mostly harmless books

What do you do if you have to spend 27 hours on a train. Stare out the window; talk to people; read; listen to music. Staring gets boring after a while, I liked the sound of the train better than any music, and the woman in my compartment was nice, but only knew Russian and a couple of words in Romanian and English. So I read.

I had been looking forward to Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse for about a year, so I had really high hopes. Too high, apparently. No, it’s not a bad anthology by all means, but it didn’t blow me away either.

Stephen King - The End of the Whole Mess. This was the only story in the anthology I had already read and still remembered, and, while I really like the way King pulled it off (a guy who’s quickly losing his faculties is writing an account of how that happened), the story itself isn’t that exciting.

Orson Scott Card - Salvage. This is the other story I had already read, but in this case I didn’t remember anything except that it involved Mormons. It was included in Card’s Folk of the Fringe, which is a collection of 4 short stories concerning (as far as I can remember) post-apocalyptic life in Utah. Salvage is about living in the future and the past, about starting over. It takes place quite a while after a catastrophic event, so people have already started getting on with their lives, except for a young man who dreams of buried treasure. The end was kind of dissapointing, but fitting. Not my favorite from Folk of the Fringe, however (and now, reading the summaries, it looks like the story I seemed to remember wasn’t from this collection… hmmm.)

Paolo Bacigalupi - The People of Sand and Slag. In some distant future, genetically-modified humans can feed on anything and live in extremely tough conditions. And then they find a real dog. The idea of “robot” meeting life isn’t new, but Bacigalupi makes it sound interesting. How do you define a human? When your physical part is so different from what “human” used to be, can you be expected to still have the same morals?

M. Rickert - Bread and Bombs. This is basically a story about points of view and (in)tolerance. An immigrant family moves into town. Children are warned not to talk to them. But in the end you don’t know who should beware of who. The fact that it is based on a real news report about the Afghanistan war makes you think…

Jonathan Lethem - How We Got in Town and Out Again. This one was a bit too cyberpunkish for me. Virtual reality meets teens trying to survive for the entertainment of others. Interesting, but not exactly my cup of tea.

George R. R. Martin - Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels. One of my favorites in this anthology, hands down. When he’s not giving us hundreds of pages of epic fantasy, Martin can write damn good short stories. After a catastrophe that destroys the Earth, the only survivors are the people in underground bunkers. But the Moon colony is still there and starts looking for signs of life, many years after the catastrophe. I love stories which tell the same thing from different points of view; this one uses a degenerated(?) Earthling and a group of “normal” humans from the Moon colony. Sort of like interspecies communication - except there are no two species, just humans that evolved differently. One of my favorites in the anthology; great atmosphere, great idea, great storytelling, great characters (or should I say points of view, since the characters aren’t very fleshed out).

Tobias S. Buckell - Waiting for the Zephyr. The Zephyr is a wind-powered ship sailing along the desert, in a future with no fossil fuel. A young girl decides to leave her former life and become one of the Zephyr’s crew. And that’s it, the story is only 7 pages long. This could make a very good premise for a novel, the idea is very intriguing. But in short story form it looks unfinished.

[To be continued...]

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