People tossed around words like “collapse of civilization” and “post-apocalyptic,” but really everything was the same mess as always.
John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey wrap up their Apocalypse Triptych with 22 tales of the people who survive the destruction of civilization. And if you thought the lead-up to the end of the world was dark, this collection has some of the grimmest stories out of the entire trilogy.
The first book was about the match; the second was about the blaze. The End Has Come is supposed to be about what rises from the ashes, but for many of these stories all I could see was the ashes.
John Joseph Adams’s plan for this trilogy was to not just have stories that take place during each part of the apocalypse, but to have the authors write three-part stories, one for each book. I think the plan worked, for the most part, but each three-part story had a different effect, depending on whether the author was focusing more on a set of characters with the disaster as a backdrop, or just on the disaster.
Jamie Ford, for instance, had all of his contributions to the trilogy set in an alternate Earth where Haley’s Comet pulverizes and then poisons the world, but each story featured a different character; the protagonist of “The Uncertainty Machine” has a clockwork fortune-teller that can see the future for anyone except the one running the machine. And Jonathan Mayberry’s “Jingo and the Hammerman” (one of my favorites in the collection) is set in the same zombie-overrun Earth as the previous two chapters, but this time it’s a slice-of-life story with two friends having an ongoing philosophical discussion about empowerment and quality of life while chopping up zombies after the end of the world. Fun, in a gruesome kind of way.
Others jumped far ahead in time, sometimes as far as centuries. Annie Bellet submitted another excellent story in the post-moon world, “Goodnight Earth,” this one a complete change of pace with nano-augmented soldiers now having to stay hidden to avoid being decommissioned. And “Prototype” by Sarah Langan is many, many years after the meteor strike and the cyborg revolt, with a tie-in to the other chapters that was a complete surprise; I can honestly say I didn’t see that one coming.
There were several three-part stories that closely followed one set of characters, and some of them were shockingly grim. Scott Sigler both does and doesn’t wrap up the story of an alien invasion in “The Seventh Day of Deer Camp” (you get the sense that the main character’s sacrifice is going to last a very long time.) “Carriers” by Tananarive Due starts in the old age of the main character Nayima, one of the few people resistant to the plague that wiped out so much of humanity. That story skims over the time she spent trapped in a lab, experimented on and casually brutalized by lab technicians, until she finally ends up bitter and mostly alone in a house far from a civilization that’s still too terrified of the plague to come near her. There’s a hint of a happy ending for her, but mostly it’s a very unhappy story.
By far the most unhappy story in the collection is “Resistance” by Seanan McGuire. Boy, this one is bleak. The scientist who saw the beginning of the fungal apocalypse is now about to start the lifelong task of ending it. Trigger warning for OCD; the main character is utterly convinced that the whole apocalypse and the death of everyone she ever loved is her fault because she knew going against her compulsions (or allowing anyone else to go against them) would end the world.
I think the editors must have realized the impact that an entire collection of post-apocalyptic stories would have on readers, since they seem to have put the more light-hearted stories towards the back of the book. “The Last Movie Ever Made” by Charlie Jane Anders has the same almost goofy tone as the previous two chapters. The hapless high-school movie-maker from “Rock Manning Can’t Hear You” makes his final movie, a slapstick silent film that takes on the army and the red-bandana militia using remote-controlled drone cameras, baseballs, and the Oscar Myer Weiner Mobile.
And then there’s “The Happiest Place,” by Mira Grant, one of my favorites. The plot sounds like it could be either silly or maudlin: in a world devastated by a super-flu epidemic, the surviving Disneyland employees scavenge the surrounding hotels for supplies, trying to keep the park running for as long as they can. The author hits just the right tone with this one, showing the staff not as caricatures, but workaday people trying to keep their spirits up and preserve something that made so many people happy. The story itself isn’t happy, but to me it was one of the more uplifting submissions, with a perfect last line.
All of the three-part stories in the trilogy resolve with a more or less satisfying ending, and there’s occasionally some hope that the characters will actually end up making the planet a little bit better. For the most part though the theme seems to be that just surviving the apocalypse doesn’t guarantee you a happy ending, and some of the biggest problems the survivors have to deal with aren’t so much with the zombies or the aliens or plagues, it’s all the horrible things that their fellow humans have done to try to stop an apocalypse that they pretty much brought on themselves in the first place.
Whew. That’s three books about the apocalypse read in a year-and-a-half. I’m now accepting recommendations for books to review that are a little more upbeat. Space-travel preferred; zombies strictly optional.