The Revivalists - Christopher M. Hood

 

Christopher M. Hood's The Revivalists promised to be a perfect fit to my reading tastes because I'm a fan of well plotted post-apocalyptic novels as well as a fan of accounts of long road trips, be those fictional on nonfictional. Although I didn't end up enjoying this one as much as I expected I would, it did mostly turn out to be a fun book to read.

The novel begins in the aftermath of a new worldwide pandemic that by some estimates has eliminated 60-70% of the world's population, something like five billion people. Governments across the globe have collapsed, survivors (called "dippers") have come out the other side of the virus with immunity, and anarchic gangs control large regions of America's roadways. The virus, dubbed the Shark Flu, was unleashed after Iceland's permafrost began to melt, and no one saw that coming.  And after the virus rapidly spread around the world via airline travel, there was simply no time for anyone to come up with a plan that could have stopped it in time.

Now, the best solution for most people is to remain where they are if conditions there allow them to survive on their own or with the cooperation of neighbors, friends, and family. One couple, however, is not content to stay in New York because their college student daughter was in California when the transportation system collapsed, and now it seems that she has joined some crazy religious cult. So Penelope and Bill decide to drive across the country, not having any idea if that is even possible, in order to bring their daughter home - whether she wants to come home or not.

Along the way, the two will have to make their way through various communities and groups that will do their best to stop them in their tracks. Some of the people they encounter are eager to kill them for what few possessions they carry, some are wanting to enslave them, and others want them to pay for the privilege of using the highways under their control. But Penelope and Bill are determined to keep moving west until they drop.

The Revivalists has all the makings of a great plot, so why did I lose some of my enthusiasm about the book? It all boils down to just how completely I could suspend my disbelief for the duration of the novel, something I don't usually have a problem doing. In this case, it was easy enough to suspend disbelief that global warming could really unleash an ancient virus that has been trapped beneath Iceland's permafrost for thousands of years. The difficulty I ran into was suspending my disbelief that two people could make so many dumb decisions in a few days and survive them all. Some...maybe...but these two didn't seem to learn much from anything that happened to them.

That's why I'm rating The Revivalists a three-star novel. As soon as I found myself talking back to Bill and Penelope, I suppose that was bound to happen. 

Short Stories from Wastelands: The New Apocalypse (Part 5)

 

(Stories 13-18, Pages 194-272)

This group of six short stories from Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, includes two back-to-back stories that turned out to be two of my favorites from the entire collection so far. I would rate each of them five-star stories, in fact, but the other four stories are more average than not, so three stars to each of those.

One of the two I really enjoyed is Susan Jane Bigelow's "The Eyes of the Flood." In this one, a lone woman has somehow survived the radiation and plague that killed off everyone else around her, and she has not seen another human being in a long, long time. But when she finally begins to sense that she is no longer alone, she is terrified. All she knows is that she has gone through such drastic physical changes since everyone disappeared that she has no idea what first contact with another "human" will be like. There's also a nice little technical twist at the very end of this one that I didn't see coming. 

The second story I particularly liked is Jack Skillingstead's "The Last Garden," a story about a plague pandemic of which no one can explain the origin. Sound familiar? Governments are so suspicious and distrustful of each other that the resulting fighting wipes humanity from the face of the Earth. "The Last Garden" is told from the point of view of a lone astronaut who returns to earth only to find herself being "managed" by her over-protective AI bodyguard. Despite its sad ending, this story is intriguing and fun all the way through. 

There is not really a bad story among the other four, so don't be scared off by them. "Echo," by Veronica Roth is similar to "The Last Garden" in the sense that it is about another post-apocalyptic world now dominated by AI, but this time it's a world in which the machines run things on Earth for their own benefit. The story's main character is faced with a moral dilemma in which she has to choose between the surviving humans and the AI bots that now run everything. She knows what the moral choice is; the question is only whether she can convince herself to make that choice. 

The other stories are "Four Kittens" (Jeremiah Tolbert), "Through the Sparks in Morning's Dawn (Tobias S. Buckell), and "Cannibal Acts" (Maureen F. McHugyh). In "Four Kittens," three people are willing to risk everything in order to rescue four Siamese kittens from a local crime boss who does not exactly wish the kittens well. It's a good story, but it's heavier on the thrill than on the apocalypse that has made the kittens such a rarity. "Through the Sparks in Morning's Dawn" is my least favorite in this group of six because it is more a takeoff on the "Mad Max" movies than anything else. Finally, "Cannibal Acts" is much what you would expect from its title. While it is not particularly original, this is a good character study, and I enjoyed that aspect of it. 

So now I'm at the point of having read 18 of the book's 34 stories, and despite the odds of it happening, I'm still looking forward to the last 16 of them. Wastelands has reminded me that the best way to enjoy a collection like this one, where all the stories share such similar themes and settings, is to take the stories in relatively small doses. For me at least, that seems to keep them fresher, and (if I admit it) makes it easier to distinguish one from the other when I think about them later.

Jack Skillingstead

Short Stories from Wastelands: The New Apocalypse (Part 4)

 

(Stories 8-12, Pages 130-193)

I've continued to work my way through the short stories in Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and I've been pleased to find that many of the stories are putting really clever twists on their apocalyptic settings. The apocalyptic hook is still prominent in each of the stories, but for the most part, the plots are more about the uniqueness and adaptability of the survivors than about the apocalypse itself.

One story, for instance, "Bones of Gossamer," has its narrator a man who lives on one of the remotest islands of Fiji. The man, and the rest of his village, have no idea what is going on in the rest of the world. All these people know is that the tourists - along with their monthly supply boat - have not been coming for the last year. When one German family and one French family do show up, the mystery only deepens.

Another story I particularly enjoyed is Charlie Jane Anders's "As Good as New," a story about how one of the tools designed to fight global warming catastrophically backfires on the world. This one combines realism and fantasy in a way that gives some hope to what appears to be perhaps the last person on Earth when she ventures out of her bunker one day and finds a peculiar bottle. Even though I'm not a fantasy genre fan, this one doesn't quite cross the line into silliness for me. 

Two of the stories, "One Day Only," by Tananarive Due, and "The Plague," by Ken Liu, take a more traditional (and similar) approach to apocalyptic stories by focusing on the cultural shock endured by survivors of cataclysmic events. In both stories, the survivors have broken into new classifications that have little or nothing to do with how humans viewed themselves pre-apocalypse. In Due's story, there are only four groups left: the vaccinated, those searching for the vaccine, those with a natural immunity, and the dead. Unfortunately, the naturally immune are the most dangerous of all. 

In Liu's tale, the separation is even more obvious. Those with enough money to make it happen are living in protected domes where life goes on much as it always has. The poor, on the other hand, are not allowed inside the domes, and have by now evolved into an unrecognizable subspecies of human beings. The irony is that each group pities the other. 

Of these five stories, only "Black, Their Regalia," by Darcie Little Badger, fails to work for me. And it's not the author's fault, because the story never really stood much of a chance because of how heavily it relies on fantasy. I simply could not buy into the premise that three American Indians and "The Plague Eater" might be able to come to the rescue of the world just in the nick of time to save humanity. My bad. 

Probably because I'm reading these stories in relatively small doses, I'm enjoying them so much that I still look forward to picking the collection back up whenever I can. The stories have not at all gone stale because of their shared similarities, but I don't believe that I would want to read all thirty-four of them straight through without the palate cleanser of other reading other genres at the same time. 

Darcie Little Badger

Short Stories from Wastelands: The New Apocalypse (Part 3)

Continuing with my survey of the thirty-four short stories collected in Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, today's post covers the fifth, sixth, and seventh stories in the book. This trio of stories includes one of the type I would just as soon never read again in my life and two others that I really liked.

Is anyone else as bored by Zombie Apocalypse as I am now? It's become so difficult to avoid stories like "Not this World, Not this War" that they have all started to blend together in my mind. The overkill probably results from the huge success of The Walking Dead television series, but I really think it's time for writers to move on now and go back to being a little more creative with their apocalyptic stories. Jonathon Maberry, to his credit, does give "Not this World, Not this War" a nice twist by putting his main character, a military-trained sniper, in a difficult emotional situation when he learns that the zombie hoard coming for him is made up almost entirely of busloads of small children who were being bussed to safety when they got infected with the zombie-bug. That was enough to save the story for me, but I do hope it's the last zombie story in Wastelands. (But I bet it's not.)

"Where Would You Be Now," by Carrie Vaughn, is my new favorite of the seven stories I've read so far. What I like best about this post-apocalyptic short story is that it focuses more on characters and relationships between characters than it does on the cause of the apocalypse or the violence that follows society's destruction. Instead, Vaughn puts her characters in an interesting setting and lets them show the reader who they are in their hearts and souls. Her story is the first one so far that ends on at least a bit of a hopeful note that good people will survive and be able to adapt to their new world. The title of the story is the question that occupants of the medical camp in which the story is mostly set ask each other when they want to relax and get to know each other better. The title ties directly in to the overall mood of the story and its last two sentences: "It doesn't matter. This is where I am." 

The most optimistic story so far is Timothy Mudie's "The Elephant's Crematorium," a story in which no animal has been able to reproduce for the last seven years, including humans. James and Liyana are alone on what used to be an African elephant preserve, and the surrealistic  aftereffects of the war that devastated the planet have made the world around them - and its dangers - completely unpredictable. Liyana is pregnant, but it's not the first time since the war, and James fears that another pregnancy could cost her her life. Liyana's bigger concern at the moment is finding out why small groups of elephants are spontaneously combusting into piles of ashes. Are they doing it on purpose; is it a kind of suicide pact between the animals? After she figures it all out, a remarkable thing happens that leaves both the humans and the elephants better for the bond they form. Even as surrealistic as this story is at times, I enjoyed more than most because its focus on the characters instead of on the customary violence that is at the heart of so much apocalyptic literature. 

These last two stories, because they show more variety than most of the earlier ones, have left me much more hopeful, even enthusiastic, about reading the rest of the collection, and I'm looking forward to reading four or five more of them this week.

Short Stories from Wastelands: The New Apocalypse (Part 2)

Last week, I commented on “Bullet Points,” the first short story from Wastelands: The New Apocalypse. As you may recall, I found “Bullet Points” to be a clever — and amusing — take on what it might be like to be one of the last people on the face of the Earth. I’ve now read the second, third, and fourth stories in the Wastelands collection and found them to be very different from “Bullet Points” — and as far as that goes, from each other. That kind of variety is one of the common characteristics of any good short story compilation, and it encourages me to keep reading (although I would hate to think that the “best” story in the collection turns out to be the very first one I read). 

These three stories are moodier than the opener, and each of the stories offers a more horrific take on what a post-apocalyptic world might be like. “The Red Thread,” by Virginia writer Sofia Samatar, is about a woman and her teenaged daughter who are moving from safe place to safe place after the world has effectively been destroyed by the devastating economic crash that follows the complete drying up of the Earth’s oil reserves. Governments and borders have collapsed, and now only isolated pockets of civility still exist. The girl is hoping to find her boyfriend; the mother is just trying to find a place to rest.

Oregon writer Wendy N. Wagner’s “Expedition 83” is just as gloomy as “The Red Thread,” but it has considerably more action. In Wagner’s story, everyone who has survived the dual catastrophes of global warming and the nuclear winter that followed now live underground. It has, in fact, been several hundred years since anyone has lived on the surface. Today, people most fear the super-fungus that, once it starts growing on any part of the body, will eventually encase even their mouths and noses. Surgeons can keep infected people breathing for a while longer, but the end is always the same. But now, two women are being allowed to see the surface for themselves. 

“The Last to Matter,” by Adam-Troy Castro, a writer who lives in Florida, is the first story from Wastelands that did not even come close to working for me. It is a surrealistic look way into the future at the point that the last city on Earth finally dies. The message, I think, is that all of the survivors are by now so bored with their lives that they welcome the end. I say “I think” but I was myself way too bored by the story to want to spend much time trying to figure it all out. 

Bottom Line: As in any short story compilation that includes the stories of dozens of different authors, there will be “hits” and “misses” among them. And readers will never agree on which are the “hits” and which are the “misses.” That’s part of the fun. All in all, at least for me, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse has gotten off to a pretty good start, and I’m eager to see what follows.

"Bullet Points" - Wastelands: The New Apocalypse (Story 1)

This is the first in what may become a series of “Apocalypse Monday” posts featuring short stories from Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, each of which are set during or after an apocalyptic event. I’ve been a fan of, and have read, stories like these all my life, and I still love them as much as I did when I was a boy.  I’m also a huge fan of short stories, generally,  because short story anthologies allow me to sample and learn about so many writers I would otherwise never experience. So, this may quite possibly turn into the first 34-week, 34-part, book review I’ve ever written, one in which I feature every short story in the collection. 

Elizabeth Bear’s “Bullet Point,” the lead-off story in Wastelands, is told from the point of view of a young woman who believes she may be the last person on Earth…or at the very least, the last person in Las Vegas. The funny thing is that there are no dead, decaying bodies anywhere to be found, only empty homes, stranded automobiles, and all those empty casino/hotels the city is known for. If there was indeed a Rapture of some sort, our narrator seems to be the only one in town who didn’t make the cut. 

And then one day as she’s riding down the Strip on her bicycle, Isabella spots a guy on the street. She knows better than to get too close to him, but over time he wins her trust and convinces Isabella that he represents no threat to her safety. The two of them start living together even though Isabella senses that he needs her company more than she needs his — and that’s when his cracks begin to show.

So now, the question for you, the reader, to think about is this one: what would you do if the only other person left on Earth (as far as you know, anyway) is your total opposite in every core belief you hold about yourself, the ones that makes you, you? How much could you, would you, or should you tolerate from someone you can’t stand being around even if they may be the only other person left on the entire planet? 

Bottom Line: “Bullet Points” is an amusing tale about the end of the world in which the “last woman” on Earth and the “last man” on Earth turn out to be a bad match — and what happens next. The seventeen-page story was published for the first time in 2019’s Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, a collection of thirty-four short stories with apocalyptic themes written between 2013 and 2019. 

Elizabeth Bear, author of some thirty novels and over one hundred short stories is a Massachusetts-based writer who can claim the prestigious Hugo award among the awards she’s won.