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    After the Apocalypse: Stories
    After the Apocalypse: Stories
    After the Apocalypse: Stories
    Audiobook7 hours

    After the Apocalypse: Stories

    Written by Maureen F. McHugh

    Narrated by Thérèse Plummer and Angela Lin

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best of the Year In her new collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh delves into the dark heart of contemporary life and life five minutes from now and how easy it is to mix up one with the other. Her stories are post-bird flu, in the middle of medical trials, wondering if our computers are smarter than us, wondering when our jobs are going to be outsourced overseas, wondering if we are who we say we are, and not sure what we'd do to survive the coming zombie plague. Praise for Maureen F. McHugh: "Gorgeously crafted stories."-Nancy Pearl, NPR "Hauntingly beautiful."-Booklist "Unpredictable and poetic work."-The Plain Dealer Maureen F. McHugh has lived in New York; Shijiazhuang, China; Ohio; Austin, Texas; and now lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of a Story Prize finalist collection, Mothers Other Monsters, and four novels, including Tiptree Award-winner China Mountain Zhang and New York Times editor's choice Nekropolis. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails, among others. io9 Best SFF Books of 2011 Tiptree Award Honor List Philip K. Dick Award finalist Story Prize Notable Book
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 21, 2014
    ISBN9781470380250
    Author

    Maureen F. McHugh

    With her groundbreaking novel, China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F. McHugh established herself as one of the decade's best science fiction writers. She is the winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and a Hugo and Nebula Award nominee.

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    Reviews for After the Apocalypse

    4/5

    129 ratings14 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I still don't get short stories, and this collection of slightly science-fictionish stories is no exception. I have no idea of how to review it, so I'll just post a few brief comments about each story:"The Naturalist"--rather than being jailed, convicts are put in a town with zombies. Most don't survive."Special Economics"--A factory girl in China sings rap songs on the street to earn extra money so she can pay off her debt and escape the company to which she is enslaved."Useless Things"--a woman ekes out a living in the southwestern desert making life-like dolls, called "reborns", which she thinks are primarily purchased by parents whose babies have died."The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large"--After a Baltimore nuclear terrorist attack, a teenage boy suffers amnesia, and builds a new life. Problems arise when his parents finally locate him, and want him to come home."The Kingdom of the Blind"--There is a computer glitch in the power switch of a worldwide system--is the computer doing this on purpose?"Going to France"--A small boat heads out into the Atlantic to enable its passengers to take off flying from a slightly shorter distance to France. Everyone suddenly wants to go to France, but no one knows why. The narrator buys a ticket to fly to France in an airplane (unlike others), but while waiting in the airport, he realizes that they weren't going to leave. (????)"Honeymoon"--"I was an aggravated bride." After learning that her new husband had gambled away the money she saved for a honeymoon, she has the marriage annulled. She moves to Cleveland, and becomes a guinea pig in medical experiments to earn money to go on what would have been her dream honeymoon trip."The Effect of Centrifugal Forces"--One of Irene's moms is a drug addict, and the other is dying from avian prion disease."After the Apocalypse"--a woman and her daughter are walking to Canada, looking for sustenance.3 stars
    • 5/5
      Phildickian SF: "After the Apocalypse" by Maureen F. McHugh


      (#60 - 2014#). Published in 2011.

      This kind of book epitomizes the reason why I prefer SF above anything else, reading-wise.

      In my last book review ("The Burning Room" by Michael Connelly), I ranted about the likeness of (some) novels in the SF field.

      Most of the novels of today are dull, uninspired, lifeless and more-of-the-same. This is the state of the art nowadays. And then there are short stories…

      If books were bricks, short stories would be pebbles, every one of them totally different. A pebble can be polished until it becomes a ruby, and each one is unique, just like a short story.


      The rest of this review can be found on my blog.
    • 4/5
      Really torn between four and five stars. This is a really stellar and different collection of short stories. What I liked most about it was how varied the stories were, but how well they all fit together. The writing is a little touch-and-go in spots, and the stories aren't at all plotty, so you may get frustrated if that's what you're looking for, but this is an awfully good book.
    • 3/5
      Stories were mostly engaging, but while several had interesting premises, I felt they just fizzled by the last paragraph, having not gone much of anywhere.
    • 3/5
      Do not read this book if you’re looking for escapist fiction. Usually sci-fi takes us out of our everyday world, but these stories of survival in the near future feel a lot like the present day. It’s just that Something has happened - a war, an epidemic, an economic collapse. But these are the things that, even now, everybody is worrying about. So it feels almost inevitable.

      People are scrounging around, trying to survive, trying to make a living, and dealing with the same old corruption that we see today. Disaster hasn’t made anybody particularly heroic. Why should it? These are stories of today, set in tomorrow. Some of them are very good, while others have a fragmentary feel.

      Nowhere is there a feeling of emergency, just an acceptance that this is the way it is now. In some ways, that’s the scariest thing of all.
    • 4/5
      Most stories about disaster have heroic battles of one sort or another. These nine short stories are instead about dealing with the individual and idiosyncratic difficulties of everyday life after some sort of calamity—including dirty bombs in Baltimore that separate a family, a bird flu epidemic in China that kills millions making getting a job tricky, an economic crash that throws people off the grid and impoverishes all but the most wealthy, and a zombie outbreak in the American Midwest that repurposes affected cities so that Cleveland is now a prison camp. Each story is about how some very ordinary person is affected, and it’s the small scale, personal level of the stories that make this collection so captivating and thought provoking.
    • 5/5
      I do not have enough good things to say about this book. I loved it so much that I couldn't bring myself to return the library's copy until I went out and bought my own.That feeling that you get when you wake up from a dream, and there's this sense of truncated narrative, that you can remember bits of the story, and it had its own internal logic, but there's something jarring about not knowing how the story ended? This book is like all of the intense feelings about dreams. Not necessarily only the good parts of those feelings, the book begins with a zombie story that is anything but light-hearted, but the parts that feel important. I think I walked away from this book changed, which is 95% of what I'm looking for in really, really good writing.Yay, Readercon GoH!
    • 5/5
      read summer 2012. Modern day Flannery O'connor.
    • 4/5
      In this collection of stories McHugh explores the ways life goes on after or in the face of catastrophes big and small. "The Naturalist" looks at the days of a criminal, who is banished to the zombie-infested outskirts of the world and expected to die—instead he becomes fascinated with the dead. Set in China after a bird flu epidemic has killed thousands, "Special Economics" is about a woman who finds herself trapped within the economic system of a large corporation. In "Useless Things" an artist, who creates true-to-life baby dolls, home has become a stopping point for immigrants and vagrants expecting a little kindness in the desert. "Going to France" is the story of a migration of people who have literally learned to take flight, and a mother and her unwanted daughter make their way across the dilapidated landscape of the U.S. in collapse in "After the Apocalypse."Those are just a few of the stories that stuck out most in my mind. McHugh touches on the human side of disaster, which comes to be in her stories, ultimately mundane. Life goes one, hearts get broken, we close ourselves off, or open up to new possibilities. I enjoyed each of these stories in turn, with "The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large" being the only one I didn't quite connect with. A fantastic collection of stories, which I would recommend even if you don't often read science fiction or apocalypse stories.
    • 5/5
      A no frills collection of character driven stories that are roughly unified by themes of recovery and reorientation. McHugh is very adept at sticking to the storytelling, closing what needs closing, and leaving open ended just those plot lines that make the reader think. There are no events that would qualify as apocalyptic in the sci-fi tradition, just significant personal upheavals.
    • 4/5
      I’ve read Maureen McHugh’s “Useless Things” at least three times now, and I admire it more with each rereading. It appears just a bit less than halfway through McHugh’s thought-provoking short story collection, After the Apocalypse. The first-person narrator is a woman living well outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a time when the United States seems on the brink of collapse: the economy is terrible, and water is extremely scarce in the Southwest — a time that doesn’t feel very far away from today. The narrator lives hand-to-mouth making dolls, particularly dolls called “reborns” that look almost, but not quite, real. She’s alone in her house but for her friendly dogs most days, which only makes her nervous when South American laborers crossing the border stop by her house looking for a meal in exchange for labor. She’s apparently on some list shared by these illegal immigrants as a kind woman who always has a handout. She doesn’t like it, but she can’t bring herself to turn these men away. But when she returns from an errand one day to find that her hospitality has been abused, she makes a few decisions about how to go on. This is a quiet story, one that describes a couple of days during which something bad happens — nonviolent, but certainly distressing – and the changes that follow. But it says much about what one will do when pushed just beyond the stretched yet tolerable limits by which one lives. “Useless Things” is typical of McHugh’s writing. Always quiet and matter-of-fact, her stories seem so real that you can hardly believe they aren’t happening in the next county over. In “The Naturalist,” for instance, we learn early on that the zombie problem has been pretty much handled by the government, with the remaining creatures — the ultimate trash, worse than guys who cooked meth or fat women on WIC — isolated in zombie preserves. These areas are isolated by water, which the zombies won’t cross, and do double-duty as prisons for the hard-core bad guys the government just wants dead. The story follows Cahill as he scavenges, kills zombies, deals with other prisoners, and tries to puzzle out how the zombies work as hunters and killers. Again, McHugh writes in an understated style, just telling her audience what happened and how. There are no big moments, just an accumulation of small ones, so that even the denouement seems natural. It’s a powerful style, and a powerful story. The same understated style is at work in “The Lost Boy: A Reporter At Large,” the story of a boy who goes into a dissociative fugue following the detonation of two dirty bombs in Baltimore. He is separated from his family and raised in foster homes, never regaining his memory of his family until his mother shows up at his place of employment one day. The focus of the story, therefore, isn’t on the dirty bombs; it’s on the effect of those bombs on one family. The story is particularized, humanized, made into a character study instead of a thriller, and in this quiet way tells us much more about the societal effects of such an attack. All nine of the stories in this slim but indispensable volume share this same restrained approach to storytelling, adjuring the larger story of how an apocalypse came about and its major effects on society for the personal, small stories the apocalypse created. The title story, “After the Apocalypse,” doesn’t even really have an apocalypse; as the story says, “Things didn’t exactly all go at once. First there were rolling brownouts and lots of people unemployed…. Then the power started going out, more and more often. Pete’s shifts got longer although he didn’t always get paid…. Then the fires started on the east side of town. The power went out and stayed out.” The world as we know it ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. There’s no one who’s going to fix things. McHugh writes about how a mother and her daughter survive, using the most primitive of instruments: the mother’s body. These stories are like individually polished and cut jewels. They’re not fiery diamonds, but more like chalcedony, beautiful and unusual. Each story bears multiple readings. You’ll want this collection on your shelf.
    • 3/5
      A fairly decent collection of shorts. McHugh's writing is that sort of precise, schooled prose that is distinctively good, that aspires to be something more without ever getting close. The writing is good but you're totally aware that that is all it is. Her ideas for short stories are quite good but they actually feel like material that could benefit from being significantly longer. Often I thought her starting idea or setting were very neat but was disappointed that twenty or thirty pages was all there was to these stories.Worth reading if you've got a spare few days but not something I'd actively hunt out.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely awesome collection of short stories about what people do when crappy things happen in life--I think a better title would be "When the shit hits the fan." I came into it expecting a post-apocalyptic jaunt, but it is so much more. Some aspects of each story might be fantastic or sci-fi, but really it's about people facing crappy situations and either overcoming or succumbing to them. Maureen McHugh is an incredible writer and storyteller, and definitely a new favorite.
    • 5/5
      Collections of short stories are still the hardest thing for me to review, which invariably means the following review will be flawed both methodologically and stylistically. But perhaps I can move past this by way of the interconnected-ness of the stories in Maureen F. McHugh's After the Apocalypse. Unlike most collections, McHugh's stories revolve around the same premise in the same world: something has gone terribly wrong with our world; the nine stories in After the Apocalypse are about those who have survived, or are surviving.That's essentially what this collection is about: how human beings respond to catastrophe. But, mostly, the collection about survival, without all the exotic images our post-apocalyptic movies show us. There are no grand heroes here, nor an assurance that "things are turning around." These are stories caught in the middle between the moment of catastrophe, the momentimmediately after, and the intermediate moments between "the world as it was" and "the better world to come." And it's that focus which makes After the Apocalypse one of the most beautiful literary feats of 2011.Despite following a similar theme, each of McHugh's stories is distinct in vision and voice, from a young man imprisoned in a city compound infested with zombies in "The Naturalist" to a woman trying to make a living in the wastelands along the U.S. border with Mexico in "Useless Things"; from Chinese women trying to free themselves from indentured labor to Chinese corporations in "Special Economics" to a magazine-style article about a young man who survived a dirty bomb attack, but lost his identity in "The Lost Boy: A Reporter At Large"; from two computer programmings debating whether their AI is trying to communicate in "The Kingdom of the Blind" to the sudden and strange shared desire for travel to France in "Going to France"; from a young woman's attempts to make something of her life after a failed marriage in "Honeymoon" to a family struggling through the after-effects of a time-dilated disease spread through food in "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces" to, finally, a woman and her young daughter struggling their way north after America's economy and borders collapse, and also struggling with themselves in "After the Apocalypse." The variety of perspectives and content produces a palimpsest of narrative; in other words, each story seems to layer on top of the one that proceeded it, turning what in other collections would be a disparate set of worlds viewed through a particular gaze into a set of stories that feel inherently collaborative. What one story cannot do due to the limits of space, the next might.Paul Kincaid has argued that "McHugh's approach to the apocalypse is oblique, a concern with the personal, the individual or family unit, rather than the devastation that surrounds them" (from Strange Horizons). He's right. The palimpsest that is McHugh's collection is perhaps driven by the intense personal nature of her narratives. No story in this collection is about the apocalypse-that-was. We never see the events that led McHugh's characters to a relatively solitary life along the border ("Useless Things") or to make a break for the city to make something of herself ("Special Economics"). We only learn about the catastrophes in retrospect, often through the eyes of characters who no more know what happened than any of us can say, with any certainty, what exactly happened on 9/11. Complex events are compressed into single-strain narratives. The effect is wondrous, if not because it's refreshing to see a different approach to catastrophe/apocalypse, then certainly because McHugh's stories, by and large, are beautiful.That's not to suggest that every story in this collection succeeds in what I've interpreted as a narratory path. "Honeymoon" leaves something to be desired, though the only reason I can muster is that the story never felt like it belonged in the collection, and, perhaps, in comparison to stories like "Special Economics," "Useless Things," or "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces," it falls short of the mark, both on a personal and narrative level. Similarly, "The Kingdom of the Blind" and "Going to France," while interesting enough, don't quite approach the grim personal nature of the other stories in the collection. The personal, I think, is where McHugh shines, as demonstrated by "The Naturalist" (the criminal), "Special Economics" (the exploited), "Useless Things" (the struggling), "The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large" (the broken survivor), "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces" (those who survive the dead or dying), and "After the Apocalypse" (the disconnected). These stories provide a kind of funhouse mirror in which to examine humanity, distorted through a world that just might be. The effect is chilling and humbling, because McHugh shows us how fragile, and yet beautiful and unique, human beings really.After the Apocalypse is a thorough, if not unsettling, journey into the human psyche after catastrophe, at once thrilling, compelling, and disturbing. This collection alone proves that McHugh is a force to be reckoned with in the world of genre, for her simple-but-beautiful prose, evocative imagery, and raw human explorations make After the Apocalypse one of the best works of SF of this decade. You can expect to see this book appear in my WISB Awards in February.