Hugh Howey

John Joseph Adams

Charlie Jane Anders

Jack McDevitt

Famine. Death. War. Pestilence. These are the harbingers of the biblical apocalypse, of the End of the World. In science fiction, the end is triggered by less figurative means: nuclear holocaust, biological warfare/pandemic, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm. But before any catastrophe, there are people who see it coming. During, there are heroes who fight against it. And after, there are the survivors who persevere and try to rebuild. THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH will tell their stories. Edited by acclaimed anthologist John Joseph Adams and bestselling author Hugh Howey, THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH is a series of three anthologies of apocalyptic fiction. THE END IS NIGH focuses on life before the apocalypse. THE END IS NOW turns its attention to life during the apocalypse. And THE END HAS COME focuses on life after the apocalypse. THE END IS NIGH features all-new, never-before-published works by Hugh Howey, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jamie Ford, Seanan McGuire, Tananarive Due, Jonathan Maberry, Scott Sigler, Robin Wasserman, Nancy Kress, Charlie Jane Anders, Ken Liu, and many others.

The End Is Nigh

Bryan Alexander

Why does the end of the world appeal to us so strongly? It may be the sheer aesthetic jolt of wiping away civilization, or the schadenfreude of witnessing the suffering and defeat of those you despise (cf Tertullian). There's a Robinson Crusoe adventure aspect, too, where we envision how we'd fare in extreme circumstances. And the politics of seeing a hated order collapse.

The The End Is Nigh anthology takes us up to that spectacular point, then pauses. Stories begin in our world or a related one, then push on to the brink. This is intentional, since Adams' collection is the first of three such books, The Apocalypse Triptych. The second one will uncover the world's end, while the third sends postcards from the aftermath.

Overall the collection successfully provides what it promises. Each story imagines a different catastrophe, offering a nice variety of perspectives, themes, problems, and characters. Most fall into the hybrid disaster-sf genre, although several push the boundaries into horror, satire, and even comedy. They kill the world through a variety of methods: asteroid, nuclear missiles, disease, hacking, alien invasion, and (thankfully, only once) zombies.

Naturally, some of the stories are more effective than others:

"Enjoy the Moment" (Jack McDevitt) (nicely podcasted by Escape Pod) is a hard science/sociology of science miniature about a scientist desperate to make her mark, and succeeding all too well. 

"The Balm and the Wound" (Robin Wasserman) bases itself on the experience of an end-of-the-world con artist, and works well both as satire and character journey. The guy spends his life predicting sham apocalypses, and for once gets it right.

"Removal Order" (Tananarive Due) is one of the most affecting stories, following a young woman as she tried to simultaneously cope with a family member's impending death by cancer and the megadeath by plague growing around her. That micro-macro balance worked very well. “Dancing with Death in the Land of Nod” (Will McIntosh) succeeds along similar lines, paralleling a young man's struggle to help his father die with dignity with the rapid onslaught of a plague. Both of these stories confront physical disgust and emotional despair convincingly.

“Spores” (Seanan McGuire) has a strong horror flavor, courtesy of William Hope Hodgson. A vicious mold starts to end civilization, seen from the point of view of a medical worker and her family. Touches of body horror are strong here.

“Pretty Soon the Four Horsemen are Going to Come Riding Through” (Nancy Kress) gives us the point of view of a poor woman - unusual in modern American fiction, and welcome. In dealing with her two childrens' issues at school, she stumbles upon a transformation just starting to alter humanity.

By the end of The End I confess to becoming jaded. My emotional engagement with characters had dropped, and I became more of a catastrophe connoisseur, calmly assessing each doom's merits and formal characteristics. Other reviewers (for example) had the opposite experience of being overwhelmed by cumulative grief. Perhaps my graduate research into British Romantic stories of doom has jaded me, or living with a doomsday prepper wife has accustomed me to thoughts of collapse, or my current politics are too grim, or I'm simply warped (probably all four in combination). But I agree with the sadder reviewers that you might not want to read all of Nigh at once, in order to get a better experience from each tale.

I recommend it, and have hopes for the next volume.

The End Is Nigh

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