Apocalypse Wednesday
PSA for Washingtonians: The Library of Congress Professionals Association is having a book sale in the Jefferson Building. Today paperbacks are $.50 and hardcovers $1; tomorrow it's a bag for a buck. The selection is heavy on popular fiction; I left behind a lot of Pratchett I already own, but picked up some Jennifer Crusie and a water-swollen copy of Outlander -- 28 books for $40. Some donor reads a lot of hardcover sf.
O.T. Nelson, The Girl Who Owned a City: When I was a kid, I loved this postapocalyptic story of a world in which everyone over twelve died of plague. Lisa, a smart and abrasive girl, survives with her little brother and starts rebuilding. It’s difficult to judge - it’s not written well, and Lisa seems a lot more annoying to me now, with her insistence that she “owns” the things she orders others to help her salvage. Still, I have strong memories of how cool this book was. The copy I have now is a revised edition and talks about computers and rollerblades, which I think is a mistake; in my memory, there was also a vaguely sexual menace to the boy-led gang that threatens Lisa’s reconstructed community, and I wonder if that’s been edited out too or if it was always just my interpretation.
Dale Bailey, The End of the World as We Know It: A witty and painful story of the apocalypse, interspersed with accounts of smaller disasters. Bailey shows how “smaller” isn’t really the right word for the people involved - the end of the world is just what happens to every one of us, repeated billions of times. Available on the F&SF site; go and read!
Stephen King, Cell: Speaking of apocalypses - what if a signal suddenly turned every cell-phone user in the world into a violent zombie-type? King makes half-hearted gestures at the “why” for this scenario, in the form of survivors’ uninformed speculations, but the thrill as always in King is in the aftermath. After the immediate horrors of the converted world, things get worse, as the cell-phone users begin to flock and in other ways behave as a new kind of entity, one with no plans to let ordinary humans regain control. While I wouldn’t put this at the top of my list of King’s books, it is a solid helping of the combination of mundane detail with devastating horror that he does so well.
O.T. Nelson, The Girl Who Owned a City: When I was a kid, I loved this postapocalyptic story of a world in which everyone over twelve died of plague. Lisa, a smart and abrasive girl, survives with her little brother and starts rebuilding. It’s difficult to judge - it’s not written well, and Lisa seems a lot more annoying to me now, with her insistence that she “owns” the things she orders others to help her salvage. Still, I have strong memories of how cool this book was. The copy I have now is a revised edition and talks about computers and rollerblades, which I think is a mistake; in my memory, there was also a vaguely sexual menace to the boy-led gang that threatens Lisa’s reconstructed community, and I wonder if that’s been edited out too or if it was always just my interpretation.
Dale Bailey, The End of the World as We Know It: A witty and painful story of the apocalypse, interspersed with accounts of smaller disasters. Bailey shows how “smaller” isn’t really the right word for the people involved - the end of the world is just what happens to every one of us, repeated billions of times. Available on the F&SF site; go and read!
Stephen King, Cell: Speaking of apocalypses - what if a signal suddenly turned every cell-phone user in the world into a violent zombie-type? King makes half-hearted gestures at the “why” for this scenario, in the form of survivors’ uninformed speculations, but the thrill as always in King is in the aftermath. After the immediate horrors of the converted world, things get worse, as the cell-phone users begin to flock and in other ways behave as a new kind of entity, one with no plans to let ordinary humans regain control. While I wouldn’t put this at the top of my list of King’s books, it is a solid helping of the combination of mundane detail with devastating horror that he does so well.