WASTELANDS: STORIES OF THE APOCALYPSE (Blackstone Audiobooks, May 2014) Edited by John Joseph Adams. Various writers and readers. ISBN# 1482999765.
Summary from the Goodreads website . . . . .
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 Revelation to The Road Warrior, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Road, storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving eschatological tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. In doing so, these visionary authors have addressed one of the most challenging and enduring themes of imaginative fiction: the nature of life in the aftermath of total societal collapse.
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.
Whether the end of the world comes through nuclear war, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm, these are tales of survivors, in some cases struggling to rebuild the society that was, in others, merely surviving, scrounging for food in depopulated ruins and defending themselves against monsters, mutants, and marauders.Wastelands delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre's core.
My review on the Goodreads website . . .. .
I listened to the audio book version during various car trips. While that took more than a month to complete, I think I benefited from absorbing this anthology in smaller doses, sometimes one story at a time. While the central theme of each story is survival following an apocalypse there is a great assortment of styles and storylines here, preventing this collection from seeming like 22 stories that all seem the same. In addition, the audio version has a different narrator for most of the stories and that lends even more variety to the listening experience.
When you pick up a lengthy anthology, and end up liking 73% of the contents, it's a premium quality piece of editing/selection. I'd recommend this and also suggest taking your time to get through it.
Sixteen of the twenty-two stories were satisfying and met my expectations. Of those, there are six that I consider worth a second reading. The best of these is "When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth" by Cory Doctorow. The others are "The End Of The Whole Mess" by Stephen King; "Salvage" by Orson Scott Card; "The Last Of The O-Forms" by James Van Pelt "Intertia" by Nancy Kress; and "Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus" by Neal Barrett, Jr.
Ten stories met my expectations but didn't exceed them like the above-mentioned works. These were written by George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Lethem, Tobias S. Bucknell, Catherine Wells, Jerry Oltion, Gene Wolfe, Elizabeth Bear, Octavia E. Butler, David Grigg and John Langan.
There were only six stories that didn't meet my expectations and ending up disappointing me -- usually because of the way they ended. While I may have appreciated the concepts and/or characters they fell short. If you want to sample this collection rather than read every work, you'll be safe to pass up the stories by Paoli Bacigalupi, M. Rickert, Jack McDevitt, Richard Kadrey, Carol Emshwiller and Dale Bailey.
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