The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [0]
THE END OF ALL THINGS Mike Ashley
THE NATURE OF THE CATASTROPHE
WHEN WE WENT TO SEE THE END OF THE WORLD Robert Silverberg
THE END OF THE WORLD Sushma Joshi
THE CLOCKWORK ATOM BOMB Dominic Green
BLOODLETTING Kate Wilhelm
WHEN SYSADMINS RULED THE EARTH Cory Doctorow
THE RAIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD Dale Bailey
THE FLOOD Linda Nagata
THE END OF THE WORLD SHOW David Barnett
FERMI AND FROST Frederik Pohl
SLEEPOVER Alastair Reynolds
THE LAST SUNSET Geoffrey A. Landis
BEYOND ARMAGEDDON
MOMENTS OF INERTIA William Barton
THE BOOKS Kage Baker
PALLBEARER Robert Reed
AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA Elizabeth Bear
THE MEEK Damien Broderick
THE MAN WHO WALKED HOME James Tiptree Jr
A PAIL OF AIR Fritz Leiber
GUARDIANS OF THE PHOENIX Eric Brown
LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE Paul Di Filippo
TERRAFORMING TERRA Jack Williamson
THE END OF ALL THINGS
WORLD WITHOUT END F. Gwynplaine Maclntyre
THE CHILDREN OF TIME Stephen Baxter
THE STAR CALLED WORMWOOD Elizabeth Counihan
The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF
Edited by
Mike Ashley
THE END OF ALL THINGS
Mike Ashley
We seem to have a fascination for the Apocalypse, the end of all things. It's not that we welcome it, least I hope not, but it seems that we can't help wondering about it, even predicting it. "The End is Nigh", a phrase perhaps too-oft used to have the impact it once had, has now passed into our language to signify yet another fallacious prediction.
There are the obvious religious connotations of the Apocalypse or the Day of Judgment - the biblical Armageddon, the Nordic Ragnarok, the Islamic Qiyamah (Doomsday), and so on - and this in turn may feed into the growing scientific awareness of our mortality through such possibilities as pandemics, cosmic catastrophes, climate change or the inevitable death of the Sun. The imagery of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, representing Conquest, War, Famine and Death, is as potent today as ever.
This anthology brings together stories that look at many of the ways that the Earth, or life upon it, may be destroyed, from plagues to floods, nuclear war to collision with a comet, alien invasion to new technologies run wild, and a few things beyond your widest imaginings.
It's all here, and more besides. But I didn't want an anthology where every story ended with death and destruction - that would become rather depressing over 500 pages - so to provide a balance I decided to introduce some hope for the future. At least half the stories take us beyond the end of civilization, even the end of the Earth, and look at how life - albeit not as we know it - may go on. Science fiction has had its own fascination with the end of all things since at least Le Dernier Homme ("The Last Man") written by the French priest Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville at the end of the eighteenth century. He had lived through the French Revolution, which had rather soured his view of the world and drove him into depression and eventual suicide in 1805, leaving this pioneering work in manuscript. It has some remarkably advanced ideas in depicting a world which, through mismanagement and overpopulation, had become ecologically exhausted.
The experience of the Reign of Terror doubtless fuelled de Grainville's work, and it is not surprising that certain events, such as the end of a century (or millennium) or World Wars, focus minds on a potential Apocalypse. Although a few books followed de Grainville's - including the like-named The Last Man (1826) by Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, which had humanity wiped out by a virulent plague, and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (1839), one of the first stories to have Earth destroyed by a comet - the real torrent of books came towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Two novels served as precursors to the main event: After London (1885) by Richard Jefferies, depicted a Britain that has reverted to the Stone Age following an unspecified catastrophe; The Last American (1889) by John Ames Mitchell has a Persian expedition explore the ruins of