judetheunbeliever's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
5.0
amgeever's review against another edition
5.0
This anthology is excellent. No two apocalypses are the same, showcasing the creativity of the authors. There was only one story I could not get into, the rest sucked me in almost from the first sentence. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys post-apocalyptic fiction.
eyelit's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
3.75
amysreading_nook's review against another edition
3.0
“My point being: we’re almost certainly and in all conceivable ways fucked six ways to Sunday”.
SYNOPSIS:
The brilliant new post-apocalyptic collection by master anthologist John Joseph Adams, for the first time including new stories by the edgiest modern writers.
New short fiction by many of the edgiest modern authors, offering tales of life after the apocalyptic event or events that end society as we know it today. In addition to a selection of newly reprinted works, WASTELANDS 3 will feature original, never-before-published stories by a group of writers hand-picked by master editor John Joseph Adams. Original stories by Veronica Roth, Hugh Howet, Elizabeth Bear, Seanan McGuire, Tananarive Due, Wendy N. Wagner and many more. Reprints will include works by Carmen Maria Machado, Charlie Jane Anders, Paolo Bacigalupi, Ken Liu and Cat Valente amongst others.
REVIEW:
Firstly I would like to thank Titan Books and John Joseph Adams for sending me a finished copy of this book. Although the book was sent to me for the purpose of reviewing, all the opinions and views discussed are entirely my own and not influenced by being sent a copy of this book.
I was really intrigued by the premise of this book; I haven’t read many books before that have been contributed to by a range of authors, and I thought the dystopian genre was really intriguing. What this book explores is potential post-apocalyptic disasters; whether it’s via nuclear war, a pandemic, climate change, or cosmological disaster, Adams allows the authors to explore their view on how the survivors move past this and how the world comes back together.
This book is a bit of a mixed bag for me. I really enjoyed some of the short stories, whereas others just dragged on for me. I definitely found towards the end of the book that I was getting a bit bored and just found that one bleak short story after another was a bit too much for me. I do like the really different perspectives and explorations that each author explored in their short story, and I appreciate that no story was the same. Each author took an individual approach to the topic and it did end up with a really wide range of stories.
The majority of these stories are bleak. They are about a hopeless world trying to move on from disaster, and I think this is part of the issue. When you’re reading a 500+ page novel where story after story is depressing, it gets hard to continue to read it. That said, there are some uplifting moments in the story, and it shows that there will always be a light in the darkness.
I was going to breakdown each story but there’s just so many and I’m not sure I really remember enough about each one, so I’m going to talk about the ones that stood out to me the most.
I think one of my favourite stories of this book was actually the first story by Elizabeth Bear titled “Bullet Point“. This short story follows Isabella who believes that she is the last human having not come across anyone else. Throughout this chapter Bear bullet points things that don’t exist anymore, amongst the collection are; fresh baked cookies, taxes, speeding tickets, assholes, dating websites, and the Tour de France. I really really enjoyed this chapter, I thought the character of Isabella managed to be really fleshed out in such a short space of time, and I also liked the challenges that she came up against in this chapter. I actually don’t want to say too much about this chapter so i’m going to leave it there, but it was really good.
Chapter 5 by Adam-Troy Castor, titled “The Last to Matter” was honestly a really bizarre chapter and i’m still not sure what to think about this. This chapter definitely had quite a fantasy feel to it but I wasn’t a massive fan of it. It just didn’t seem to go anywhere for me, and didn’t really hook me in. The reason I felt the need to comment on this chapter was because there is a particular line that has scarred me forever – “he met a woman who decided to spend her years giving birth. She sat naked, her back against a wall, her legs splayed to facilitate the escape of her offspring, a glistening fetal something who while Kayn watched several times squirmed its way free of her birth canal, then climbed up her body to force its way back into her open mouth”. The paragraph goes onto explain how the MC Kayn has conversations with this offspring and at this point I may have checked out of this story, I was just disturbed.
Chapter 6 by Jonathan Maberry and Chapter 7 by Carrie Vaughn, titled “Not this War, Not this World” and “Where would you be now” respectively are also both really good chapters. They are both very different to one another and have really different tones, but both explore how people might act and behave once the world has gone to hell. Chapter 6 is actually a short sequel to Maberry’s story Dead of Night and Fall of Night, both of which I am now intrigued to read.
Chapter 13 by Ken Liu titled “The Plague” is only four pages long but is so powerful; no matter how the world ends there will always be someone there to tell you that you are surviving wrong “he sees my happiness as misery, my thoughtfulness as depression, my wishes as delusion. It is funny how a man can see only what he wants to see. He wants to make me the same as him, because he thinks he’s better“.
And finally chapter 28 by Corinne Duyvis titled “And the rest of us wait“. Although this is arguably a bleak story I think it is the most uplifting of all the story; it shows that there is a little light in the darkness, and even though everything is falling about you’ve got to hold tight to what bit of humanity and life that you can.
There are a couple of these stories that I would easily rate five stars and have intrigued me to want to check out the authors, but others I just wasn’t interested in. So overall I would rate the whole collection three stars. I do really like the concept of this and would be intrigued to read more similar anthologies like this.
This book is due to be published on June 4th; if you enjoyed post-apocalyptic dystopian novels I would recommend you giving this a browse.
SYNOPSIS:
The brilliant new post-apocalyptic collection by master anthologist John Joseph Adams, for the first time including new stories by the edgiest modern writers.
New short fiction by many of the edgiest modern authors, offering tales of life after the apocalyptic event or events that end society as we know it today. In addition to a selection of newly reprinted works, WASTELANDS 3 will feature original, never-before-published stories by a group of writers hand-picked by master editor John Joseph Adams. Original stories by Veronica Roth, Hugh Howet, Elizabeth Bear, Seanan McGuire, Tananarive Due, Wendy N. Wagner and many more. Reprints will include works by Carmen Maria Machado, Charlie Jane Anders, Paolo Bacigalupi, Ken Liu and Cat Valente amongst others.
REVIEW:
Firstly I would like to thank Titan Books and John Joseph Adams for sending me a finished copy of this book. Although the book was sent to me for the purpose of reviewing, all the opinions and views discussed are entirely my own and not influenced by being sent a copy of this book.
I was really intrigued by the premise of this book; I haven’t read many books before that have been contributed to by a range of authors, and I thought the dystopian genre was really intriguing. What this book explores is potential post-apocalyptic disasters; whether it’s via nuclear war, a pandemic, climate change, or cosmological disaster, Adams allows the authors to explore their view on how the survivors move past this and how the world comes back together.
This book is a bit of a mixed bag for me. I really enjoyed some of the short stories, whereas others just dragged on for me. I definitely found towards the end of the book that I was getting a bit bored and just found that one bleak short story after another was a bit too much for me. I do like the really different perspectives and explorations that each author explored in their short story, and I appreciate that no story was the same. Each author took an individual approach to the topic and it did end up with a really wide range of stories.
The majority of these stories are bleak. They are about a hopeless world trying to move on from disaster, and I think this is part of the issue. When you’re reading a 500+ page novel where story after story is depressing, it gets hard to continue to read it. That said, there are some uplifting moments in the story, and it shows that there will always be a light in the darkness.
I was going to breakdown each story but there’s just so many and I’m not sure I really remember enough about each one, so I’m going to talk about the ones that stood out to me the most.
I think one of my favourite stories of this book was actually the first story by Elizabeth Bear titled “Bullet Point“. This short story follows Isabella who believes that she is the last human having not come across anyone else. Throughout this chapter Bear bullet points things that don’t exist anymore, amongst the collection are; fresh baked cookies, taxes, speeding tickets, assholes, dating websites, and the Tour de France. I really really enjoyed this chapter, I thought the character of Isabella managed to be really fleshed out in such a short space of time, and I also liked the challenges that she came up against in this chapter. I actually don’t want to say too much about this chapter so i’m going to leave it there, but it was really good.
Chapter 5 by Adam-Troy Castor, titled “The Last to Matter” was honestly a really bizarre chapter and i’m still not sure what to think about this. This chapter definitely had quite a fantasy feel to it but I wasn’t a massive fan of it. It just didn’t seem to go anywhere for me, and didn’t really hook me in. The reason I felt the need to comment on this chapter was because there is a particular line that has scarred me forever – “he met a woman who decided to spend her years giving birth. She sat naked, her back against a wall, her legs splayed to facilitate the escape of her offspring, a glistening fetal something who while Kayn watched several times squirmed its way free of her birth canal, then climbed up her body to force its way back into her open mouth”. The paragraph goes onto explain how the MC Kayn has conversations with this offspring and at this point I may have checked out of this story, I was just disturbed.
Chapter 6 by Jonathan Maberry and Chapter 7 by Carrie Vaughn, titled “Not this War, Not this World” and “Where would you be now” respectively are also both really good chapters. They are both very different to one another and have really different tones, but both explore how people might act and behave once the world has gone to hell. Chapter 6 is actually a short sequel to Maberry’s story Dead of Night and Fall of Night, both of which I am now intrigued to read.
Chapter 13 by Ken Liu titled “The Plague” is only four pages long but is so powerful; no matter how the world ends there will always be someone there to tell you that you are surviving wrong “he sees my happiness as misery, my thoughtfulness as depression, my wishes as delusion. It is funny how a man can see only what he wants to see. He wants to make me the same as him, because he thinks he’s better“.
And finally chapter 28 by Corinne Duyvis titled “And the rest of us wait“. Although this is arguably a bleak story I think it is the most uplifting of all the story; it shows that there is a little light in the darkness, and even though everything is falling about you’ve got to hold tight to what bit of humanity and life that you can.
There are a couple of these stories that I would easily rate five stars and have intrigued me to want to check out the authors, but others I just wasn’t interested in. So overall I would rate the whole collection three stars. I do really like the concept of this and would be intrigued to read more similar anthologies like this.
This book is due to be published on June 4th; if you enjoyed post-apocalyptic dystopian novels I would recommend you giving this a browse.
iamltr's review against another edition
4.0
I bought this book because of the fact I had not read stories by some of these writers and wanted to see if I would like them. The good news is I have bought books by these new to me people so now I have even titles on my tbr pile.
Some of these stories were really good, like the Richard Kadrey, Seanan McGuire, and Scott Sigler and then there were the not so good ones which made me take so long in finishing this book.
All in all, this book was good and I plan on getting the first 2 editions.
Some of these stories were really good, like the Richard Kadrey, Seanan McGuire, and Scott Sigler and then there were the not so good ones which made me take so long in finishing this book.
All in all, this book was good and I plan on getting the first 2 editions.
jessgeekmom's review against another edition
4.0
Pretty good collection, I would have liked more new stories, there were a number I had already read elsewhere.
kethryveris's review
adventurous
emotional
funny
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
5.0