months he finally reached the Ocean, crawled into the water and died. His decomposing body would provide the Ocean with atoms and molecules so that in a far future, new life could emerge from it.
Because of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the Cold War, post-apocalyptic literature was popular. But the fall of the Berlin Wall meant also the end of post-apocalyptic literature.
Today there is a revival of this genre. Probably because adventure and the possibility of starting all-over have a kind of charm. Maybe the most notorious example is Cormac McCarthy who received the Pulitzer-Price for his novel 'The Road'.
In this collection, you won't find stories where an invasion by Aliens or an uprising of Zombies are responsible for wastelands all over the globe. The editor of this anthology, John Joseph Adams, says that they could be the subject for another anthology. The best thing I can do right now is to give you the name of each author and the title of his/her story.
The End of the Whole Mess - Stephen King Salvage - Orson Scott Card The People of Sand and Slag - Paolo Bacigalupi Bread and Bombs - M. Rickert How We Got In Town and Out Again - Jonathan Lethem Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels - George R.R. Martin Waiting for the Zephyr - Tobias S. Buckell Never Despair - Jack McDevitt When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth - Cory Doctorow The Last of the O-Forms - James Van Pelt Still Life with Apocalypse - Richard Kadrey Artie's Angels - Catherine Wells Judgement Passed - Jerry Oltion Mute - Gene Wolfe Inertia - Nancy Kress And the Deep blue Sea - Elisabeth Bear Speech Sounds - Octavia E. Butler Killers - Carol Emshwiller Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus - Neal Barret, Jr. The End of the World as we Know It - Dale Bailey A Song Before Sunset - David Grigg
The End of the World as You Know It This is one of those themed compendiums in which the editor is trying a little too hard to take credit for collecting a previously unappreciated sub-genre. You see that a lot in speculative fiction. But regardless of the stretches John Joseph Adams makes in proclaiming the unheralded greatness of "post-apocalyptic fiction," he has put together a very powerful collection of stories by many great authors that are essential for the thinking spec-fi fan. Like any such collection, this one features a few clunkers here and there, like Elizabeth Bear's attempt at gritty action mixed with muddled supernatural elements, or the self-indulgently non-linear closer by John Langan. But the vast majority of tales here tackle the human aftermath of the end of civilization in intriguingly creative ways.
Orson Scott Card and Jerry Oltion explore the likely influence of established religion after the downfall of human civilization; while Paolo Bacigalupi, Catherine Wells, Nancy Kress, and Neal Barrett offer the book's best examples of the either comforting or frightening ways regular folks will adapt after the end of the world they know. There are also a few compelling surprises in store for the reader, like the tale of a forlorn former musician by David Gregg, and the morbidly funny apocalypse meta-tale by Dale Bailey. The book's most successful installments are Octavia Butler's (R.I.P.) look at a disturbing social collapse caused by an affliction that merely prevents people from adequately communicating, and George R.R. Martin's tale of the likely inability of future humans to accept their different courses of development after the collapse of a society that just barely kept them together.
And that's the running theme in most of the tales so expertly collected herein by John Joseph Adams. You usually have to imagine the apocalypse for yourself, but that's not the point. Here the writers advance much more enlightenment on how people will or will not adapt to the loss of a social order that they or their predecessors should have tried not to destroy. [~doomsdayer520~]
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