This is a strange collection of odds and ends of “apocalyptic” writing or stories of the apocalypse. The writers here include Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Octavia Butler, Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Bear, Gene Wolfe, George R. R. Martin, and various others (many of whom I don’t know very well). Oh, and I forgot Cory Doctorow.
So the collection, like any collection is hit and miss. I think the most common kinds of misses, for me, are the ones in which everything is bad and terrible and the world kind of ends. The good kind of story here, the especial hits for me, are where people have worked out a new kind of life. When I review a book from Iran in a subsequent, I will rehash a point that is coming up more and more in my reading of literature — that the apocalypse has already happened over and over and that dystopias have always existed for some. This of course is a terrible thing, but it’s also maybe a kind of ok thing.
The biggest thing about this collection is the specifics of the apocalypses. I feel like this book, from 2008, has a foot in a couple of different places — there’s some zombie apocalypse here and there, there’s nuclear fallout and mutation — which is almost quaint, there’s disease–which still seems possible, but also is an evergreen idea (see my upcoming review of Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book), and there’s just the beginning of thinking about eco disasters, where I imagine this book would take us in the future.
All that said, there’s exactly one future here that seems livable — so congrats Tobias Buckell…you made the only wasteland that doesn’t scare the shit out of me.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Wastelands-Apocalypse-John-Joseph-Adams/dp/1597801054/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=wastelands&qid=1556066284&s=gateway&sr=8-3)