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3.6 AVERAGE
3.6 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
medium-paced
challenging
dark
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
An interesting mix of concepts in the stories. Some are quite sad and a couple are hard to read post-pandemic. It felt like the author made a lot of the characters racist, homophobic, ableist and/or fatphobic as passive character traits as though that’s all she needed to do to flesh them out as people and the stories suffer for it.
Only the first and last stories deal with an apocalypse in any real way. In the others it's either just mentioned briefly or is completely absent. I'd say the common thread running through all of the stories is change. Each of the main characters has had a significant change happen in their lives. I enjoyed all of them for different reasons, though the one I was most interested to read ended up being my least favorite.
Wow – McHugh knows how to write a short story. It’s hard to find a writer who is so consistently good at it. And it’s all sci fi as diverse as realistic fiction to the zombie apocalypse – nothing too big or showy in terms of sci fi; it’s grounded in the real world and either in the here and now or Five Minutes in the Future.
The Naturalist – Starting with a bang! It’s kind of The Hunger Games meets the Zombie Apocalypse. Zombies have popped up in Ohio and probably other places (though no one really seems to know why). And the government is using it as a penal colony (hoping that the zombies will take care of their criminal problem). The main character ends up feeling connected to the dopey, flame-obsessed zombies and capturing the other criminals to perform experiments in zombie perceptions.
Special Economics – Story set in futuristic China (which I love! More of these!) about girls trapped in servitude (one of those deals where debt to company will always be higher than their wages) to a factory making something top-secret. This could’ve gone a lot of ways, but luckily the feisty heroine comes out on top and clevers her way to freedom.
Useless Things – A very “quiet” story despite the fact it involves a mysterious annual order for a creepy life-like baby doll and a break-in early on. Mostly about how charitable impulses can turn sour after one bad experience (woman typically helps out illegal immigrants passing through, but after a theft she no longer is willing to help them).
The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large – Different tone, but well-done. A faux-news report (like something you’d find in the NYT Magazine) featuring a boy who developed amnesia in the aftermath of an atomic bomb in Baltimore and his (disappointing) reunion with his family – the boy still has no memory of them and seems mostly weirded out that these people and this past of which he has no idea of has interrupted the life he’s comfortable with.
The Kingdom of the Blind – Programming girl develops a fondness for an AI program that’s starting to gain sentience (the program isn’t doing much…yet. It’s just playing around with creating rolling back-ups and fucking with data…kind of a testing of the environment thing).
Going to France – Probably one of my least favorites. Because I have no idea what is happening or where it intended to go. A host of people are struck with the intense impulse to go to France – and some of them spontaneously develop the ability to fly in order to get there. I…don’t get it. Sounds like the beginning of what could be an interesting story, but not complete enough to stand on its own.
Honeymoon – More sciency then sci fi; a woman who occasionally signs up to be a test subject in medical experiments for the cash is in one that goes really, really bad where people in the room develop intense, possibly fatal reactions. But that’s it…just this drug had possibly fatal side-effects in humans but it didn’t turn anyone into zombies or gave them superpowers (that we know of!!)
The Effect of Centrifugal Forces – Also not my favorite story and I mostly forgot what happens. Mad Cow Disease equivalent hit the American poultry industry and an unknown number of people have the fatal disease (and there’s no test for whether you have it until it’s too late, so it’s a lot of people waiting around hoping they’re not dying). The main character is a troubled girl in a grief support group, who is angry at her mom for dying (and being a hoarder) and her stepmom for…being her stepmom (and also at her second mom for abandoning her).
After the Apocalypse – Typical post-apocalypse story of the survivors…except that in this one the heroine is not some superwoman mama-bear but instead thinks her daughter is whiny deadweight…and abandons her. This is like a down-the-rabbit-hole version of [b:Aftertime|9065272|Aftertime (Aftertime, #1)|Sophie Littlefield|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1288994261s/9065272.jpg|13943357].
The Naturalist – Starting with a bang! It’s kind of The Hunger Games meets the Zombie Apocalypse. Zombies have popped up in Ohio and probably other places (though no one really seems to know why). And the government is using it as a penal colony (hoping that the zombies will take care of their criminal problem). The main character ends up feeling connected to the dopey, flame-obsessed zombies and capturing the other criminals to perform experiments in zombie perceptions.
Special Economics – Story set in futuristic China (which I love! More of these!) about girls trapped in servitude (one of those deals where debt to company will always be higher than their wages) to a factory making something top-secret. This could’ve gone a lot of ways, but luckily the feisty heroine comes out on top and clevers her way to freedom.
Useless Things – A very “quiet” story despite the fact it involves a mysterious annual order for a creepy life-like baby doll and a break-in early on. Mostly about how charitable impulses can turn sour after one bad experience (woman typically helps out illegal immigrants passing through, but after a theft she no longer is willing to help them).
The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large – Different tone, but well-done. A faux-news report (like something you’d find in the NYT Magazine) featuring a boy who developed amnesia in the aftermath of an atomic bomb in Baltimore and his (disappointing) reunion with his family – the boy still has no memory of them and seems mostly weirded out that these people and this past of which he has no idea of has interrupted the life he’s comfortable with.
The Kingdom of the Blind – Programming girl develops a fondness for an AI program that’s starting to gain sentience (the program isn’t doing much…yet. It’s just playing around with creating rolling back-ups and fucking with data…kind of a testing of the environment thing).
Going to France – Probably one of my least favorites. Because I have no idea what is happening or where it intended to go. A host of people are struck with the intense impulse to go to France – and some of them spontaneously develop the ability to fly in order to get there. I…don’t get it. Sounds like the beginning of what could be an interesting story, but not complete enough to stand on its own.
Honeymoon – More sciency then sci fi; a woman who occasionally signs up to be a test subject in medical experiments for the cash is in one that goes really, really bad where people in the room develop intense, possibly fatal reactions. But that’s it…just this drug had possibly fatal side-effects in humans but it didn’t turn anyone into zombies or gave them superpowers (that we know of!!)
The Effect of Centrifugal Forces – Also not my favorite story and I mostly forgot what happens. Mad Cow Disease equivalent hit the American poultry industry and an unknown number of people have the fatal disease (and there’s no test for whether you have it until it’s too late, so it’s a lot of people waiting around hoping they’re not dying). The main character is a troubled girl in a grief support group, who is angry at her mom for dying (and being a hoarder) and her stepmom for…being her stepmom (and also at her second mom for abandoning her).
After the Apocalypse – Typical post-apocalypse story of the survivors…except that in this one the heroine is not some superwoman mama-bear but instead thinks her daughter is whiny deadweight…and abandons her. This is like a down-the-rabbit-hole version of [b:Aftertime|9065272|Aftertime (Aftertime, #1)|Sophie Littlefield|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1288994261s/9065272.jpg|13943357].
I know, I know. I always preface these reviews with "I don't really like anthologies but--" Well, I decided to give this one a shot and I was very disappointed in most of the stories in this book. I read about two-third of the stories and skipped the rest. The ones I read I didn't really like much. EXCEPT. EXCEPT!! The last story, which is coincidentally where the title from the book came from. The last story is a good one and it gave me such mixed feelings over the mother character when I realized what exactly happened. Very good story, very poor collection of stories overall.
VERDICT: 2.9 stars for me, rounded to 3. GR aggregate rating is ~3.6 stars, so most readers enjoyed it a bit more than I did.
As the title suggests, this collection of short stories mostly all take place after some kind of apocalypse. Global apocalypse, regional apocalypse, and in one case, a much smaller scale one. The intriguing part is that in most of these stories the apocalypse itself is very much background to the "real" story; often the apocalypse took places years before and the stories are more about people picking up the pieces.
Many of McHugh's ideas are fascinating:
In "Useless Things", after a global pandemic kills 250 million people (n.b. these stories were published in 2011, well before coronavirus) flea markets are inundated with used stuff from all those dead people.
A sudden mania sweeps over America compelling people to go to France for no real reason in "Going to France".
In "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces" a global food supply contamination has left untold millions with Avian Prion Disease, a degenerative brain condition.
And most intriguing, in a Stanisław Lem way, is "The Kingdom of the Blind" where a large hospital computer system (maybe? probably? almost certainly?) has achieved sentience but its sentience is so vastly difference from ours that it is unaware anything else in the universe exists. But its exploration of the universe via trial and error (such as cycling the hospital power systems) is causing havoc. Is restoring to an older version of the software murder or genocide or none of the above?
Unfortunately nearly all of the stories lacked something at their center, hence the 2-star rating. The clearest example of this is "The Lost Boy" about an elementary school kid who develops complete amnesia ("dissociative fugue") after two dirty bombs are detonated by terrorists in Baltimore. The whole story just...felt like it was missing something.
The two stories that do the best job of having that something are the two that open and close the book. In "The Naturalist" there is a zombie apocalypse. It's been going on for a couple of years. Not really a big deal. They've got the zombies contained. The dump prisoners in the zombie containment zone, to alleviate prison overcrowding. McHugh takes the typical zombie story but with the zombies stripped of much (but not all) of their menace they become more like dangerous wild animals: the lions of the African savanna, for instance. You still need to be careful around them but you treat them more as something to be wondered at and studied that terrified of.
And in "After the Apocalypse" she takes the typical post-apocalyptic setup of parent and child (c.f. The Road, Bird Box, The Quiet Place, and many, many more) but turns it on its head. What if it was an unwanted pregnancy in the first place? What if the parent grows more and more frustrated with the child? What if....the parent starts thinking about abandoning the child and going their own way?
Unfortunately most of the other stories, even when they had an intriguing premise, fell flat for me.
Many of McHugh's ideas are fascinating:
In "Useless Things", after a global pandemic kills 250 million people (n.b. these stories were published in 2011, well before coronavirus) flea markets are inundated with used stuff from all those dead people.
A sudden mania sweeps over America compelling people to go to France for no real reason in "Going to France".
In "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces" a global food supply contamination has left untold millions with Avian Prion Disease, a degenerative brain condition.
She sounded like a grown-up. Well, that’s probably what watching your mom die horribly did to you.
And most intriguing, in a Stanisław Lem way, is "The Kingdom of the Blind" where a large hospital computer system (maybe? probably? almost certainly?) has achieved sentience but its sentience is so vastly difference from ours that it is unaware anything else in the universe exists. But its exploration of the universe via trial and error (such as cycling the hospital power systems) is causing havoc. Is restoring to an older version of the software murder or genocide or none of the above?
Unfortunately nearly all of the stories lacked something at their center, hence the 2-star rating. The clearest example of this is "The Lost Boy" about an elementary school kid who develops complete amnesia ("dissociative fugue") after two dirty bombs are detonated by terrorists in Baltimore. The whole story just...felt like it was missing something.
He was Obi Wan. She was just a girl whom he could explain things to. She had known it all along, at some level, but this was the first time she’d forgotten to uphold her end of the bargain.
The two stories that do the best job of having that something are the two that open and close the book. In "The Naturalist" there is a zombie apocalypse. It's been going on for a couple of years. Not really a big deal. They've got the zombies contained. The dump prisoners in the zombie containment zone, to alleviate prison overcrowding. McHugh takes the typical zombie story but with the zombies stripped of much (but not all) of their menace they become more like dangerous wild animals: the lions of the African savanna, for instance. You still need to be careful around them but you treat them more as something to be wondered at and studied that terrified of.
And in "After the Apocalypse" she takes the typical post-apocalyptic setup of parent and child (c.f. The Road, Bird Box, The Quiet Place, and many, many more) but turns it on its head. What if it was an unwanted pregnancy in the first place? What if the parent grows more and more frustrated with the child? What if....the parent starts thinking about abandoning the child and going their own way?
Unfortunately most of the other stories, even when they had an intriguing premise, fell flat for me.