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Presents a collection of short stories from such authors as Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, John Langan, and Octavia E. Butler that focus on the end of the world.
It's hard to rate short story collections as a whole when it contains so many different writers and styles. I loved a few of the tales, hated a few of them, and was indifferent on a few more. My favorite story of the bunch was "Judgment Passed" by Jerry Oltion, and as a computer programmer myself I had a soft spot for "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by Cory Doctorow.
It is totally worth reading just to see 22 different views on the Apocalypse in rather short order. ( )
Sem gefur að skilja er þetta drungalegt smásagnasafn og hrollvekjandi að miklu leyti. Fáar sögurnar gefa bjarta og vongóða mynd um framtíðina. Í meðförum höfundanna hefur heimurinn farist með einum eða öðrum hætti og mannkynið berst við að lifa af mismikið skaddað - eða þróað - eftir að hafa aðlagað sig nýjum aðstæðum. ( )
What better way to spend the day than by reading about the apocalypse. So many good writers, so much more to read based on this anthology. I found new authors to look into and came across some old ones I might want to return to! ( )
Famine. Death. War. Pestilence. These are said to be the harbingers of the biblical apocalypse--Armageddon, the End of the World. -- from the Introduction
(Introduction): Famine. Death. War. Pestilence.
I want to tell you about the end of war, the degeneration of mankind, and the death of the Messiah -- an epic story, deserving thousands of pages and a whole shelf of volumes, but you (if there are any "you" later on to read this) will have to settle for the freeze-dried version.
Quotations
If you examine the copyright page of this anthology, you'll note that just two of the stories in this volume were written in the '90s. On the other hand, more than half the stories were originally published since the turn of the millennium. So why the resurgence? Is it because the political climate now is reminiscent of the climate during the Cold War? During times of war and global unease, is it that much easier to imagine a depopulated world, a world destroyed by humanity's own hand?
Is that all there is to it, or is there something more What is it that draws us to those bleak landscapes - the wastelands of post-apocalyptic literature? To me, the appeal is obvious: the desire for a new frontier. It also allows us to start over from scratch, to wipe the slate clean and see what the world may have been like if we had known what we know now.
Presents a collection of short stories from such authors as Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, John Langan, and Octavia E. Butler that focus on the end of the world.
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Collects twenty-one stories and an introduction by the editor, John Joseph Adams: "The End of the Whole Mess" - Stephen King
"Salvage" - Orson Scott Card
"The People of Sand and Slag" - Paolo Bacigalupi
"Bread and Bombs" - M. Rickert
"How We Got In Town and Out Again" - Jonathan Lethem
"Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels" - George R.R. Martin
"Waiting for the Zephyr" - Tobias S. Buckell
"Never Despair" - Jack McDevitt
"When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" - Cory Doctorow
"The Last of the O-Forms" - James Van Pelt
"Still Life with Apocalypse" - Richard Kadrey
"Artie's Angels" - Catherine Wells
"Judgement Passed" - Jerry Oltion
"Mute" - Gene Wolfe
"Inertia" - Nancy Kress
"And the Deep Blue Sea" - Elisabeth Bear
"Speech Sounds" - Octavia E. Butler
"Killers" - Carol Emshwiller
"Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus" - Neal Barret, Jr.
"The End of the World as we Know It" - Dale Bailey
"A Song Before Sunset" - David Grigg
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. Complete with introductions and an indispensable appendix of recommendations for further reading, Wastelands delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre's core.