If you haven’t read China Mountain Zhang you should check it out. That’s not a ringing endorsement per se. I liked it a lot, but it’s strange and uncomfortable, but completely original and something altogether else.
Same goes with this book. It delivers on its title. This is a collection of stories that take place after various and diverse kinds of apocalypse that could befall us, from the overreach of technology and medical fields, to zombies, to disease, to economic collapse and so on. In each of these stories, it’s not the actual downfall that gets you so much as the scrabbling for humanity afterward.
This is not the world of the Walking Dead, where the barest traces of humanity fall by the wayside as soon as oversight is gone. Instead, this is where those traces latch on and become way stronger to more and more detrimental effects.
So it might be in a collapsed economy working for a corporate syndicate that runs its internal economy like a boomtown Coal mine accruing debt, it might be living in New Mexico in relative separation from the real perils only to find that people are still as depraved as ever when given half a chance, it might be the feeling of free fall after a crisis.
In a lot of ways this is similar to the world you saw in Logan where the crash is slow and painful and real, but like a slow moving train that we can’t stop, don’t want to stop, don’t know how to stop, and so it keeps going slowly.
One thing I REALLY liked about this collection is it does what so many others fail to do….take a risk on what trends are big today and put them in our near future. So it’s the near future and people are still watching Netflix. It also has really nice cover design. The book looks artificially aged and has a graphic design of a late 70s book, which actually fooled me when it was talking about the internet.