Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, edited by John Joseph Adams

Following a brief but insightful preface outlining the history of post-apocalyptic fiction, editor John Joseph Adams begins Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse with Stephen King’s “The End of the Whole Mess,” an Omni story from 1986. King’s narrator, freelancer Howard Fornoy, is a writer with a deadline. He has to tell the story of the coming of the Messiah (his brother, Bobby Fornoy) before the Messiah’s gift to humanity claims him, too.

King’s story showcases one of his signature tropes, the folksy narrative sneakily concealing a dark horror. Despite the self-imposed time pressure (emphasis on “self-imposed,” since King gives no explanation why Fornoy must write his story AFTER doing himself in), Howard takes plenty of time to recount what it was like to grow up with a boy genius brother. Bobby’s growing distress at humanity’s capacity for violence leads him to search for a cure. Predictably, the cure is worse than the disease.

The whole thing feels all too familiar. The Law of Unintended Consequences is an old friend in science fiction, as is technological Ragnarok; Robert Silverberg’s 1972 collection, Beyond Control provided seven fine examples, going back as far as Alfred Bester’s 1941 classic, “Adam and No Eve.” Does King bring anything new to an old plot? Perhaps so, if readers value this as a tragic tale of brotherly love. But even the poignancy of Howard’s and Bobby’s fates is tainted by echoes of Daniel Keyes’s Hugo-winning 1959 novelette, “Flowers for Algernon.”

Orson Scott Card’s “Salvage,” originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, concerns the ambitions of nineteen-year-old orphan, Deaver Teague. Deaver’s a salvage trucker in a post-ecological disaster world. He drives around the American west, retrieving abandoned washing machines and refrigerators and bringing them back to the Salvage Center on Oquirrh Island in the Mormon Sea. Deaver isn’t content to salvage appliances, though. He’s convinced the real wealth is hidden in the partially submerged Mormon Temple, one of many buildings swallowed by the Mormon Sea.

To enjoy a story like “Salvage,” a reader needs fortitude to endure the characters’ overwrought dialect, and at least a passing interest in questions of faith. Mormonism isn’t central to the story—any religion could have provided the basis for this story, and indeed, the watery Temple brought to mind the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. But Deaver isn’t looking for faith in the Temple; he’s looking for gold. An unsentimental denouement turns this into a better story than it might otherwise have been. Ultimately, it’s an interesting exploration of faith, or the lack thereof.

In Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag,” technological adaptation has turned people into something more and less than human. Bacigalupi’s characters eat minerals, regrow limbs in a matter of hours, and live forever, provided they don’t fall prey to the vaporizing weapons of other post-humans. Good thing they can live off of sand and mud, too, because their world is polluted and sterile, nearly devoid of non-engineered life.

The story focuses on three tactical defense responders, hired muscle protecting SesCo’s mining operations. Lisa, Jaak, and Chen (the first-person narrator) investigate a perimeter breach and discover a dog— a real, live, non-engineered dog who has survived in this world against all logic. Once the company’s biologist takes his DNA samples and leaves, the team is left to decide the dog’s fate. Bacigalupi uses the team’s arguments and subsequent actions in a masterful way to reveal just how alien these post-humans— these “gods,” as they tell themselves—have become.

The brilliance of “The People of Sand and Slag” lies in Bacigalupi’s restraint. Sympathy for the dog comes from the reader; Chen lacks the capacity for it, and he’s the most human of the three. The ending shows similar restraint in that Chen’s epiphany has all the force of a popgun cap. This lack of revelation may at first seem like a flat conclusion, but it underscores what Chen and the rest have become. “The People of Sand and Slag” gets some of its flash from its vision of technological adaptation, but it’s the author’s treatment of post-human psychology which really shines.

M. Rickert’s “Bread and Bombs” is a good deal less successful. This is not a post-apocalyptic tale so much as a vignette of a small town in wartime; it seems to take place during some future conflict, but could easily have been transplanted to America in the early years following World War II. The science fiction/speculative elements are almost nonexistent.

The story concerns the town’s fearful reaction to a refugee family who are, somehow, identified with the nation’s enemies. “Bread and Bombs” is narrated by a writer who, as a girl, took part in a deadly outburst of hatred against the newcomers. This could have been an effective cautionary tale of the infectiousness of prejudice, but Rickert strives to make it a story of lost innocence. How? By telling the reader just that, again and again. The heavy hand so absent from Paolo Bacigalupi’s story found its home here.

Next up is “How We Got In Town and Out Again” by Jonathan Lethem, author of the wonderful SF/Raymond Chandler pastiche, Gun, With Occasional Music. In “How We Got In Town and Out Again,” Gloria and Lewis are teenaged scavengers who roam from one fortress-town to the next. Everyone is hungry, and resources are scarce, so it takes guile to worm your way in past the town militia. To make it into town this time, Gloria and Lewis attach themselves to a wandering troop who stage virtual reality marathons for cash. Contestants wander from one VR scenario to the next, and stay in the competition provided they don’t fall asleep; spectators pay to watch the contestants’ adventures.

In the prefacing note, editor John Joseph Adams tells readers that this story evolved from Lethem’s dislike for VR technology, as well as research he had done into 1930s dance marathons. The information is unnecessary, as Lethem’s scorn is apparent (although directed more at the abuse of the technology, rather than the technology itself), and the dance marathon parallel would be immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (book or movie). Indeed, Lethem acknowledges his debt to the older work by giving the female lead the same name, Gloria, and making the prize money the same, $1000. The theme of man’s exploitation of his fellow man is present in both works, too.

But “How We Got In Town and Out Again” is more than a futuristic retelling of Horace McCoy’s novel. Lethem shows that regardless of the state of technology, human nature is foul, yet at least some people can remain hopeful even when they have lost nearly everything.

“Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels,” author George R. R. Martin’s 1973 post-nuclear holocaust story, combines elements of the post-apocalyptic and first contact subgenres. Half a millennium after the war, humans on Earth survive only in the deepest of tunnels, and their numbers are dwindling due to an infestation of predatory worms. Greel, a scout of the People, has fought his way up to the surface tunnels to find something that might help his civilization survive their struggle. Fast approaching are Cliffonetto and Von der Stadt, explorers from mankind’s surviving lunar civilization.

Early in the story, Cliffonetto and Von der Stadt’s conversations are reminiscent of a lot of Golden Age SF, when characters lectured one another for the benefit of the reader. Here, however, Martin’s intention isn’t exposition but irony. Cliffonetto tells Von der Stadt that extraterrestrial human life is stagnant:

“We’re not going anywhere. There’s so damn few changes, so little in the way of new ideas. We need fresh viewpoints, fresh genetic stock. We need the stimulation of contact with a foreign culture.”

But Greel’s People, genetically modified by five hundred years of radiation and intense evolutionary pressure, are not the handsomest specimens of humanity. When Cliffonetto finally sees this “fresh genetic stock,” his high-minded goals take on a tinny ring.

But the irony is even more complex, since Cliffonetto’s statements are correct. Greel, his People, and the extraterrestrial humans could indeed fulfill each other’s hopes. The contrast between these hopes and the dark, disastrous finish make for a memorable ending.

“Waiting for the Zephyr” by Tobias S. Buckell is less a tale of the apocalypse and more of one set around the apocalypse. “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” the saying goes, and even though Mara lives in a small town where everything is run by wind power after the economy of the United States collapsed when the crude oil business did, things are still remarkable similar. In a town where dust seeks to claim everything and a country where plastic is more valuable than gold because of the oils in it, Mara just wants to break free of her family and her small town life, believing that the large cities are vital to human survival. But she is surrounded by fearful, doubtful relatives who not only mourn her yen to leave, they’re willing to go to great lengths to prevent her escape. Apocalyptic stories often start at the end and finish with a bitter inevitability, but this one holds a thread of hope, of possibility that the drive and spirit which took us to great heights in the beginning might find a second life for us after the end.

Jack McDevitt’s “Never Despair” expertly captures the feel of standing at the feet of the ruins of an ancient culture. But instead of the step pyramids of the Aztecs or the pueblos of the Native Americans or even Stonehenge, the culture lost to time is ours. Among steel and glass towers tumbled to ruin, homes reduced to softened wood beams, and broken concrete, Chaka combs the inevitable finale of our cities and towns looking for Haven, the legendary place where men hid the memories of the past. “I am something left behind by the retreating tide,” says a man Chaka meets in a shelter, someone that readers will recognize more than Chaka does. It’s an apt rendering. The world’s confusion—as known by Chaka, its new inhabitant—versus how it’s perceived by a long forgotten program is handled smoothly and without clichè. “Never Despair” is also a story of a beginning more than an end.

“When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” by Cory Doctorow is a chilling novella depicting a chain reaction of not-quite natural disasters that hit while a crew of system administrators are doing emergency work on their servers. Thanks to the special filtering and environmental controls the servers require, the sysadmins survive, as does the Internet. But is it better to know what’s happening at the end of the world, or to remain ignorant? Imagine sitting in a clean room while horrific, real-life accounts of world’s end fill Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad; pictures begin to stream in on Flickr; and elections begin through Usenet as the world tries to continue. Faced with the prospect of being locked in with the servers indefinitely as everyone they’ve ever known falls prey to a bioweapon, the characters fall into a mute mindlessness or infantile tears. Compelling and terrifying, layered with techno-speak and a bit of geek humor, but still heartbreakingly raw.

Infused with a dose of fantasy, “The Last of the O-Forms” by James Van Pelt boasts a colorful menagerie of mutations. The creatures in Trevin’s vagabond zoo aren’t scientific oddities; they are the new wave of creatures born after a mutating plague struck the Earth. Offering only a glimpse of Van Pelt’s short story collection about the events of the plague, “The Last of the O-Forms” does not expand upon it, but the effect that ten years of strange mutant births has had on the Earth-dwelling humans is clear and, plainly put, despair laden.

Richard Kadrey’s “Still Life with Apocalypse” is short and unapologetic in its presentation of the apathy of those left behind after the events that end the world as we know it. Slice-of-life style, it discloses the events that changed everything and the daily life now typical for the survivors. But instead of instilling a passion and drive for continued survival, it impresses upon the reader a sense of tiredness, a willingness to pass quietly to the end.

“Artie’s Angels” by Catherine Wells is a moving tale of a future world where the Earth is not protected from the full force of the sun’s rays, and those people who can afford it gather in habitats that become overrun slums. In one of these habitats lives Artie, a visionary who seems to be able to bend the harsh rules of life around him and make extraordinary things happen. Told from the viewpoint of his sidekick, Morgan, “Artie’s Angels” is a story of hope, devastation, and legends.

“Judgment Passed” by Jerry Oltion is one of the few end stories that bring religion into the picture. Like other offerings in Wastelands, it’s more of a beginning than an end, a character-driven tale of a space crew that comes back to Earth to discover the planet empty of humans and four-year-old newspapers documenting Jesus’ return. The crew is split between treasuring what they’ve been left and trying to catch God’s attention, no matter what the cost, and rejoining the rest of their race, wherever they might be. Whimsical at times, nevertheless, “Judgment Passed” doesn’t resolve much of anything and reads like a well formed theological debate.

“Mute” by Gene Wolfe is surreal and silent, telling of a pair of children who are dropped off at their father’s house only to find it, and the world, empty. Much is left up to the reader to interpret—who can merely watch, like a captive voyeur.

In his introduction, Adams suggests that to varying degrees, these stories explores the “scientific, psychological, sociological and physiological changes” that inevitably occur in “the wake of an apocalypse.” In “Inertia” by Nancy Kress, the focus is primarily on how the process of adaptation to a disfiguring disease, and the subsequent internment of its victims from the rest of society, has affected psychological and sociological development. After years of trying to find a cure, the U.S. government has turned its back on the internment camps, leaving the inhabitants to fend for themselves. Narrated by Gram, a long-time internee, the story examines the impact of the possibility of hope on this abandoned and isolated community. This possibility comes in the shape of Tom McHab, a member of an underground group of medics whose research into the disease has been outlawed. Puzzled at the relative stability of society within the camps, McHab and his group have discovered a link between this stasis and the disease. As well as physically disfiguring those afflicted, the disease also causes a change to specific receptors in the brain, triggering a depressive, calming effect that mutes the urge to anger and violence. Ironically, all the indicators of apocalypse—unemployment, insurgency, rioting, the imposition of martial law, and the subsequent slide into anarchy—are played out outside the camps, among the ranks of the uninfected. Having come up with a treatment for the disfiguring aspects of the disease, McHab thinks that the way to resolve the societal breakdown in the outside world is to spread the disease among the wider population. How Gram and her family react to his proposal forms the heart of the story, as we discover that where one person might perceive hope, another may well see betrayal.

Elizabeth Bear’s “And the Deep Blue Sea” confronts us with a more familiar apocalyptic landscape, a post-nuclear, radiation-fried western U.S.A. The story has echoes not only of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley—as Adams acknowledges in his introduction—but also of George Miller’s second Mad Max movie, yet it has its own distinctive voice and is imbued with a dark humour that stems, in part, from its sly take on Faust. Harrie, a female motorcycle courier, is hired to transport a case containing fetal stem cell cultures from Phoenix to Sacramento, presumably on a mission of mercy. Not only does her route take her through the deadly ruins of Las Vegas and across the Mojave Desert, but she has only eight hours in which to complete the assignment. Where the story departs from the conventions of post-apocalypse messenger stories is in the nature of this particular courier: what is it that gives her the nerve to ride through such Hellish regions on her Kawasaki Concours? The answer to that particular question lies in her meeting, in Las Vegas, with the pin-stripe suited, fedora wearing Nick, a dapper gentleman who’s come to call in a debt she’s not ready to pay. Nick’s offer to renegotiate the debt presents Harrie with a dilemma, and it is her response to this which fuels the latter part of the narrative, as she continues her journey to Sacramento via Chernobyl, Bhopal, and other Hells on Earth. As with Kress’s tale, the climax is ambiguous, seemingly downbeat but, in its final gesture of defiance, offering a glimmer of hope.

Violence is the form of communication humans resort to when more effective means break down. Prompted by her witnessing a fight break out on a bus, Octavia E. Butler’s “Speech Sounds”—which, shamefully, is my first encounter with her fiction—has the failure to communicate as the precursor to apocalypse. In this simple, understated story, Butler posits a United States that has succumbed to an illness which has robbed most people of the power to speak or to read and write. Communication takes place through gesture and body language, and thus has been reduced to focusing on people’s most basic needs—food, shelter, companionship, sex. In this milieu, society’s infrastructures have collapsed, with most people fending for themselves, surviving through the barter of services and skills, or through brute force. Rye, a former history professor and writer has lost the power of literacy, but—though she hides the fact—can still speak. Traveling by bus from LA to Pasadena, she abandons her journey after violence erupts and is aided by a man who appears to be a cop, though she cannot understand why someone would still function in that role. They form a tentative alliance based on mutual need, but their relationship, prompted by circumstances, swiftly becomes more intimate. The simple, human need to be wanted, desired, and touched is beautifully sketched by Butler, as is the sense of affirmation, of new hope that such meaningful contact can bring. Two or three passages in the story are rendered with such astonishing conviction that the reader finds him or herself feeling what Rye feels—her brief but deep and bitter hatred for the man when she discovers that he possesses the literacy she has lost; the excitement of a first sexual encounter in three or four years, signaled in her nervous giggling, and the eagerness with which she slips a condom on her lover, surprising him; and, at the end of the story, the manner in which she reaches out, after almost walking away, to two young children, deciding, despite her own grief, to protect them. Here, speech signals a renewal of meaningful communication, a recognition that while we can still talk, there is still hope.

In “Killers,” Carol Emshwiller visits upon American shores the kind of insurgency and internal warfare that has torn apart Iraqi society. Our unnamed narrator speaks to us in a simple, matter-of-fact tone that signals the fatalism that seems a natural consequence of fourteen years of terror. The inhabitants of the small town where she lives have uprooted themselves and relocated their community higher up a mountain so as to be nearer the water they need to sustain themselves. The new town that looks down the valley on the old one, where “the Vons and Kmart are big looted barns,” is mostly a town of women. Their menfolk are mostly dead or still caught up in the internecine atrocities that continue to plague the western U.S.A. The community survives through barter and tries to avoid the crazies—veterans of the war—who inhabit the woods further up the mountain and occasionally sneak into the village to steal. In a grim echo of the senseless slaughter of those Iraqis perceived as colluding with the Americans, their bodies dumped in public places as a warning, the bodies of a number of crazies have started to appear on the edge of the village, each one shot in the back with ornately carved crossbow darts. The narrator fears it might be her brother and becomes convinced of this when she spies an intruder lurking around outside her house. Emshwiller skillfully conveys her character’s complex and contradictory emotions when she eventually discovers the man unconscious in her room; the mix of fear, bravado, and desire tell us all we need to know about how she, and her community, have dealt with the prolonged absence of men. Despite realizing that he is the one who has been slaughtering the other crazies, she willingly helps him, seemingly playing out her traditional feminine role as nurturer and caregiver, a role that seems not to have been abraded by the savagery of war. But Emshwiller subverts this comforting notion by confronting us with an abrupt and brutal ending, all the more shocking for its emotional honesty and simple pragmatism.

Neal Barrett, Jr.’s “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus” has some inventive and comic touches—a machine gun toting marsupial; poker playing dogs; a murderous band of sex-starved, fuel-hungry life insurance salesmen; and a traveling whore offering three familiar, fantasy role-play figures—but the scenario is overly familiar, calling to mind a number of desert set post-apocalypse stories and films, in particular Harlan Ellison’s “A Boy and His Dog,” and the latter two Mad Max films. While the story cracks swiftly along, and Barrett does a good line in sardonic humor—the budding relationship between Ginny and Moro, the repairman hired to fix a piece of tech vital to her enterprise, is neatly rendered—it is also lacking in real tension and surprise. Del, Ginny’s android barker, is a slightly more ballsy cousin of CP30, while the potentially interesting Possum Dark, who rides shotgun for the flying circus, is sadly underdeveloped. The climax is predictable, with Moro turning up to save the day and, just in case we didn’t see it earlier, to provide a too pat explanation for how he knew to be there.

There’s a wry, fatalistic charm to Dale Bailey’s “The End of the World as We Know It,” an unusual and highly self-conscious tale of the apocalypse. It begins with a brief description of the Bubonic plague, and interspersed throughout the subsequent narrative are a number of digressions reflecting on the conventions of the “end-of’the-world” story to which, as Bailey observes, his protagonist fails to conform. Alongside these dissections of the mechanics of the sub-genre, Bailey also cites a number of real life apocalypses—Pompeii, Krakatoa, 9/11, the extinction event that did in the dinosaurs, the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda. One event he mentions—the death of Elvis Presley—hints at the real point of the story, which is that for both victims and survivors, the apocalypse is largely a personal event.

Wyndham—the choice of name is deliberate, confirmed by a later reference to a favorite end of the world scenario being “carnivorous plants”—is a UPS driver who wakes up one morning to find his wife and daughter dead. Seeking help, he soon discovers that everyone else has met the same fate and, in the absence of any communication from elsewhere, assumes that some catastrophe has wiped everyone out. Rather than acting out one of the familiar post-apocalypse roles mentioned by Bailey, or seeking answers as to the nature of the apocalyptic event, Wyndham retreats into himself. He doesn’t arm himself or stock up on food; he doesn’t acquire a whole new set of survival skills or build himself a well-fortified stockade; nor does he roam the country in a customized 4×4 looking for other survivors. He merely moves into a house after carting away the bodies of its former inhabitants and stocks up on sufficient alcohol to nullify his pain. That is all Wyndham can do—get drunk, watch the sky, accept the fact that everything is over. For the truth is, what has happened to everyone else matters less than the end of his own world, the personal apocalypse represented by the loss of his family. Even the appearance, near the end of the story, of another survivor—a young, attractive woman—does not, as the narrator explicitly warns us, signal hope or renewal. The billions of dead all had names; all are irreplaceable. Bailey lays bare the conventions of the apocalypse story not in order to mock or denigrate it, but to explore what it is about the form that fascinates us. And in doing so, not only does he identify the personal nature of our fascination, but he also gives us a memorable and poignant addition to the genre.

The relevance of culture and its artifacts to post-apocalypse survival is explored in David Grigg’s “A Song Before Sunset.” This is an interesting theme, one that has been explored to powerful effect in works as different as Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Unfortunately Grigg’s story is oddly unengaging and the problem lies mainly in his protagonist, Parnell, once a famous concert pianist. Having survived whatever catastrophe has caused the breakdown of society, Parnell has struggled to adjust to the brutal reality of life. Viewed as an eccentric by those he barters with, the chance finding of a sledgehammer allows him to force his way into an abandoned concert hall where he discovers a grand piano. As he barters for the tools he needs to retune the instrument, hordes of Vandalmen roam the country, targeting cultural emporia like libraries and art galleries. Determined to restore the piano to its former glory, Parnell ignores the imminent danger, but instead of a sense of excitement or anticipation, the mood of the story remains flat and tensionless. Grigg fails to really convey the emotional intensity of Parnell’s singular task, and even the climax of the story, where he plays a sequence of pieces by Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin to an empty auditorium, comes across as mundane. The story’s conclusion is also problematic: confronted by a Vandalmen after he stops playing, Parnell is told that art he has valued so highly is to blame for the savagery of life in the post-apocalyptic world. In that his response to the Vandalman’s threat is itself savage, there’s a germ of truth here, but one has only to think of the 15,000-year-old cave paintings at Lascaux to know that a harsh, brutal existence does not in itself negate the compulsion to create art.

John Langan’s “Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers” is, in the author’s own view, a response to and comment on Dale Bailey’s story, a riposte to Wyndham’s quiet acceptance of his fate. While Bailey’s narrator comments on the different conventions of the post-apocalypse scenario while confronting his protagonist with none of them—apart, of course, from loneliness—Langan shows no such restraint. He digs inside the end of the world cupboard and throws nearly everything he finds at his protagonists, Jackie—8 months pregnant— and Wayne, a Batman obsessive who’s developed a sideline in survivalist skills. They appear to be the only two human survivors of a flesh-melting plague (How? Why?—don’t ask, it doesn’t matter), but it seems their troubles have only just started. That’s because they are being hunted by a pack of what seem to be mutant hyenas who smash into Jackie’s house, chomp up her boyfriend, Glenn, while she manages to escape with Wayne. The story comes at you hard and fast, rather like one of the pack, and the frenetic pace never lets up, even in the crucial flashback scenes and one dream sequence which manages to allude to both Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids. In an almost casual attempt at disrupting the formal conventions of narrative, Langan uses lines of bold print, separated by passages of regular font, to form a couple of complete sentence that, stripped to the bone like the victims of the flesh-melting virus, more or less tell the tale in its entirety. The regular passages flesh out the story, giving us incident, action, feeling, and reflection, sketching vividly the characters of Jackie and Wayne. Whether or not one buys the notion of the bold print serving as a visual metaphor for the manner in which such narratives rely on familiar frameworks, or views the paragraphless pages of regular text as denoting the relentless pace and overwhelming odds stacked against the protagonists, doesn’t at all detract from the excitement and satisfaction of what is, in the end, rather a traditional end of the world tale.

Publisher: Night Shade Books (Jan. 2008)
Price: $10.85
Trade paperback: 352 pages
ISBN: 1597801058

[“The End of the Whole Mess” by Stephen King through “Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels” by George R. R. Martin reviewed by Douglas Hoffman, “Waiting for the Zephyr” by Tobias S. Buckell through “Mute” by Gene Wolfe reviewed by Michele Lee, and “Inertia” by Nancy Kress through “Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers” by John Langan reviewed by Mike O’Driscoll.]