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John Adams: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

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John Adams Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse
  • Название:
    Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse
  • Автор:
  • Издательство:
    Night Shade Books
  • Жанр:
  • Год:
    2008
  • Город:
    San Francisco
  • Язык:
    Английский
  • ISBN:
    978-1597801058
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    5 / 5
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Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the harbingers of Armageddon — these are our guides through the Wastelands… From the to ; from to , 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 post-apocalyptic 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 — 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. Complete with introductions and an indispensable appendix of recommendations for further reading, delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre’s core. John Joseph Adams is the assistant editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and a freelance writer. His website is . Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse

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Bobby had graduated high school, for all practical purposes, by the age of ten, but he never got a B.A. or B.S., let alone any advanced degree. It was that big powerful compass in his head, swinging around and around, looking for some true north to point at.

He went through a physics period, and a shorter period when he was nutty for chemistry… but in the end, Bobby was too impatient with mathematics for either of those fields to hold him. He could do it, but it—and ultimately all so-called hard science bored him.

By the time he was fifteen, it was archaeology—he combed the White Mountain foothills around our summer place in North Conway, building a history of the Indians who had lived there from arrowheads, flints, even the charcoal patterns of long-dead campfires in the Mesolithic caves in the mid-New Hampshire regions.

But that passed, too, and he began to read history and anthropology. When he was sixteen my father and my mother gave their reluctant approval when Bobby requested that he be allowed to accompany a party of New England anthropologists on an expedition to South America.

He came back five months later with the first real tan of his life; he was also an inch taller, fifteen pounds lighter, and much quieter. He was still cheerful enough, or could be, but his little-boy exuberance, sometimes infectious, sometimes wearisome, but always there, was gone. He had grown up. And for the first time I remember him talking about the news… how bad it was, I mean. That was 2003, the year a PLO splinter group called the Sons of the Jihad (a name that always sounded to me hideously like a Catholic community service group somewhere in western Pennsylvania) set off a Squirt Bomb in London, polluting sixty per cent of it and making the rest of it extremely unhealthy for people who ever planned to have children (or to live past the age of fifty, for that matter). The year we tried to blockade the Philippines after the Cedeno administration accepted a "small group" of Red Chinese advisors (fifteen thousand or so, according to our spy satellites), and only backed down when it became clear that (a) the Chinese weren’t kidding about emptying the holes if we didn’t pull back, and (b) the American people weren’t all that crazy about committing mass suicide over the Philippine Islands. That was also the year some other group of crazy motherfuckers—Albanians, I think—tried to air-spray the AIDS virus over Berlin.

This sort of stuff depressed everybody, but it depressed the shit out of Bobby.

"Why are people so goddam mean?" he asked me one day. We were at the summer place in New Hampshire, it was late August, and most of our stuff was already in boxes and suitcases. The cabin had that sad, deserted look it always got just before we all went our separate ways. For me it meant back to New York, and for Bobby it meant Waco, Texas, of all places…he had spent the summer reading sociology and geology texts—how’s that for a crazy salad?—and said he wanted to run a couple of experiments down there. He said it in a casual, offhand way, but I had seen my mother looking at him with a peculiar thoughtful scrutiny in the last couple of weeks we were all together. Neither Dad nor I suspected, but I think my mom knew that Bobby’s compass needle had finally stopped swinging and had started pointing.

"Why are they so mean?" I asked. "I’m supposed to answer that?"

"Someone better," he said. "Pretty soon, too, the way things are going."

"They’re going the way they always went," I said, "and I guess they’re doing it because people were built to be mean. If you want to lay blame, blame God."

"That’s bullshit. I don’t believe it. Even that double-X-chromosome stuff turned out to be bullshit in the end. And don’t tell me it’s just economic pressures, the conflict between the haves and have-nots, because that doesn’t explain all of it, either."

"Original sin," I said. "It works for me—it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it."

"Well," Bobby said, "maybe it is original sin. But what’s the instrument, big brother? Have you ever asked yourself that?"

"Instrument? What instrument? I’m not following you."

"I think it’s the water" Bobby said moodily.

"Say what?"

"The water. Something in the water."

He looked at me.

"Or something that isn’t"

The next day Bobby went off to Waco. I didn’t see him again until he showed up at my apartment wearing the inside-out Mumford shirt and carrying the two glass boxes. That was three years later.


"Howdy, Howie," he said, stepping in and giving me a nonchalant swat on the back as if it had been only three days.

"Bobby!" I yelled, and threw both arms around him in a bear-hug. Hard angles bit into my chest, and I heard an angry hive-hum.

"I’m glad to see you too," Bobby said, "but you better go easy. You’re upsetting the natives."

I stepped back in a hurry. Bobby set down the big paper bag he was carrying and unslung his shoulder-bag. Then he carefully brought the glass boxes out of the bag. There was a beehive in one, a wasps’ nest in the other. The bees were already settling down and going back to whatever business bees have, but the wasps were clearly unhappy about the whole thing.

"Okay, Bobby," I said. I looked at him and grinned. I couldn’t seem to stop grinning. "What are you up to this time?"

He unzipped the tote-bag and brought out a mayonnaise jar which was half-filled with a clear liquid.

"See this?" he said.

"Yeah. Looks like either water or white lightning."

"It’s actually both, if you can believe that. It came from an artesian well in La Plata, a little town forty miles east of Waco, and before I turned it into this concentrated form, there were five gallons of it. I’ve got a regular little distillery running down there, Howie, but I don’t think the government will ever bust me for it." He was grinning, and now the grin broadened. "Water’s all it is, but it’s still the goddamndist popskull the human race has ever seen."

"I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about."

"I know you don’t. But you will. You know what, Howie?"

"What?"

"If the idiotic human race can manage to hold itself together for another six months, I’m betting it’ll hold itself together for all time."

He lifted the mayonnaise jar, and one magnified Bobby—eye stared at me through it with huge solemnity. "This is the big one," he said. "The cure for the worst disease to which Homo sapiens falls prey."

"Cancer?"

"Nope," Bobby said. "War. Barroom brawls. Drive-by shootings. The whole mess.

Where’s your bathroom, Howie? My back teeth are floating."

When he came back he had not only turned the Mumford tee-shirt right-side out, he had combed his hair—nor had his method of doing this changed, I saw. Bobby just held his head under the faucet for awhile then raked everything back with his fingers.

He looked at the two glass boxes and pronounced the bees and wasps back to normal. "Not that a wasps’ nest ever approaches anything even closely resembling ‘normal,’ Howie. Wasps are social insects, like bees and ants, but unlike bees, which are almost always sane, and ants, which have occasional schizoid lapses, wasps are total full-bore lunatics." He smiled. "Just like us good old Homo saps." He took the top off the glass box containing the beehive.

"Tell you what, Bobby," I said. I was smiling, but the smile felt much too wide. "Put the top back on and just tell me about it, what do you say? Save the demonstration for later. I mean, my landlord’s a real pussycat, but the super’s this big bull dyke who smokes Odie Perode cigars and has thirty pounds on me. She—"

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