EDITED BY
JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS
INTRODUCTION
JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS
As I write this, it’s Thanksgiving. A lot of us, including me, have a lot of things to be thankful for. Yet by any reasonable assessment, the world as a whole today seems closer to the precipice of apocalypse than perhaps it has ever been. The Doomsday Clock—maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—shows that we are at two minutes to midnight… which means we’re the closest we’ve been to “doomsday” since 1953.
But if you pay attention to the news at all, you don’t need the Doomsday Clock to tell you that. While it is tempting to leave aside—as the subject matter for an introduction to a different anthology—the dystopian elements of today’s world (which are legion), the slow but alarmingly frequent collapse of democracies around the world, coupled with the rise of authoritarian regimes and divisive, hateful rhetoric, makes World War III look like an increasingly frightening—and disturbingly probable—outcome.
Of course, destroying ourselves with weapons of war is just one of many possible apocalyptic scenarios that could come to pass. Climate change looms over everything as an omnipresent and terrifying threat to the entire world. I’m witnessing it up close and personal as I write this from my home in California, where there are raging wildfires burning to both the north and south of me—thankfully far enough away that my family is in no danger. Not everyone was so lucky… including the residents of the town called Paradise (which now is anything but). Yet we still have people—including prominent world leaders—denying anthropogenic influence and moving too slowly to try to arrest the progress of climate change. As I’ve said in the introduction to my climate fiction anthology Loosed Upon the World, “Welcome to the end of the world, already in progress.”
There are many other ways the world might end. A huge extraterrestrial object slamming into the Earth might cause an extinction-level event. Hell, a huge extraterrestrial race might do the same. Neither of these seem terribly likely, though if I were the kind of ghoul who’d bet on how the world will end, I’d put way more money on one than the other.
Or there’s always the chance that a horrible pandemic will wipe us out, leaving behind a world devoid of people, and nothing but the edifices of civilization as monuments to what we achieved as sentient creatures. Or—getting back to anthropogenic apocalypses for a moment—there’s always the chance some rogue nation will engineer a biological weapon to wipe out a specific population, thereby dooming the entire world by mistake. Or, hey, maybe we’ll try to do something good with viruses, like releasing some kind of engineered microbe into the atmosphere—perhaps designed to combat climate change. Then everything goes awry, and actively, literally kills us.
My point being: We’re almost certainly and in all conceivable ways fucked six ways to Sunday.
Despite that, it somehow still remains entertaining to imagine being one of the survivors, to be one of the ones “scrounging for cans of pork and beans”[*] and maybe even finding yourself with the responsibility of trying to build a new world from the ashes of the old.
So once again, I’ve delved into the vault[†] and gathered more “memorabilia”[‡] of the apocalypse… all for your reading “pleasure.” The selections you’ll find here all come from the last several years—thirty-four stories total, including twenty reprints and fourteen never-before-published tales.
I can only hope you’ll get to read them before the end actually comes…
BULLET POINT
ELIZABETH BEAR
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of thirty novels and more than a hundred short stories, and her hobbies of rock climbing, archery, kayaking, and horseback riding have led more than one person to accuse her of prepping for a portal fantasy adventure. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer Scott Lynch.
It takes a long time for the light to die. The power plants can run for a while on automation. Hospitals have emergency generators with massive tanks of fuel. Some houses and businesses have solar panels or windmills. Those may keep making juice, at least intermittently, until entropy claims the workings.
How long is it likely to take then? Six months? The better part of a decade?
I stand on the roof deck of the Luxor casino parking garage, watching the lights that remain, and I wonder. I don’t even know enough to theorize, really.
I’m not an engineer. I used to be a blackjack dealer.
Now I am the only living human left on Earth.
It’s not all bad. I don’t have to deal with:
• Death (except the possibility of my own, eventually).
• Taxes.
• Annoying holidays with my former extended family.
• Airplane lights crossing the desert sky.
• Chemtrails (okay, those were never real in the first place).
• Card counters.
• Maisie the pit boss. Thank God.
• My ex-husband. Double thank God.
Well, of course I can’t know for sure that I’m the only living person. But for all practical purposes, I seem to be. Maybe Las Vegas is the only place that got wiped out. Maybe over the mountain, Pahrump is thriving.
I don’t think so. I hear the abandoned dog packs howling in the night, and I’ve watched the lights go out, one by one by one.
I feel so bad for those dogs. And even worse for all the ones trapped in houses when the end came. All the cats, guinea pigs, pet turtles. The horses and burros, at least, have a chance. Wild horses can survive in Nevada.
There are so many of them. There’s nothing I can do.
If there are any other humans surviving, they are far away from here, and I have no idea where to find them, or even how to begin looking. I have to get out of the desert, though, if I want to keep living. For oh, so many reasons.
I can trust myself, at least. Trusting anybody else never got me where I wanted to be.
Another thing I don’t know for sure, and can’t even guess at: Why.
Not knowing why?
That’s the real pisser.
Here is an incomplete list of things that do not exist anymore:
• Fresh-baked cookies (unless I find a propane oven and milk a cow and churn some butter and then bake them).
• Jesus freaks (I wonder how they felt when the Rapture happened and it turned out God was taking almost literally everybody? That had to be a little bit of a come-down).
• Domestic violence.
• Did I mention my ex-husband?
There’s more than enough Twinkies just in the Las Vegas metro area to keep me in snack cakes until the saturated fat kills me. If I last long enough that that’s what gets me, I might even find out if they eventually go stale.
A problem with being in Las Vegas is getting back out of it again. Walking across a desert will kill me faster than snack cakes. And the highway is impassable with all the stopped and empty cars.
Maybe I can find a monster truck and drive it over everything.
More things that don’t exist anymore:
• Reckless driving.
• Speeding tickets.
• Points on your license.
• Worrying about fuel efficiency.
†
† After