April Apocalyptic Reads
A collection of original, stimulating interpretations of key texts by Cormac McCarthy, designed for students and edited and written by leading scholars in the field.
For generations, the Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster, who they consider to be less than human. When the autopsy of Matilda's sovereign reveals a surprising link between his death and her mother's suicide some quarter-century before, Aster retraces her mother's footsteps. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer and sowing the seeds of civil war, Aster learns there may be a way off the ship if she's willing to fight for it.
Norton Award finalist YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults 2016 Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Books of 2015 Book Riot Best of 2015 Buzzfeed 32 Best Fantasy Novels of 2015 ABC Best Books for Young Readers Los Angeles Times Summer Reading Locus Recommended Reading Wasp's job is simple. Hunt ghosts. And every year she has to fight to remain Archivist. Desperate and alone, she strikes a bargain with the ghost of a supersoldier. She will go with him on his underworld hunt for the long-long ghost of his partner and in exchange she will find out more about his pre-apocalyptic world than any Archivist before her. And there is much to know. After all, Archivists are marked from birth to do the holy work of a goddess. They're chosen. They're special. Or so they've been told for four hundred years. Archivist Wasp fears she is not the chosen one, that she won't survive the trip to the underworld, that the brutal life she has escaped might be better than where she is going. There is only one way to find out. Praise forArchivist Wasp: "Archivist Wasp is a gorgeous and complex book, featuring a deadly girl who traverses an equally deadly landscape. Wasp won me over, and she's sure to find fans among teens and grown-ups alike." -- Phoebe North, author ofStarglass "A tremendously inventive and smart novel.Archivist Wasp is like Kafka by way of Holly Black and Shirley Jackson, but completely original. Highly recommended." -- Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy "A gorgeous, disturbing, compelling book with a smart, complicated heroine who bestrides her post-apocalyptic world like a bewildered force of nature. Reading it was a wild ride and a thoroughly satisfying one." -- Delia Sherman, author ofThe Freedom Maze "One of the most revelatory and sublime books I've ever read,Archivist Wasp is a must-read for fans of post-apocalyptic fiction. Kornher-Stace is a genius, and I can't wait to see what she does next!" -- Tiffany Trent, author ofThe Unnaturalists "Brutal post-apocalypse meets sci-fi techno-thriller meets a ghost story for the ages in this astonishingly original novel from Nicole Kornher-Stace. You've never read anything likeArchivist Wasp, but once you have you'll be clamoring for more." -- Mike Allen, author ofUnseaming "Sharp as a blade and mythically resonant, Archivist Wasp is a post-apocalyptic ghost story unlike anything else I've read. Trust me, you want this book." -- Karina Sumner-Smith, author ofRadiant "Archivist Wasp turns destiny on its head, and it re-invents the world you know to do it. Strong. Fast. Addictive." -- Darin Bradley, author ofNoise "Goes off like a firecracker in the brain: the haunted landscape, the sure-footed, blistering prose -- and, of course, the heroine herself, the most excellent Archivist Wasp." -- Kelly Link, author ofGet in Trouble Praise for Nicole Kornher-Stace: "In richly textured, atmospheric prose, Kornher-Stace delivers a spellbinding tale of deception, betrayal, and the darker possibilities of playacting."--Booklist "Mesmerizing from the first page and once you get into its flow, a page turner to boot."--Fantasy Book Critic "Absorbing, exciting, intellectually fascinating, emotionally true, and well-crafted, bobbles and all."--Ideomancer
A fascinating and disturbing dystopian vision from a neglected sci-fi master, imagining an all too terrifying alternate ending to World War Inbsp;and its implications for the human race The year is 2041. Since the end of WWI, Berlin has been an enormous subterranean city, home to 300 million citizens who have never seen the sun, and presided over by the autocratic Hohenzollern dynasty. Every aspect of life is regimented; from controlled rations that are issued on the basis of work-for-food, to a press that works exclusively under the auspices of the Information Service. Christianity has been abolished and all breeding is carried out on the basis of strict eugenic principles. Lyman De Forrest, an American chemist, discovers a way of neutralizing Berlin's defenses and, assuming the identity of a dead German man, enters the city to discover its hidden truths. The first outsider for decades to enter the forbidden metropolis, he is horrified to find a society where women are kept in isolation for breeding or the pleasuring of high status men. Can De Forrest escape this living tomb? Published shortly after the end of WWI,nbsp;this tremendous example of early dystopian science fiction is thoughtnbsp;to have been the inspiration behind Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: 'We'll Not Go Home Again' provides a framework for our fascination with the apocalyptic events. The popular appeal of the end of the world genre is clear in movies, novels, and television shows. Even our political debates over global warming, nuclear threats, and pandemic disease reflect a concern about the possibility of such events. This popular fascination is really a fascination with survival: how can we come out alive? And what would we do next? The end of the world is not about species death, but about beginning again. This book uses postapocalyptic fiction as a terrain for thinking about the state of nature: the hypothetical fiction that is the driving force behind the social contract. The first half of the book examines novels that tell the story of the move from the state of nature to civil society through a Hobbesian, a Lockean, or a Rousseauian lens, including Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, Malevil by Robert Merle, and Into the Forest by Jean Hegland. The latter half of the book examines Octavia Butler's postapocalyptic Parable series in which a new kind of social contract emerges, one built on the fact of human dependence and vulnerability.
