Wastelands

"Wasteland" has become almost a whole genre in Chinese web literature; this book is a concentrated survey of that genre within Western genre fiction. Twenty stories, twenty kinds of apocalypse. The same collapsed world and civilization reset to zero: Stephen King writes about how obsession grows into a monster in the wilderness, George R. R. Martin about how strangers' kindness and suspicion tear at each other, Orson Scott Card about the last shred of human dignity at the end of the universe, and Paolo Bacigalupi about how "environmentalism" becomes a moral performance under resource scarcity. The book does not please readers with blood and explosions; it relies on the cool extrapolation beneath each premise: if order is withdrawn, what is left of people? Editor Adams has a steady eye for selection—among the twenty pieces there is hardly a fast-food story written purely for thrills; lengths vary, and reading it feels less like binge-reading a power fantasy than like having twenty masters' imaginations spread out before you, each telling a segment of the human world after doomsday. The language of the three translators—Yao Xianghui, Wang Meizi, and Geng Hui—is clean, and the terminology is handled reassuringly. If you treat the wasteland only as a battlefield, a stage for leveling up and fighting monsters, this book may feel "not satisfying enough"; but if you are willing to see the silence, hesitation, and tiny bits of kindness after the end, this is an excellent introduction and specimen.