Out of the Ruins edited by Preston Grassmann

(Titan Books, 2021)

Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

Apocalypses and end-times are among the most popular sf subjects, but there’s always something slightly odd about the combination of anxiety and pleasure in reading them. “Apocalypse” is more than “disaster” or even “catastrophe”. It really is the underlining finality of everything. Hence, a collection of “apocalypse” stories is bound to be uneven and challenging. There is almost certainly going to be an overload in a series of stories which rip up and throw away human history in inventive ways.

That said, editor Grassmann reminds us of the original Biblical word apokalypsis, which actually means disclosure or revelation (as in the “Revelation” of St John the Divine) of hidden or secret knowledge. The stories here have been selected in line with the broader, original meaning, together with an underlying sense that this apocalypse/revelation can, or should, “acknowledge that each of us can excavate something of value from the ash of our end-times and make something new”. This asks more from the stories than a simple charting of variant versions of The Ending Of It All. They range from the harrowing incursion of the monstrous (Anna Tambour’s “The Age of Fish, Post-flowers”, in which we never quite learn what the “orms”, which seem to have corralled the narrator’s community in their block, are ) to the mysterious (China Mièville’s “Watching God”, in which a population watches ships come and go, to the comic (Paul Di Filippo’s “The Rise and Fall of Whistle-Pig City”). They include a distinctly odd (though by no means unsuccessful) cybernoir narrative, “Malware Park” by Nikhil Singh, and a redemptive posthuman post-Apocalypse, “How the Monsters Found God” by John Skipp and Autumn Christian. There are poems (by Clive Barker and D.R.G. Sugawara) and parables; original fiction and reprints (including a rare treat, Samuel R. Delany’s extract from the never completed “The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities”, originally published in 1996 in The Review of Contemporary Fiction). All in all, quite a mixture.

There certainly have been conventional “falls of civilisations” in the past of some of these stories, such as Lavie Tidhar’s “The Green Caravanserai”, in which scavengers along the Red Sea uncover technology and weaponry from half-forgotten wars, but the endings of these stories avoid the clichés and stereotypes of “catastrophe fiction”. The progress of an Earth Abides/The Stand-type plague is charted in Carmen Maria Machado’s “Inventory” through the memories of a “last survivor” charting their sexual experiences. But in Charlie Jane Anders’ “As Good As New” there is a genie in a bottle who has been granting wishes, reversing apocalypses (and thus creating the unintended consequences that lead to new ones) on the instructions of a succession of other “last survivors”. Ramsey Campbell, in “Reminded” shows people dealing with a world in which memories have been wiped by forces unknown. Emily St John Mandel’s “Mr Thursday” revisits and recasts the time-travel story in which someone intervenes in another person’s life, to have her agent trying (but failing) to make a change out of simple human sympathy rather than simply following his instructions. Kaaron Warren’s “Exurbia” is certainly a personal apocalypse (the protagonist is thrown out of his tower-block early on in this story), but the unusual beginning allows us an insight into this future which, more than many stories in the collection offers a vivid picture of a world which is both familiar and other.

In the long-ago days when I was applying for jobs most people would avoid but were good “career-moves”, I was advised never to talk about “problems” but “challenges” or “opportunities”. Hence I was mildly amused by the rhetorical question in the blurb “can we turn the cataclysm into an opportunity?” But the hope presented at the conclusions of many of these stories is, as in “Inventory” and “Mr Thursday”, or Nick Mamatas’ “The Man You Flee At Parties”, often the result of someone confronting their own personal apokalypsis and thus makes sense. It is true that in some stories, even some of the better ones, the grasping for redemption and hope does head towards rather saccharine comfort, although even as I wonder whether there is such a thing as “cosy Apocalypse”, I find myself admitting that individual tastes are going to differ widely on this issue. Just as so much Utopian fiction crashes and burns on the troubling issue of waving away the mountains of human striving and misery that have built a better world, so rebuilding from the Apocalypse can likewise ignore the fact that for every fictional protagonist who finds redemption, millions of others may have been crushed.

The best stories are those which revisit, but do not repeat, the standard themes of Apocalyptic sf, and those in which it is quite clear that the author has understood quite what has caused this “apocalypse” even as the reader has to puzzle it out. And which are less “message” stories than stories about individuals facing individual dilemmas. We see this in the Mièville story and in Tambour’s “The Age of Fish, Post-Flowers”, in Nina Allan’s “A Storm in Kingstown” when the temporal location of the story only gradually comes clear, and perhaps Jeffrey Thomas’s “The Endless Fall”, which begins with what seems to be a survivor regaining consciousness in what seems to be an escape pod. Given the range of style and theme, reading straight though the anthology is possibly not to be recommended. Nevertheless, there is a wide variety of storytelling approaches in this anthology, and despite my caveats above, it is worth reading, a story or two at a time, and savouring the difference that you will find.

Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.