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danoreading's review against another edition
4.0
Favorites were:
Mute by Gene Wolfe
Inertia by Nancy Kress
The End of the World as We Know It by Dale Bailey
The End of the Whole Mess by Stephen King
Mute by Gene Wolfe
Inertia by Nancy Kress
The End of the World as We Know It by Dale Bailey
The End of the Whole Mess by Stephen King
meginsanity's review against another edition
3.0
So… I love post-apocalyptic fiction. I mean, I love it. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank changed my life in high school. Unfortunately many of the stories in this collection just fell flat for me. I really wanted to enjoy them more than I did.
Many of these stories were exactly the type I like, with protagonists with strong personalities, plausible or unexplained end-of-the-world scenarios, and a focus on the realities of day-to-day life after an apocalypse. My favorites were "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" (Cory Doctorow), "Speech Sounds" (Octavia Butler), "The End of the Whole Mess" (Stephen King), and "Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels" (George R.R. Martin). Unfortunately, many of the others I felt fell flat, had weak introductions or just seemed reactionary. I got frustrated when several stories in a row at times just didn't grab me. Maybe it is because post-apocalyptic fiction tends to often be political - you have to have a cause, and often those causes reflect our current fears and political climates. They can easily cross the line into hyperbole or seem hysterical.
John Joseph Adams is a really good collector of short stories within a genre. I just recently finished his zombies anthology and the vampires one is waiting for me at home. The nice thing about anthologies is that even if some or most of the stories don't stack up you always find a few gems. So overall, I am happy I read this one.
Many of these stories were exactly the type I like, with protagonists with strong personalities, plausible or unexplained end-of-the-world scenarios, and a focus on the realities of day-to-day life after an apocalypse. My favorites were "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" (Cory Doctorow), "Speech Sounds" (Octavia Butler), "The End of the Whole Mess" (Stephen King), and "Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels" (George R.R. Martin). Unfortunately, many of the others I felt fell flat, had weak introductions or just seemed reactionary. I got frustrated when several stories in a row at times just didn't grab me. Maybe it is because post-apocalyptic fiction tends to often be political - you have to have a cause, and often those causes reflect our current fears and political climates. They can easily cross the line into hyperbole or seem hysterical.
John Joseph Adams is a really good collector of short stories within a genre. I just recently finished his zombies anthology and the vampires one is waiting for me at home. The nice thing about anthologies is that even if some or most of the stories don't stack up you always find a few gems. So overall, I am happy I read this one.
mayhap's review against another edition
3.0
The strength of this collection is its variety–you are virtually guaranteed to find at least one story that gives you a whole new perspective on what it means to be at the end and at least one story that you hate so much that you wish the apocalypse would come early for it.
littlepepperguy's review against another edition
3.0
Giving it a 3 star because I really fucked with Butlers short story. But I had to skip around a lot because golly you give men a apocalypses prompt and it goes straight to macho man army fantasy BOOOORRRRINNG.
merrieberrie's review against another edition
3.0
This was a mixed bag for me. There were some really excellent stories, and some that just did not do it for me.
reginas_books's review against another edition
4.0
I picked this up because I love dystopian stories, but also because I love Orson Scott Card. I was not disappointed by either him or any of the other writers in this anthology. There are some that may pass as mediocre, but the large majority of this book is just excellently written.
lesserjoke's review against another edition
3.0
This 2008 anthology collects 22 short stories about life after various apocalyptic scenarios, all but one of which had been previously published elsewhere (although Stephen King's plague journal "The End of the Whole Mess" was the only entry I'd read before). The sole new contribution turns out to be one of my favorites: "Judgment Passed" by Jerry Oltion, in which a group of astronauts return to earth only to discover that biblical Armageddon has come and gone in the time they've been away, and all other humans are now presumably in either heaven or hell. Another highlight for me -- and a reminder that I still need to track down the original collection it's drawn from -- is "Speech Sounds" by Octavia E. Butler, about an unraveling society where most people have lost the ability to either form or comprehend language.
As those selections demonstrate, the exact doomsday premises vary quite a bit from author to author, which is a good approach for a work like this. There's also a range of tones here; although it's easy to see this genre as exclusively a subset of horror, I tend to prefer the exercises that find some dawning hope amid the bleakness, rather than just humanity's futile last gasps.
Overall, though, like many other anthologies, it's a mixed lot quality-wise. I rated every individual title as I read through them, and the mean and mode ratings both came out to 3-out-of-5 stars for me. That's a score that indicates I like a particular piece more than I dislike it but have not really been blown away, which is true of this book as a whole as well. I'd still recommend it for fans of this sort of fiction, but it's not uniformly strong across its contents.
[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, incest, rape, and gore.]
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As those selections demonstrate, the exact doomsday premises vary quite a bit from author to author, which is a good approach for a work like this. There's also a range of tones here; although it's easy to see this genre as exclusively a subset of horror, I tend to prefer the exercises that find some dawning hope amid the bleakness, rather than just humanity's futile last gasps.
Overall, though, like many other anthologies, it's a mixed lot quality-wise. I rated every individual title as I read through them, and the mean and mode ratings both came out to 3-out-of-5 stars for me. That's a score that indicates I like a particular piece more than I dislike it but have not really been blown away, which is true of this book as a whole as well. I'd still recommend it for fans of this sort of fiction, but it's not uniformly strong across its contents.
[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, incest, rape, and gore.]
Like this review?
--Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
--Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
--Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
--Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog
silenttardis's review against another edition
3.0
uhmmm i started john joseph adams collections by another collection , and i felt a bit disapointed by this collection, there were a couple of stories that i really enjoyed but most of them they were ok, not great, and thats fine i guess, i will listen to another collection next and hopefully i will enjoy way more ^__^ , but maybe this book will be your favorite, just it wasnt mine.
mbcovarrubias's review against another edition
3.0
There were some stories that were very interesting, there were some that were not so much. It was overall a decent collection, though I felt like they could have been curated better.
searobin's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
hopeful
reflective
tense
medium-paced
3.5
I really enjoyed:
- The End of the Whole Mess - Stephen King
- Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels - George R.R. Martin
- When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth - Cory Doctorow
- Inertia - Nancy Kress
- And the Deep Blue Sea - Elizabeth Bear
- Speech Sounds - Octavia E. Butler