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After the Apocalypse

3.62 of 5 stars 3.62 · rating details · 846 ratings · 212 reviews

The apocalypse was yesterday. These stories are today.

Following up on her first collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh explores the catastrophes, small and large, of twenty-first century life—and what follows after. What happens after the bird flu pandemic? Are our computers smarter than we are? What does the global economy mean for two young girls in China? Ar...more

Paperback, 188 pages

Published November 8th 2011 by Small Beer Press (first published October 24th 2011)

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Mar 24, 2012 karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: hey-shorty

when this came into the store, i thought "huzzah" because i already own two of her other books that looked really good. of course, i have not read them. this is the way i operate - i buy books and i squirrel them away until it feels right to read them, frequently owning several books by a single author who looks good to me, without having anything upon which to base that impression.it is a very peculiar kind of madness.but then mike reynolds reviewed this book,and he specifically recommended it...more when this came into the store, i thought "huzzah" because i already own two of her other books that looked really good. of course, i have not read them. this is the way i operate - i buy books and i squirrel them away until it feels right to read them, frequently owning several books by a single author who looks good to me, without having anything upon which to base that impression.it is a very peculiar kind of madness.but then mike reynolds reviewed this book,and he specifically recommended it to me. and so i read it. four months later. for me, this is a pretty good turnaround.

and he was right - this is an excellent, and consistent, collection. she has an ability that she shares with authors like barry unsworth or richard powers or (i am told) stewart o'nan, to write gracefully in a number of different styles and with a number of different foci. she is able to geek out in the kingdom of the blind and still write a perfect tough little sad piece of working-poor-struggling-to-transcend-circumstances in honeymoon, which was my clear favorite.

there is so much to admire here. so much to break your heart against.useless things is, among other things, a bitterly learned lesson about where to draw the line between being a good person and being a victim. and it is a perfection. the effect of centrifugal forces...i genuinely don't know where to start with discussing that one. i could write a thirty page paper on that story and only scratch the surface of its contribution to american literature.

after the apocalypse and the naturalist have less pure emotional appeal for me, but are so psychologically fascinating, they make my conscience itch. these characters are so refreshing. they are emotionally unmoored - clinically detached and determined to survive in a way that makes you root for them while never wanting to come across them in real life. it is all about the bottom line, here, and that line is survival, no matter what needs to be done to achieve it. amazingly complex characters for a short story.

and that's what angers me so much. short stories! why are you so short? these characters - i would love to see them in a variety of circumstances! i could read multiple novels set in the worlds she has presented here. size matters! and i want more!

so, to recap: five perfect stories in a nine-story collection. you definitely need to read this.(less)

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Mar 01, 2012 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Maureen McHugh has a knack—and I say 'knack' because it's even more elusive and intuitive than a talent—for investing each of her short stories with an immediately recognizable humanity, even when trafficking in genre tropes or the wantonly fantastical. In the premiere story 'The Naturalist,' the trappings of a traditional zombie story are elevated by an eminently human protagonist named Cahill whose thoughts and concerns aren't those of a caricatured horror movie hero—caught in a dumbshow of hi...more Maureen McHugh has a knack—and I say 'knack' because it's even more elusive and intuitive than a talent—for investing each of her short stories with an immediately recognizable humanity, even when trafficking in genre tropes or the wantonly fantastical. In the premiere story 'The Naturalist,' the trappings of a traditional zombie story are elevated by an eminently human protagonist named Cahill whose thoughts and concerns aren't those of a caricatured horror movie hero—caught in a dumbshow of hide-and-kill—but those of a naturalistic everyman. Cahill's cunning and practicality are matched by his moral ambiguity. He doesn't correspond either to the prevailing notions of heroism or villainy. He's a muddy character. And it's precisely this psychological muddiness which engages the reader and allows the story to transcend the rote of zombie survivalism tales. McHugh's precise and truthful rendering of what it means to be alive at the beginning of the twenty-first century similarly enlivens all of these stories with an unmistakable sympathy. All of our fears and failings are registered here, along with our doggedness and hope.

I suppose the unifying theme of the book is 'apocalypse' in a very broad, metaphorical sense. Only a few of the stories allude to a literal global cataclysm. Some of the apocalypses are only personal, but devastating in their own proportionate ways. Themes include economic collapse, artificial intelligence, pandemics, dirty bombs, and amnesia. The highlights are 'The Naturalist,' 'Useless Things,' and 'Kingdom of the Blind.' McHugh's only misstep here is the (thankfully) very short story 'Going to France'—a ditzy oddity about flying people. Or something. It's a conspicuous dud among the other eight very accomplished stories included here.

I suppose I ought to thank Gottlieb for badgering me into reading this with his typical spittle-flying hyperbole, but I just can't bring myself to. He said it was the best book of last year. He's probably right, but don't tell him. (less)

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Jan 17, 2012 Ceridwen rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Aerin, Jacob, maybe Alan Beard and Jessica Treat

Recommended to Ceridwen by: Mike Reynolds

Shelves: 9-11, omg-were-all-going-to-die, zombies, short-shories, america-and-environs, capital-l-labor, sci-fi, it-s-alive, reviewed

This book managed to hit all of my sweet spots for a short story collection: a meta-subject that I have more than just a passing interest in; an album-like exploration of related themes that has a casual, unshowy mastery of narrative voice; an emphasis on character over more precious concerns like making a novel-in-disguise or other spring-loaded plot devices. (Not that there is anything wrong with this, that is just not as interesting to me.) These stories are not about the apocalypse, but afte...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Joshua Nomen-Mutatio by: Ceridwen

Shelves: fiction, short-stories, dystopic, survivally

Despairing about the proliferation of the generally repetitive short story collection? Fear and tremble not, for After the Apocalypse is here to save the day.

Maureen F. McHugh’s collection continually conjured up the word "solid" and not in a patronizing way that one might use that word to politely describe an artistic effort that follows all the rules yet fails to captivate one’s attention or stimulate any of the other nerves in want of stimulation from art—but in the sense that it was taken i...more

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Sep 10, 2012 Veeral rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: post-apokalipsa, apokalipsa, anthology

I normally don’t read short stories. I feel that the characters just don’t have enough time to develop in a short story compared to a full length novel. But this weekend, as I was reading A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin, I had a sudden urge to read something that doesn’t have to be 1000 pages long. I had to read around 50-100 pages just for Tyrion Lannister to appear again (Jon, Arya and Theon Greyjoy are also cool though).

Anyway, so as I said earlier, reading something short really appe...more

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Jan 06, 2012 Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars

UGH, MAUREEN MCHUGH, I LOVE YOU.

Maureen McHugh hasn't published anything since Mothers and Other Monsters in 2005 and hasn't published a novel since Nekropolis in 2001 and for a while it seemed like she has abandoned fiction entirely to write online alternate reality games, and so when I saw that she had published a new collection of short stories I kind of lost my shit with excitement. I don't understand why Maureen McHugh doesn't get more acclaim. Like, I respect Ursula K. Leguin's work, and...more

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Apr 06, 2013 Alan rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Survivors

Recommended to Alan by: Previous work and a killer cover

Maureen F. McHugh doesn't really publish all that frequently—her standalone bibliography consists of just four novels and two short-story collections—but it's a real treat whenever she does. After the Apocalypse, one of those two collections, contains just nine short stories in one slim trade paperback, and six of them have already appeared elsewhere... but sometimes, as they say, good things come in small packages.

Its deceptively simple cover is the first indication that what's within might be...more Maureen F. McHugh doesn't really publish all that frequently—her standalone bibliography consists of just four novels and two short-story collections—but it's a real treat whenever she does. After the Apocalypse, one of those two collections, contains just nine short stories in one slim trade paperback, and six of them have already appeared elsewhere... but sometimes, as they say, good things come in small packages.

Its deceptively simple cover is the first indication that what's within might be extraordinary... the image cleverly inverts the classic Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Here, the clock reads five minutes after midnight... and most of the stories do in fact deal with the aftermath of one apocalypse or another.

The lead story didn't impress me all that much, I'll admit. "The Naturalist" is a straightforward riff on the zombie subgenre—not a bad one, but that trope is so terribly overplayed these days... I'd really like it if we could just declare a moratorium on zombies altogether for a decade or so, just to let the archetype recharge a little. Not gonna happen, but a guy can dream.

Then, though, with every story after that, I found myself getting more and more interested.

I first came to McHugh's writing through her sui generis 1992 novel China Mountain Zhang, and her gift for characterization, so apparent in that first work, comes through here too, in the people who inhabit each of her often rather ragged worlds. "Special Economics," for example, has a disaster in the background, but it's really a hopeful story about people helping each other to resist corporate exploitation. "Useless Things" is more explicitly post-apocalyptic, but even there McHugh focuses on the small-scale and human. And in "Kingdom of the Blind," a more explicitly science-fictional tale (I could almost see the ghost of Cory Doctorow hovering overhead)—I, too, wanted to write a sequel to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in which Mike comes back, so I could definitely relate to the narrator of that one...

In the end, I was wishing that this book were longer—and if that's my worst complaint, then this must be pretty good stuff after all...(less)

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Apr 05, 2013 Spike Gomes rated it 3 of 5 stars

I got this thinking it would be a collection of post-apocalyptic stories. Some of them are, but not in the sense of the usual tropes of the genre. If anything, as a previous reviewer noted, these stories really focus on the mundane aspects of the character's lives. There is a subdued restrained feel and inner emotional focus to these stories that really make them feel more in the tradition of literary fiction rather than science fiction. I don't mind, since I like both genres, but others might b...more

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Nov 06, 2012 Katie rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a book of short stories, each dealing with a different post-apocalyptic scenario (although to be honest, a couple of them are pretty obscure and it isn't clear what the post-apocalyptic situation is... they seem to be in contemporary times, with nothing out of the ordinary, unless I missed something). I enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction so this was a treat, especially since it was a bunch of different short stories all dealing with different dreary visions of the future. Very creative.

I rea...more

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Sep 04, 2012 Natalie rated it 3 of 5 stars

I really wanted to like this book, but overall it was a bit disappointing. I'd read "After the Apocalypse" (title story) on Storyville and really liked it--liked it so much so that I want my literature class to read it. I had big hopes for the rest of the collection, but it just didn't pan out. I like a couple of the others okay: The Naturalist, Useless Things. Most of the others were either boring, confusing, or just utterly forgettable. I could not make it through the one about the computer pr...more I really wanted to like this book, but overall it was a bit disappointing. I'd read "After the Apocalypse" (title story) on Storyville and really liked it--liked it so much so that I want my literature class to read it. I had big hopes for the rest of the collection, but it just didn't pan out. I like a couple of the others okay: The Naturalist, Useless Things. Most of the others were either boring, confusing, or just utterly forgettable. I could not make it through the one about the computer programmers and the AI computer. I tried, then I gave up. This is rare for me, as I'll usually finish as the ending of a short story can sometimes be totally redeeming, but I didn't finish (and I did skip ahead and read the end, but it was nothing special).

The thing that I think disappointed me the most was how average these other stories were. What I really liked about the title story and "The Naturalist" was that they were totally original. I'd not seen anyone write about apocalypse in this way. The idea that there are still many people who can live on and be more or less the same as always, while lives for others is either devastated or impossible is a different take. The others though, I feel like I've seen that story before. I know how that goes, and I was never really that interested.

My final complaint is a small thing, but something that, as a writer, really aggravated me. It's a sentence structure/word choice issue. Some many times a sentence was just clunky, unwieldy. I'd have to read a couple times to get the syntax straight. This is a silly problem--one that should have and could have been easily fixed. For example, at the end of "Useless Things" the very last words are "the handgun in my hand." Okay, I get that it's a handgun and it's in her hand, so she needs to say that, but the repeat of the word "hand" is unfortunate. There's no beauty in that and last words are so important. Why not just say "gun in my hand" or some adjective and "gun in my hand"? It would have been so much better. Again, I'm a writer and a little neurotic, so this bothers me. It probably wouldn't most readers.

After saying all that, though, I still do really like and appreciate "After the Apocalypse" (the title story) and will hopefully have my students read it later this semester. (less)

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Aug 16, 2012 Rick Urban rated it 4 of 5 stars

The good news is, many of us will survive the various end-of-the-world scenarios that befall mankind in this fascinating short story collection; it is also the bad news. For those who fear the end of order that the cataclysm foretells, there is the comfort of knowing that at the micro-level of our individual lives, friends and family will continue to disappoint, personalities will follow dependable trajectories, and the basics of existence will remain the same: find food, avoid danger, live to s...more

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Jul 13, 2012 Andrea Blythe rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fic-apoc-dystopia, fic-scifi, fic-zombies, fic-short-stories

In this collection of stories McHugh explores the ways life goes on after or in the face of catastrophes big and small. "The Naturalist" looks at the days of a criminal, who is banished to the zombie-infested outskirts of the world and expected to die—instead he becomes fascinated with the dead.

Set in China after a bird flu epidemic has killed thousands, "Special Economics" is about a woman who finds herself trapped within the economic system of a large corporation.

In "Useless Things" an artis...more

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Mar 09, 2012 Daniel Powell rated it 4 of 5 stars

There are some really great stories in After the Apocalypse, by Maureen F. McHugh. It's a 3.5/5 for me, so I'll round up in this case. "The Naturalist," "Special Economics" and "After the Apocalypse" were my favorite stories. These tales each had a sense of urgency, a narrative tension that begs the reader to work quickly toward the pay-off. That's a double-edged sword with McHugh's writing, though, because there is some serious beauty in her prose. She's a keen observational writer, and she tur...more There are some really great stories in After the Apocalypse, by Maureen F. McHugh. It's a 3.5/5 for me, so I'll round up in this case. "The Naturalist," "Special Economics" and "After the Apocalypse" were my favorite stories. These tales each had a sense of urgency, a narrative tension that begs the reader to work quickly toward the pay-off. That's a double-edged sword with McHugh's writing, though, because there is some serious beauty in her prose. She's a keen observational writer, and she turns a phrase well.

In "Useless Things," she effectively pegs the circumstances attendant to the financial meltdown in America. She uses setting to effectively add dimension to her characters:

The suburbs are full of walkaway houses--places where homeowners couldn't meet the mortgage payments and just left, the lots now full of trash and windows gone. People who could went north for water. People who couldn't did what people always do when an economy goes soft and rotten: they slid, to rented houses, rented apartments, living in their cars, living with their families, living on the street.

But inside Sherie's parents' home it's still twenty years ago. The countertops are granite. The big-screen plasma TV gets hundreds of channels. The freezer is full of meat and frozen Lean Cuisine. The air conditioner keeps the temperature at a heavenly seventy-five degrees. Sherie's mother, Brenda, is slim, with beautifully styled graying hair. She's a psychologist with a small practice.

Indeed, one of the charms of this collection is the variety of crises explored throughout the stories. The apocalyptic narratives run the gamut, from disease to zombie problems and financial ruin.

A few stories didn't quite deliver on the promise set up in their first acts, sometimes grinding to a halt in their focus on scientific minutia, which took the spotlight off of the characters.

Still, this is a good collection and well worth the attention of fans of speculative fiction and post-apocalyptic stories.(less)

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Mar 01, 2012 Keith Akers rated it 4 of 5 stars

I don't do a lot of fiction, but this is a good book for anyone interested in what resource depletion may be like in a future of "peak oil" (or similar human-induced disasters). It's similar to James Kunstler's "World Made by Hand" in that it details what the near future, after some human-induced disaster like disease or peak oil, might be like. The difference is that these are short stories, so the author creates a whole set of different worlds to explore, not just one. People will like, or dis...more I don't do a lot of fiction, but this is a good book for anyone interested in what resource depletion may be like in a future of "peak oil" (or similar human-induced disasters). It's similar to James Kunstler's "World Made by Hand" in that it details what the near future, after some human-induced disaster like disease or peak oil, might be like. The difference is that these are short stories, so the author creates a whole set of different worlds to explore, not just one. People will like, or dislike, different stories, but the whole thing is worth reading, just because we need to be trying to imagine or think about these things.

One thing I like is that she describes how things appear to individuals, rather than taking an omnipotent viewpoint. The reader is sometimes deliberately left in the dark about why the world has come to this state. The point is to describe how the apocalypse "feels" to people. Sometimes the date of the story is vague but in one case a story can be dated precisely to August 16, 2022, just about a decade from now. This ("Useless Things"), or the final story, were my favorites. To describe how apocalypse "feels" is the import of the story on the zombie apocalypse; it's not because McHugh foresees a possible future in which humans will need to fend off zombies, it's a story about us and how we react to unsavory events.

SPOILER ALERT: I found "Going to France" to be a very challenging story, basically surrealistic, and nothing really apocalyptic is ever referred to. The only sense I can make out of it is that this is a dream sequence (after all, flying is something that usually happens in dreams). This story is attractive but has puzzled a lot of people. While the zombie story (the very first story) was also challenging and made me think, it was sort of a turn-off that the main character was so violent. The final story "After the Apocalypse" was also nice, also made me think, about the ways that "apocalypse" arrives in the breakdown of social conventions into a more primitive level; even though no one gets physically hurt in this story, it just leaves you thinking that whatever disaster they have been fleeing from has "hit them" at the end. The story about the lost boy is similar in structure; it shows that "the apocalypse" is not just about bombs or millions of deaths, it's also about human relations. None of the stories had a really depressing or dysfunctional ending; the key characters are trooping on. So even when I didn't like the characters, or how the story came out, the author makes you think about things.

Many, many years ago I read a collection of science fiction short stories by Robert Heinlein called "The Green Hills of Earth." It had tales of exploring outer space. This collection reminds me of that collection, but oh how our ideas of the glorious future have changed.(less)

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Feb 19, 2012 Charles Dee Mitchell rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-sf

The world is in the process of ending in a wide variety of ways in McHugh's short stories. Life will not end completely, but it will be irrevocably changed and made more miserable. Causes vary from the sensational --zombies!--to the sorts of pandemics and financial/societal collapse readers will find more dishearteningly believable.

in Special Economics, bird flu has killed a billion Chinese, the labor market it tough, and employers are unscrupulous. But the two enterprising heroines find a way t...more

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Jan 28, 2012 Shaun Duke rated it 5 of 5 stars

Collections of short stories are still the hardest thing for me to review, which invariably means the following review will be flawed both methodologically and stylistically. But perhaps I can move past this by way of the interconnected-ness of the stories in Maureen F. McHugh's After the Apocalypse. Unlike most collections, McHugh's stories revolve around the same premise in the same world: something has gone terribly wrong with our world; the nine stories in After the Apocalypse are about thos...more Collections of short stories are still the hardest thing for me to review, which invariably means the following review will be flawed both methodologically and stylistically. But perhaps I can move past this by way of the interconnected-ness of the stories in Maureen F. McHugh's After the Apocalypse. Unlike most collections, McHugh's stories revolve around the same premise in the same world: something has gone terribly wrong with our world; the nine stories in After the Apocalypse are about those who have survived, or are surviving.

That's essentially what this collection is about: how human beings respond to catastrophe. But, mostly, the collection about survival, without all the exotic images our post-apocalyptic movies show us. There are no grand heroes here, nor an assurance that "things are turning around." These are stories caught in the middle between the moment of catastrophe, the moment
immediately after, and the intermediate moments between "the world as it was" and "the better world to come." And it's that focus which makes After the Apocalypse one of the most beautiful literary feats of 2011.

Despite following a similar theme, each of McHugh's stories is distinct in vision and voice, from a young man imprisoned in a city compound infested with zombies in "The Naturalist" to a woman trying to make a living in the wastelands along the U.S. border with Mexico in "Useless Things"; from Chinese women trying to free themselves from indentured labor to Chinese corporations in "Special Economics" to a magazine-style article about a young man who survived a dirty bomb attack, but lost his identity in "The Lost Boy: A Reporter At Large"; from two computer programmings debating whether their AI is trying to communicate in "The Kingdom of the Blind" to the sudden and strange shared desire for travel to France in "Going to France"; from a young woman's attempts to make something of her life after a failed marriage in "Honeymoon" to a family struggling through the after-effects of a time-dilated disease spread through food in "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces" to, finally, a woman and her young daughter struggling their way north after America's economy and borders collapse, and also struggling with themselves in "After the Apocalypse." The variety of perspectives and content produces a palimpsest of narrative; in other words, each story seems to layer on top of the one that proceeded it, turning what in other collections would be a disparate set of worlds viewed through a particular gaze into a set of stories that feel inherently collaborative. What one story cannot do due to the limits of space, the next might.

Paul Kincaid has argued that "McHugh's approach to the apocalypse is oblique, a concern with the personal, the individual or family unit, rather than the devastation that surrounds them" (from Strange Horizons). He's right. The palimpsest that is McHugh's collection is perhaps driven by the intense personal nature of her narratives. No story in this collection is about the apocalypse-that-was. We never see the events that led McHugh's characters to a relatively solitary life along the border ("Useless Things") or to make a break for the city to make something of herself ("Special Economics"). We only learn about the catastrophes in retrospect, often through the eyes of characters who no more know what happened than any of us can say, with any certainty, what exactly happened on 9/11. Complex events are compressed into single-strain narratives. The effect is wondrous, if not because it's refreshing to see a different approach to catastrophe/apocalypse, then certainly because McHugh's stories, by and large, are beautiful.

That's not to suggest that every story in this collection succeeds in what I've interpreted as a narratory path. "Honeymoon" leaves something to be desired, though the only reason I can muster is that the story never felt like it belonged in the collection, and, perhaps, in comparison to stories like "Special Economics," "Useless Things," or "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces," it falls short of the mark, both on a personal and narrative level. Similarly, "The Kingdom of the Blind" and "Going to France," while interesting enough, don't quite approach the grim personal nature of the other stories in the collection. The personal, I think, is where McHugh shines, as demonstrated by "The Naturalist" (the criminal), "Special Economics" (the exploited), "Useless Things" (the struggling), "The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large" (the broken survivor), "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces" (those who survive the dead or dying), and "After the Apocalypse" (the disconnected). These stories provide a kind of funhouse mirror in which to examine humanity, distorted through a world that just might be. The effect is chilling and humbling, because McHugh shows us how fragile, and yet beautiful and unique, human beings really.

After the Apocalypse is a thorough, if not unsettling, journey into the human psyche after catastrophe, at once thrilling, compelling, and disturbing. This collection alone proves that McHugh is a force to be reckoned with in the world of genre, for her simple-but-beautiful prose, evocative imagery, and raw human explorations make After the Apocalypse one of the best works of SF of this decade. You can expect to see this book appear in my WISB Awards in February.(less)

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Dec 05, 2011 Ryandake rated it 5 of 5 stars

i used to be a great devourer of short fiction--ate stories like popcorn--but in recent years i find that i need the depth that only a full-length novel can bring. maybe it's just how much time you spend reading a novel, comparatively. i don't know. but i like complexity these days a lot more than i like small, jewel-like perfection.

and so i bounced around the bookstore aisle with joy when i saw a new maureen f. mchugh, even a slender one, and then deflated somewhat when i saw it was short stori...more i used to be a great devourer of short fiction--ate stories like popcorn--but in recent years i find that i need the depth that only a full-length novel can bring. maybe it's just how much time you spend reading a novel, comparatively. i don't know. but i like complexity these days a lot more than i like small, jewel-like perfection.

and so i bounced around the bookstore aisle with joy when i saw a new maureen f. mchugh, even a slender one, and then deflated somewhat when i saw it was short stories.

but you know, short maureen f. mchugh is still better than most people's novels. and this collection does not disappoint.

i don't know how she manages to make you feel like you've read a novel, even only in the space of some few pages. paolo bacigalupi can do that; louise erdrich can do that; a few others who are true masters of the short form can. reading one of these stories is truly falling down the rabbit-hole--you are BAM! in the world of the story, and so near the thoughts and feelings of the characters, that it's as if there had been a couple hundred pages leading up to it that you just forgot you'd read.

the first and last stories are standouts i will not likely ever forget. one or two are, well, let's be honest, meh. all in all it left me as usual wishing i could speed her pen a bit, and feed me more.

one oddball thought as i was reading this collection. so many of the characters are not well-educated, middle-class-and-up white people. occasionally their diction seemed more elevated than was likely, but eh, i can live with that. it's just so refreshing to hang out with people who don't all sound like they dropped out of a $35,000-a-year college catalog. it seems like america is forgetting it still has a working class, there are so few books about them. so it was a distinct pleasure to read so many stories of the not-affluent.

and it got me thinking--what would a newspaper look like if it really took the working class as its audience? i'm pretty certain it would not look like the New York Times. U.S. culture has stratified so much economically that reading a working-class newspaper would probably feel like reading a newspaper from another nation. "How to Get an Extra 3,000 Miles on Your Transmission". "Giving Your 12-Year-Old Confidence to Babysit Younger Siblings". i don't know when this happened... i miss the days (i swear, they're somewhere in my memory) when working-class people had the respect of society.(less)

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Nov 29, 2011 Andrew Neal rated it 4 of 5 stars

None of these stories have a punchline. Rather, they just showcase short but possibly important periods of time in the protagonists' lives.

It's at least the third book I've read in the last few weeks* which included the statement that XXXXX (frequently, but not always, the XXXXX is the act of killing**) isn't like it is on TV (or in the stories), which I think may be the most rampant cliche in modern genre fiction. It was in two of these stories, matter of fact, but it didn't diminish them indi...more

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Oct 03, 2011 Justin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: dystopia, read-2011, 2011-release, small-beer-press

I get e-mails from time to time offering me electronic copies of self-published or small press titles for review. I usually say yes, with the caveat that I may never actually read it or get past the first chapter. Most of them are not very good. Once in a while though there's a real home run. After the Apocalypse, a collection of short stories by Maureen F. McHugh,is a home run.

I'd never heard of McHugh prior to receiving an e-mail about her collection. It turns out she's published four novels a...more

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Jan 17, 2012 Alex rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, post-apocalypse

The short story: the scourge of mankind. I bought After The Apocalypse because it showed up on best of 2011 lists. And some of it is amazing, but some of the stories let the side down. It's probably not coincidental that the stories that don't sit as well as the others are those with typos or words that simply have no place in otherwise complete sentences.

Looking at the listing of nine stories, approximately five of them qualify as "very good", two as "kind of pointless" and two as "nearly there...more

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Apr 11, 2012 pax rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, female-writers, science-fiction, own-english, lit-usa-canada, favs-and-recs, short-fiction

[The official book website of the publisher links to some of the stories which appeared online elsewhere. I highly recommend reading them if I could not convince you to get the book. And then getting the book.]

That said: What a great, strong collection! I'm most impressed by the voices: there is a male convict and a female elderly artist and a not-yet-twenty Chinese girl. And every one of them is distinct, clear, believable. Some are likeable, others repulsive, but never without a clear sense of...more

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Nov 14, 2012 Sue rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, dystopia, post-apocalyptic

This book is an interesting mix of short stories, only a couple of them along the lines of your traditional post-apocalyptic genre than others. Most really just tap into a what seems to be the modern mindset of Americans today due to modern economic and/or environmental stresses, etc., and the ways different types of people deal with them. Only three of the stories fall into the realm of what I'd consider post-apocalyptic or dystopian (i.e., a collapse of society in general or a drastic change f...more

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Jan 10, 2012 Ronya rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: post-apocalyptic

I've never read any Maureen McHugh before, and now I think I'll go track down her other stuff. It's difficult to say something like "I really enjoyed these post-apocalyptic stories" without people looking at you funny. Eh, I'll say it anyway. McHugh's stories in this collection, set against various apocalypses--war, zombies (she'll make you take that one seriously, when these days it's so hard to because Everyone Has a Zombie Novel), economic breakdown, bird flu plague--have no punchlines, but a...more

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Oct 11, 2011 Tammyjo Eckhart rated it 4 of 5 stars

Nine stories set in the immediate aftermath of some tragedy that might be called an apocalypse in the eyes of the survivors. The events leading fewer and fewer humans alive are discussed in a round about way which makes perfect sense since if you are surviving you are unlikely to be analyzing or going into great details about what happened.

The apocalypses range from zombies to illness to energy and water finally hitting their limits for mankind. Three of the stories are outstanding: "The Natural...more

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May 28, 2013 Rob rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

Ever since I read the wonderful China Mountain Zhang last year I've been looking forward to reading more of McHugh's work. Don't know why it took me so long to get ahold of this.

Single author short story collections are usually a mixed bag. This one works well because it is a very rare breed, a single author *thematic* short story collection. The title is a bit of a misnomer, though I can't think of a better one. There are, strictly speaking, no almost no actual apocalypses in the book. The tit...more

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Nov 26, 2011 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Ceridwen, Sock Puppet, karen

There's a subset of sci-fi labeled mundane by author (and sort of apostle) Geoff Ryman: eschewing the hyperboles of operatic interstellar shenanigans, far-future (and -flung) technowizardry, and the widescreen scope of global Event, these fictions think local, concentrating on fine-grained character studies in the light of some imaginable, even foreseeable future. How do we live, when X? What is the psychology of citizens and the ethos of community under conditions Y?

McHugh's collection may fail...more There's a subset of sci-fi labeled mundane by author (and sort of apostle) Geoff Ryman: eschewing the hyperboles of operatic interstellar shenanigans, far-future (and -flung) technowizardry, and the widescreen scope of global Event, these fictions think local, concentrating on fine-grained character studies in the light of some imaginable, even foreseeable future. How do we live, when X? What is the psychology of citizens and the ethos of community under conditions Y?

McHugh's collection may fail the strict DNA testing for mundane--one story follows a sudden epidemic of people flying, and most (see title) occur after some more serious epidemic, collapse, apocalypses with zombies, tainted chicken nuggets, or some unnamed econo-energy breakdown that unravels the social fabric we now know. But mostly the author ignores or slides right by the cause or narration of the Big Breakdown, instead zeroing in on this woman, that man, these individuals just getting by. And the stories are smart, heartbreaking, riveting. The opener ("The Naturalist") seems at first like my standout: a(nother) zombieverse, but here in a JohnCarpenteresque move the undead are corralled in Cleveland, and the zone is used as a penal colony. We follow one such prisoner as he observes the walkers, trying to figure out how they behave. He is not--they never are--a particularly good man, and the story unsettles, and rings new tones from, the standard zombie tropes. But it's more of a showboat plot than McHugh's norm, even though its central strengths are found in every tale here: the short fiction writer's precision with detail, a wit even in the telling of terrible things, an ability to reveal depths and layers of a character's psychology through action (rather than an expository inner monologue). As I've sat on my reactions for a week or so, I've circled back around a good number of these tales: a single woman trying to do good deeds with passing homeless men, in a southwest after economic collapse; a programmer struggles to make sense of strange behavior from a sophisticated computer network; a divorced woman makes some extra money in drug trials; a woman wanders another blasted American landscape with her teenaged daughter, and makes a hard choice.

The more I thought about them, my rankings kept shifting, and my memories of the book deepening, strengthening. It's easily one of the best I read this year.(less)

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Jan 27, 2013 Karen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction, post-apocalyptic, short-stories, adult

I should have loved this book! I like short stories for their low commitment level and their immediacy, and I am always up for a creative, thoughtful, post-apocalyptic story.

Maybe the first story in the collection, "The Naturalist," set the bar too high. Its story of a future in which prisoners are locked up in a zombie-infested area was both disturbing and thought-provoking, and I loved it. One other gem in this collection is "Honeymoon," which I liked for its main character, an overweight, pra...more

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Jul 14, 2012 Jenny rated it 3 of 5 stars

Do not read this book if you’re looking for escapist fiction. Usually sci-fi takes us out of our everyday world, but these stories of survival in the near future feel a lot like the present day. It’s just that Something has happened - a war, an epidemic, an economic collapse. But these are the things that, even now, everybody is worrying about. So it feels almost inevitable.

People are scrounging around, trying to survive, trying to make a living, and dealing with the same old corruption that we...more

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May 08, 2013 Craig DiLouie rated it 4 of 5 stars

AFTER THE APOCALYPSE is a collection of short stories by Maureen F. McHugh that concern people coping with massive change. The aftermath of a bird flu pandemic, a plague of mad cow-like disease, zombies, a computer that becomes sentient, economic collapse–the scenarios are varied and interesting. The stories focus less on the sensational and more on average people trying to live their lives in the face of massive change. The worlds McHugh creates are believable and colored with disruption, and t...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Amanda Morgan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

Huh, forgot to add this one. I thought it was a pretty uneven collection-- all of the stories were well written, but some were more to my taste than others. I think McHugh is at her best when she's speculating, and some of the stories included in this volume hewed a little closer to literary fiction than I generally like. The opening story, "The Naturalist," is a horrific take on the ever-popular zombie genre, and it stayed with me long after I finished the book. I think my favorite piece is "Sp...more

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About Maureen F. McHugh

Maureen F. McHugh (born 1959) is a science fiction and fantasy writer.

Her first published story appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1989. Since then, she has written four novels and over twenty short stories. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang (1992), was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula Award, and won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. In 1996 she won a Hugo Award for h...more

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“Sydney did not believe in life after death, but in her experience, admitting this could lead to long and complicated discussions in which people seemed to think that since she did not believe in God or the afterlife, there was nothing to stop her from becoming an ax murderer.” — 4 people liked it

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