mostly harmless books

[Part 1]
[Part 2]

Nancy Kress - Inertia. Beggars in Spain (the short story) was one of my first SF reads and; this year, when I read Beggars and Choosers, I wasn’t expecting much, but I loved it. Inertia… not so much. I’ve seen reviewers name this as their favorite and I can see why: original idea, moral dilemmas… But something was missing for me, I can’t put my finger on it. I didn’t care about the characters or their fate, and the dilemma wasn’t interesting enough to make up for it.

Elizabeth Bear - And the Deep Blue Sea. “Reminiscent - without being derivative - of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley“ would have been enough to convince me to read it. And the editor is right: the basics are the same - messenger has to deliver something across a devastated land -, but the layout is different. Hell Tanner meets Faust, maybe. The most important clue about the story is actually a missing word - easy to get for native English speakers, a bit more difficult for non-natives (I had to google): the full phrase is “devil and the deep blue sea”.

Octavia E. Butler - Speech Sounds. Another favorite of mine, and another author I’ve been hearing about but never got to read. The story won the Hugo the year I was born… yet it’s not dated at all. Apocalyptic scenario: an illness (or maybe a virus, or pollution, or something else) kills most of the population and leaves most of the others with stroke-like problems: paralysis, loss of ability to speak and understand speech, loss of ability to read and write. Rye carries a pin in the shape of a stalk of wheat, because that’s as close as she can get to something signifying her name; the man she meets carries a piece of black rock, so he becomes Obsidian. One of them can read and write, the other can speak, but they have both lost the ability that mattered more to them. The story is both sad and hopeful. I’m glad it ends with hope, and I really have to get my hands on more Butler.

Carol Emshwiller - Killers. A story about terrorists. And jealousy. What do you do when most men are dead, gone or crazy and roaming the mountains, and one of them shows up at your doorstep? He is probably one of the enemies, but do you kill him or try to build a life with him? Well… in a way, both.

Neal Barrett, Jr. - Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus. Another story about a traveling show - this time it doesn’t offer mutants, but sexual pleasure, in exchange for the most valuable currency: gas. Even though Ginny is a real live woman, not a bot, not everything is as 100% genuine. Then shooting ensues. Nothing special, really, but I am still trying to figure out if it’s a Monty Python reference or not.

Dale Bailey - The End of the World as We Know It. A fun end of the world story, if there can be such thing, and yet another favorite for me. Wyndham has survived the apocalypse and is telling his story. The extremely cool part: he theorizes about end of the world stories, and his deadpan humor is great. Being able to joke when everyone else is dead is something. The story itself isn’t that important, it’s the way it’s told. The apocalyptic theory alternates with flashbacks of the actual end and Wyndham’s current life as the supposed only man alive, and Bailey makes this work perfectly.

Most of the good quotes are too long, but here’s one of the best bits: “Here’s one of my favorite end-of-the-world scenarios, by the way: Carnivorous plants.” (as in The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham; I feel so smart for getting this.)

David Grigg - A Song before Sunset. What will happen to art after the apocalypse? Sad but true: art is not useful in an immediate and tangible way. This is a story about an artist who does not forget what he is, even while scavenging to stay alive. It’s a sad story, but at least he gets his wish and maybe that’s most important.

John Langan - Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers. Jackie and Wayne are followed by the Pack and keep encountering cars filled with purple flowers. We never find out what the Pack is or where the flowers came from (which is a little annoying). The story reminded me a lot of King’s The Stand: pregnant young girl has to leave home with some guy because her boyfriend is killed off by the respective end-of-the-world scenario; the style, however, is different. Stylistically, the most noticeable characteristic is the division of the story by certain parts of sentences; if read together, they make up an extremely compressed summary, but they also fit in perfectly if read normally, in context.

And one of the best parts of the book is the last section: other recommended post-apocalyptic fiction. I am glad to see I’ve read quite a lot of them, but there’s even more new things to look forward to!

You might also be interested in:

• The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy
• A couple of podcasts
• Same cover, more stories
• Wastelands - part 1
• Back from Ukraine