WASTELANDS(Stories of the Apocalypse) by John Joseph Adams
Acknowledgments
"The End of the Whole Mess" ? 1986 by Stephen King. Originally published in Omni, October 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Salvage" ? 1986 by Orson Scott Card. Originally published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The People of Sand and Slag" ? 2004 by Paolo Bacigalupi. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Bread and Bombs" ? 2003 by M. Rickert. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"How We Got In Town and Out Again" ? 1996 by Jonathan Lethem. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels" ? 1973 by George R. R. Martin. Originally published in Vertex, December 1973. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Waiting for the Zephyr" ? 2002 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally published in Land/Space, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Never Despair" by Jack McDevitt ? 1997 by Cryptic, Inc. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" ? 2006 by Cory Doctorow. Originally published in Jim Baen's Universe, August 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Last of the O-Forms" ? 2002 by James Van Pelt. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Still Life with Apocalypse" ? 2002 by Richard Kadrey. Originally published in The Infinite Matrix, May 29, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Artie's Angels" ? 2001 by Catherine Wells Dimenstein. Originally published in Realms of Fantasy, December 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Judgment Passed" ? 2008 by Jerry Oltion. Appears for the first time in this volume.
"Mute" ? 2002 by Gene Wolfe. Originally published in 2002 World Horror Convention Program Book. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency.
"Inertia" ? 1990 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, January 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"And the Deep Blue Sea" ? 2005 by Elizabeth Bear. Originally published in SCI FICTION, May 4, 2005. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Speech Sounds" ? 1983 by Octavia E. Butler. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, Mid-December 1983. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Octavia E. Butler.
"Killers" ? 2006 by Carol Emshwiller. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus" ?1988 by Neal Barrett, Jr. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The End of the World as We Know It" ? 2004 by Dale Bailey. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"A Song Before Sunset" ? 1976 by David Rowland Grigg. Originally published in Beyond Tomorrow, 1976. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers" ? 2007 John Langan. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Introduction
by John Joseph Adams
Famine. Death. War. Pestilence. These are said to be the harbingers of the biblical apocalypse—Armageddon, The End of The World. In science fiction, the end of the world is usually triggered by more specific means: nuclear warfare, biological disaster (or warfare), ecological/geological disaster, or cosmological disaster. But in the wake of any great cataclysm, there are survivors—and post-apocalyptic science fiction speculates what life would be like for them.
The first significant post-apocalyptic work is The Last Man (1826), by the mother of science fiction—Frankenstein author Mary Shelley—so the sub-genre is in essence as old as science fiction itself. Although its origins are firmly rooted in science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction has always been able to escape traditional genre boundaries. Several classic novels of the genre, such as Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, On the Beach by Nevil Shute, and Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, were published as mainstream novels. That trend is seeing a resurgence, with authors like Cormac McCarthy venturing into post-apocalyptic territory with his bleak new novel The Road—which was not only a best-selling book and an Oprah Book Club pick, but a winner of the Pulitzer Prize as well.
But SF has produced its share of novel-length classics as well, including the undisputed king of the sub-genre, Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. Not to mention Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow, John Christopher's No Blade of Grass, or Wilson Tucker's criminally underappreciated The Long Loud Silence. I could go on and on . . .and I do—in the "For Further Reading" appendix you'll find at the end of this book.
Post-apocalyptic SF first rose to prominence in the aftermath of World War II—no doubt due in large part to the world having witnessed the devastating destructive power of the atomic bomb—and reached the height of its popularity during the Cold War, when the threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation seemed a very real possibility.
But when the Berlin Wall fell, so did the popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction. 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 of these 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: it fulfills our taste for adventure, the thrill of discovery, 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 then what we know now.
Perhaps the appeal of the sub-genre is best described by this quote from "The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)" by John Varley:
We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders. Sure it's horrible, sure we weep for all those dead people. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive, to start over. Secretly, we know we'll survive. All those other folks will die. That's what after-the-bomb stories are all about.
Or is that just the beginning of the conversation? Read the stories, and you decide.
The stories in this volume go beyond the "wandering," "scrounging," and "defending" that Varley describes above. What you will find here are tales of survival and of life in the aftermath that explore what scientific, psychological, sociological, and physiological changes will take place in the wake of the apocalypse.
What you will not find here are tales depicting the aftermath of aliens conquering the Earth, or the terror induced by a zombie uprising; both scenarios are suitably apocalyptic, but are subjects for another time (or other anthologies, as it were).
In the stories that follow, you will find twenty-two different science fictional apocalyptic scenarios. Some of them are far-fetched and unlikely, while others are plausible and all-too-easy to imagine. Some of the stories flirt with the fantastic. Many venture into horrific territory. All of them explore one question:
What would life be like after the end of the world as we know it?