Maureen F. McHugh: After the Apocalypse (2011, Small Beer Press)
201 pages
English language
Published Dec. 7, 2011 by Small Beer Press.
This is a very nice collection of "end of the world" stories. None of them spend much time on what caused the disruption, instead focusing on how people deal with it on an individual level. Let's hope that none of them come true.
I found all of these stories engaging but one. The outlier reads like a description of one of the author's dreams, and doesn't seem to have much of a theme or point of interest, at least, not one that was clear to me. But the rest of the book is filled with stories not of the end of the world, but of the time just after.
Zombie apocalypse, bird flu plague, technological singularity, riotous economic collapse: the world has no lack of ways to die. In each story, the strategies people use to deal with extreme crisis reflect our own quotidian reactions to the 2nd Great Depression. Not all of these protagonists are so representative of ordinary people, however. The first story, about a man sent to a zombie reservation / prison, ends by showing exactly how unlike us he has become, while still raising the question, how would we …
I found all of these stories engaging but one. The outlier reads like a description of one of the author's dreams, and doesn't seem to have much of a theme or point of interest, at least, not one that was clear to me. But the rest of the book is filled with stories not of the end of the world, but of the time just after.
Zombie apocalypse, bird flu plague, technological singularity, riotous economic collapse: the world has no lack of ways to die. In each story, the strategies people use to deal with extreme crisis reflect our own quotidian reactions to the 2nd Great Depression. Not all of these protagonists are so representative of ordinary people, however. The first story, about a man sent to a zombie reservation / prison, ends by showing exactly how unlike us he has become, while still raising the question, how would we change in these circumstances? How ARE we changing at the end of American Empire?
