Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams
Night Shade Books, 2008, $15.95, tp, 9781597801058
Warning: This review contains some spoilers. If you’d rather not know how some stories climax, bookmark this page and read it after reading.
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.…” So runs “Knock”, Fredric Brown’s famed 1948 “shortest horror story ever written.”
My generation grew up on “last man on Earth” stories (it was even the title of the first film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend)—far too many of which, sigh, climaxed as “Adam and Eve”-themed fables—and its linked genre, “after the Bomb” stories. (In Alfred Bester’s 1963 “They Don’t Make Life Like They Used to”, incidentally, the last woman on Earth refers to herself as the “Last Man on Earth” to avoid the sexist arrogance of “Last Woman on Earth” and the pretentiousness of “Last Person on Earth”. Obviously it predates political correctness.) Such tales were the source of innumerable, memorable Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes. (“Time Enough at Last” and all the books in the world, and no eyeglasses, as befell Burgess Meredith.)
After its heyday in the 1950s and early ’60s, the height (or depth) of the Cold War, and following the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the subgenre of the post-apocalyptic story seemed to fade, at least until the nascent environmental movement provided another end-of-the world scenario. There was a brief flurry in popular culture in the Reagan Era—such as David Brin’s novel The Postman and the Mad Max film trilogy, whose lone heroes, note, weren’t the Last Man on Earth, but moved through populated (albeit not populous) landscapes where civilization had collapsed—before petering out again, Kevin Costner (Waterworld and the film adaptation of The Postman) notwithstanding.
In today’s war-torn and ecologically at-risk world, there has been a resurgence in the subgenre. More than half of the 22 offerings in Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, an anthology of post-apocalyptic short fiction edited by John Joseph Adams, have been published since 2000. Two, M. Rickert’s “Bread and Bombs” and Carol Emshwiller’s “Killers”, were written in reaction to, respectively, 9/11 and the War in Iraq.
The catastrophes in the collection are nuclear, bacteriological, genetic, climatic, infrastructural, and even divine. Stephen King’s opening story, “The End of the Whole Mess”, sets the tone for the volume with a humanity-ending protein “calmquake”. The most unusual and original apocalypse is (no surprise) Octavia E. Butler’s “Speech Sounds”, where she posits a loss of our language ability, while “Judgment Passed” by Jerry Oltion (the only story original to the anthology) plays off the Left Behind series as returning astronauts learn that they’ve missed the Rapture. The Devil, on the other hand, is behind the nuclear devastation in “And the Deep Blue Sea”, Elizabeth Bear’s take on the post-apocalyptic messenger story (exemplified in The Postman and Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley).
Nukes have a time-honored place in the genre, and their resultant fallout transforms humanity in George R.R. Martin’s “Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels” (from 1973, the oldest work in the volume), and is the likely cause of the “mutation plague” afflicting both humans and animals in James Van Pelt’s wistful “The Last of the O-Forms”. Barely human are the sand-feeding modified inhabitants of a toxic Earth in Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag”, though briefly restored by the appearance of a miraculously surviving animal companion of the past. A virulent flesh-eating plague of unknown origin wipes us out—and unleashes feral packs of hungry dogs—in John Langan’s fast-paced offering with the mouthful title of “Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers” (a response of sorts, incidentally, to another story in the volume), and (while not indicated in the story here—see his novel Eternity Road) devastates civilization in Jack McDevitt’s “Never Despair”. From Orson Scott Card’s Folk of the Fringe series, “Salvage” presents a shattered community on the shores of a flooded Great Salt Lake, while, in “Waiting for the Zephyr“, Tobias S. Buckell portrays hope in a dust-storm-ravaged town in a fossil-fuelless future (after the nuking of the Middle East).
In other stories, though, such as “Inertia” by Nancy Kress and “Still Life with Apocalypse” by Richard Kadrey, “A Song Before Sunset” by David Grigg, and particularly Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, it’s a kitchen-sink of causes—war, social unrest, and rioting—that causes the world to go to pieces.
No cause for the calamity is specified in Gene Wolfe’s disturbing tale of childhood’s end, “Mute”, Neal Barrett, Jr.’s breezy “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus” (a few months back, the idea of using gasoline as a form of currency didn’t seem science-fictional), or “How We Got in Town and Out Again”, Jonathan Lethem’s swipe at virtual reality technologies. Dale Bailey even breaks the fourth wall in his “The End of the World as We Know It”, an end-of-the-world story about end-of-the-world stories, to tweak us: his survivor protagonist’s curiosity about the cause of the catastrophe “will never be satisfied. Unfortunately, neither will yours.”
However, whereas in the classic, mid-20th century end-of-the-world story, the cause and nature of the calamitous event dominated the narrative—weren’t most “after-the-Bomb” stories at heart cautionary tales?—the genre being well-established, contemporary handlings of the scenario employ it primarily as a plot device to get through the apocalypse, as Adams notes in his introduction, to “explore what scientific, psychological, sociological, and physiological changes will take place in [its] wake.”
King’s story is, in essence, about two brothers, and the love and trust that leads the narrator into going along with his idealistic mad scientist sibling. Grigg proffers the conventional survivor in a bleak, depopulated world without technology, scrounging for basic goods, eating rats, and fending off marauders like the Vandalmen, yet concerns the hopeful quest of a concert pianist for a chance to play a grand piano once more. For all of his mock survey of the varieties of end-of-the-world stories, and comic touches (like the porcelain Elvis statue from the Home Shopping Network), Bailey’s tale is ultimately about the personal devastation of a man whose wife and daughter have been killed, the end-of-his-world. Harmful solar radiation drives humanity’s remnants under radiation shields or, if wealthy or powerful, off-world, in “Artie’s Angels”, but at its core it’s a consideration of quiet heroism by Catherine Wells. Kress’s quarantined protagonists get past their “inertia” to take action (they hope) to save the world, Buckell’s lead character escapes her isolated small town in a wind-driven caravan, and, finally, as his title suggests, McDevitt inspires his heroine to press on with her quest through a museum hologram of Winston Churchill.
A mixed bag of horror, chaos, and futility, and, gratifyingly, gentle optimism that rises beyond mere survival, Wastelands is a stellar compendium of contemporary visions of life in the aftermath of total societal collapse and/or the near-extinction of humanity that mostly steers clear of the genre’s clichés. (Sorry, Grace Jones fans, no punks clad in bondage gear riding souped-up ATVs.) For those whose tastes in post-apocalyptic fiction run to classics of the genre, Adams commendably provides a list of recommendations for further reading, from Brian Aldiss to Roger Zelazny, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to Z for Zachariah, and from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (from 1826, perhaps the first example of the genre) to upcoming works by authors in this collection.