Description:
Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence--the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the harbingers of Armageddon--these are our guides through the Wastelands.
From the Book of Revelation to The Road Warrior, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Road, storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving eschatological tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. In doing so, these visionary authors have addressed one of the most challenging and enduring themes of imaginative fiction: the nature of life in the aftermath of total societal collapse.
Gathering together the best postapocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today's most renowned authors of speculative fiction--including George R. R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King--Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon. Whether the end of the world comes through nuclear war, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm, these are tales of survivors, in some cases struggling to rebuild the society that was, in others, merely surviving, scrounging for food in depopulated ruins and defending themselves against monsters, mutants, and marauders.
Wastelands delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre's core.
Brief description:
Paolo Bacigalupi is the author of the highly acclaimed The Drowned Cities and the New York Times bestseller Ship Breaker, which was also a Michael L. Printz Award winner and a National Book Award finalist. He is also the author of The Windup Girl and Pump Six and Other Stories and is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, John W. Campbell Memorial, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial awards. He lives in western Colorado with his wife and son.
Review Quotes:
"The twenty-two stories in this end-of-days anthology run the gamut from nuclear devastation to environmental debacle to the Second Coming...This title belongs in most sf or short fiction collections."
-- "Library Journal"