[Editor’s note: usual reviewer Ian Randal Strock (it’s awkward writing that in the third person, when I’m the editor and the person typing this, and the usual reviewer, but you get the idea) was unable to attend Tuesday’s NYRSF reading in New York City, but Mark L. Blackman stepped up and submitted this report. If you find yourself at an event of interest to the larger community, please consider sending in a write-up: we can’t be everywhere.]
On the evening of Tuesday 5 February 2008, in the scientifictional frontier somewhere between the victory parade for the New York Giants and the Super Tuesday primaries, the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings Series featured a duet of readings from Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, a newly published anthology of post-apocalyptic tales edited by John Joseph Adams that has been well-received by critics. Produced by the Series’ executive curator Jim Freund (host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf radio program on sf and fantasy), and presented at the NYRSF Readings’ venue at the South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery, the evening’s guest curator was the anthology’s editor.
In opening remarks before the audience of about 40, Adams noted that the subgenre of the post-apocalyptic story, which encompasses nuclear, bacteriological, climatic, technological, cosmological, and even divine catastrophe, is nearly as old as science fiction itself, one of its earliest examples coming from the pen of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. He further observed that this variety of story saw its heyday during the Cold War, between Hiroshima and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, after a lull, is re-emerging in today’s war-torn and ecologically-at-risk world. He then introduced the evening’s readers, John Langan and Carol Emshwiller.
John Langan’s offering, with the mouthful title of “Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers”, was a revision of the classic, mid-20th century end-of-the-world story and a response of sorts to another story in the volume by Dale Bailey. Langan said that he wanted “to show that not everyone would roll over and go gentle into that good night.” Indeed, set in the weeks after the world has been devastated by a virulent plague, his protagonists, a pregnant 20-year-old and her comic geek “best guy friend”, make a stand and fight back against the pursuing titular feral Pack (answering the question “What Would Batman Do?”). Langan’s rapid, nearly breathless reading well suited the fast-paced action.
The second reading, “Killers” by Nebula- and World Fantasy Award-winning author Carol Emshwiller, was tremendously different in both pacing and tone. Rustic and introspective, and ultimately chilling, the story grew out of her objections to the war in Iraq. Set in a Western town in the aftermath of a terrorist war in the US—a war that exhausted our resources (and most of the menfolk), and regressed local civilization to pre-industrial existence, before apparently petering out—Emshwiller’s tale centered on a lonely and reclusive young woman who finds and takes in a former enemy soldier. Her unhurried reading (due in part to visual difficulties) matched the reflective pacing of the story’s interior monologue.
Wastelands features stories from 22 writers, including, in addition to Langan and Emshwiller, Octavia E. Butler, Orson Scott Card, Cory Doctorow, Stephen King, Jonathan Lethem, George R.R. Martin, and Gene Wolfe, and is available from Night Shade Books for $15.95. (For additional information, visit johnjosephadams.com/wastelands.)
Afterward, as customary, the guests and about half the audience (including writers Richard Bowes, S.C. Butler, and Barbara Krasnoff) adjourned to a nearby pub for dinner and conversation.
——Mark L. Blackman