I’m a big fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, so when I noticed this recommended in the library catalog, I couldn’t resist. It’s a collection of apocalyptic stories written by a wide assortment of authors, several of whom are very well known. I ended up not reading three of the stories, one of them because it was by an author whom I despise ethically, so I refuse to give him the pleasure of wasting my time with his work, and two because they were just bad, and they didn’t grip me.

There were some awesome stories in here, and, as a whole, the book was quite varied. I especially loved “The People of Sand and Slag,” “Inertia,” “And the Deep Blue Sea,” and “The End of the World As We Know It,” all of which had very different takes on a potential apocalypse and how people would respond to it. (Although “World” got a little bit too meta at times for my taste.)

This was certainly a book well-worth recommending. If you enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction, I think you would probably like it. And, like all books of short stories, it has the advantage of allowing readers to skip things they don’t like, to focus on the stories which are enjoyable.

There’s something about apocalyptic fiction which is intriguing and compelling, and I think the introduction posited a very plausible reason for this. We like to read stories like these because we like to imagine ourselves in an apocalypse, confident that we would survive to be the heroes of our own narrative. I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but I think that’s actually right on. When you imagine the apocalypse, do you imagine yourself as one of the bloated corpses left behind by violent explosions, plague, tsunami, or what have you? No, you imagine yourself heroically striking out and coming up with enterprising solutions to uncommon problems. Becoming a leader who helps to rebuild a society.

Demographics:

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, edited by John Joseph Adams. Published 2008, 327 pages. Fiction.