Review: Slightly disturbing apocalypse anthology
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 3, 2013
As this is an anthology, I'll review each one as I read it.25/2 - Executable: I'm not quite sure of what the apocalypse of this story was, not sure exactly how the machines took over and what they did to the world.  How did they effect non-mechanical things like gavels?  I understand why there might not be any new ones being made, but what happened to all the gavels made prior to the apocalypse?  Did the machines break them all?  That seems unlikely.  The author did a good job of teasing us with the story, while still keeping the story really short.  To be continued...26/2 - Let's See What Tomorrow Brings: I liked this story because it had a different apocalypse, it wasn't the usual global pandemic, nuclear war or asteroid that feature in a lot of apocalypse story lines.  I would love to read it as a full length novel.Julia's Garden: This really played on a fear that I have of the overuse of antibiotics and the consequences that we're all going to suffer because of that.  I'm not quite sure I understand why Julia felt the need to eat the bacteria from the petri dishes.  It seemed that the author was trying to say that the death of everyone's gut flora also meant the dulling, if not death, of the population's sense of taste.  I might have to google that.  Did the appearance of 'gas gangrene' on Julia's wound signify that if people managed to hold on a little bit longer, the world wouldn't end after all?  That's what I got from the final scene, which made Julia's impending suicide a little illogical.Tick: I really liked the slightly different format of this story, where a paragraph or so from current time was followed by a flashback, which we eventually found out were journal entries made by the narrator.  I could see this being a movie and that's how I saw it as I was reading it.  It sort of reminded me of Resident Evil in that the background of the apocalypse is told in flashbacks from the main character's slowly returning memory.  Another one worthy of being extended into a full length book.The Last Hand: I didn't enjoy this one as much as the previous four stories.  As soon as I started reading I could see definite overtones of a drunker, even more disreputable version of Paul Blackthorne's Harry Dresden in The Dresden Files.  Spells on the floor, an imprisoned supernatural being who makes smart remarks and helps out his 'master' when forced to.  The method of apocalypse was certainly different, but it seemed more like it had been thrown in at the end of a sci-fi short story, instead of being written solely as an apocalypse story.  Maybe the author forgot the due date for his contribution, so just changed the ending of an unpublished sci-fi story and handed that in, hoping no one would notice.  If I was only rating this story I would give it 2 stars.  To be continued...27/2 - Fly the Moon to Me: This one had a more depressing view of human nature than the previous stories.  The moral of the story seemed to be 'work together and we'll all come out ahead, try to be greedy and no one wins', which I think is absolutely true.  I'd be Timo, trying to see the good in all people but still being wary of the motives of both strangers and friends.Relapse: The second sentence of this story is 'Dr. Emil Werner and Dr. Joseph Heinrich worked tediously.' Is that meant to be 'tirelessly'? Because tediously just doesn't make sense in this context. Oops, there's another one - I'm pretty sure 'a gigantic object hurdled through the sky,' is supposed to be 'a gigantic object hurtled through the sky,'. Are these typos or does the author simply not know the difference between the meaning of the two pairs of words? I hope it's the former, because the latter makes me worried for his future career as a writer. On to the actual story, which was good, but also slightly fantasy-destroying. I've always wished I could go back to somewhere around the age of five and do my life over again, with all my current memories of course to help me make better choices. It never occured to me that I wouldn't be able to make better choices and have my life turn out more as I still imagine it one day might, just earlier in my timeline. When I realised that John was going to go back 10 years and be able to re-do that decade of his life, I thought 'Great, he'll be able to pull himself out of the dark part of his life early, meet his wife early and be happy for more of the final decade of his life than he was the first time around, and each successive time be with her and their children longer and longer.' Him killing himself over and over in despair because he couldn't find the right sequence of events to meet his wife again wasn't how I imagined a life re-do going.Burning Alexandria: I really liked all the book references. It showed me that the author is well, and variedly, read, which I think is an important personality trait in any good author. I feel the same as Irwin (and presumably the author) about e-readers, although possibly in a slightly less drastic way. I'm not worried, maybe because it hadn't occurred to me till I read this story, that the libraries will be overrun by e-books and eliminate all the real books, but I definitely get angry when the only way to borrow a certain book from the library is in an electronic form. Strangely enough, especially with this particular story, I'm reading this book on Kindle software for my laptop (I still refuse to get an actual e-reader), but that's only because the authors are unknown to me and I didn't want to spend money buying it and having it shipped to me when I could get this electronic version for free. I look at e-books as a sort of free trial, and then if I like the book enough to know I'll want to read it again I buy a real copy of it. Plus, except for a few exceptions of author requested reviews for Smashwords published books, I haven't paid for any of my 149 Kindle e-books, and I don't feel like I'm cheating the authors, because if their story is good I'll buy a real copy for my real library. It's just not the same, you can't proudly display your Kindle library to guests via your laptop like I can with my new purpose built library/reading room. One day I hope to have enough room for as many books as Irwin had, without the hoarder tendencies. To be continued...28/2 - Silver Sky: I like space/sci-fi and the addition of evolved intelligent animals was very interesting, although I have to wonder if the dolphins and chimpanzees would be willing to work with us after all the damage we've done to their world. I mean, if they've evolved so much why wouldn't they build a ship for their own use, especially after we broke the sun in the first place? I'm sure humans wouldn't help intelligent animals escape the planet if we blamed them for the end of the world. So why would they help us? Their morals must have evolved along with their intelligence. As soon as Clara grabbed Allan and dragged him off to bed I was suspicious of her motives. Then when she didn't really want to meet Ruiz I knew she was going to turn out to be a suicidal zealot who was part of the final plan. It was a good, 3 star story that would have been better as a full length novel going back to the appearance of the evolved mammals. To be continued...1/3 - Sacrifice: This was the shortest story of the anthology. It was so short that it was hard to get a feel for it, I'm not sure whether I liked it or not. It did kind of remind me of the conclusion of the movie The Day After Tomorrow, with snow covering most of the planet, only the survivors were triumphant and happy to be rescued not murdering each other over flint. One of the lesser stories in this anthology for me.Empty Nest: Very interesting idea, I especially liked the way Mother Earth dismissed anyone who had been elected as a VIP, rather than simply working hard to become one without anyone elses help - there are too many VIPs elected into their positions. I would love to know which planet Esther is.Mother and Child: Due to the comic format the story was laid out in I was unable to read the final story. There are instructions to contact the editor to get a pdf copy of the story in order to read it, but I can't be bothered - that's too much work to go to just to read a 5-10 page story.Overall, I enjoyed this apocalypse anthology, gave me a few new ways for me to worry about the world ending after the anticlimax of 21/12/2012.