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Feb 14, 2011

Jessica rated it:

This summer, I had a bit of a run-in with post-apocalyptic literature; fun, right?

In the end, I wound up with a slight case of apocalyptic hysteria and couldn't sleep for several weeks - but, on the plus side, I also discovered this little gem of a book. As all of the year end "best of" lists emerge, I've been surprised that it hasn't shown up even once, because it was really nicely done. Using a series of interlinked short stories (which is not, in my opinion, an easy rou More...

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Dec 18, 2010

Traci rated it:

In an attempt to take a break from my normal reading fare (i.e., more paranormal stuff), I decided to run through my I-want-to-read-this-someday-down-the-road list and see if anything looked good. This seemed to fit the bill - definitely not supernatural, and short to boot. I placed my reserve and when it came, I checked it out thinking I might eventually get around to it.

It didn't take long to start reading it, and once I started, I found I couldn't stop. There's something about thi More...

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Oct 16, 2010

Boyd rated it:

I'm not sure what makes this little Book of Nightmares a story collection rather a novel, other than the fact its author says so. There's nothing particularly discrete about its subsections, and I can't see any one of them standing up all that well on its own.

But that's a tiny quibble about a very interesting, if uneven, book. The prose is one of its real pleasures: it's economical without being either flat or--like THE ROAD--ostentatiously stark. It's also, and not infrequently, More...

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Oct 03, 2010

Simon rated it:

Interesting and not quite what I expected. The book follows an unnamed narrator through nine self-contained episodes, starting in the year 2000 and ending (as far as I could work out) in c. 2040. It’s a short book and the prose is spare so rather than a detailed and complicated vision of mankind’s immediate future we get some vivid passages on a first-person scale with a strong sense of environmental and social disorder lurking behind and alongside the narrative(s). This includes some fright More...

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Sep 10, 2010

Jason rated it:

This is not a book for everyone. It is billed as a collection of short stories, and it is indeed divided into 9 separately titled and able to stand alone stories, but it also provides no table of contents and reads in a linear fashion, following the same protagonist, and so is a novel in stories.

It opens with the protagonist as a small boy on the eve of the Y2K scare, as they flee the city for the countryside at the boy's maternal grandparents. They are leaving because the father is More...

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Apr 19, 2010

Schnaucl rated it:

Three and a half stars.

This is a first novel, but I would not have guessed that if I hadn't read the book jacket. The writing is polished with a nice flow.

The book is really snapshots of the main character's life as the world goes to hell (and maybe rebuilds?). The first chapter takes place when the main character is 10 years old and his father is convinced that Y2K will destroy civilization as we know it so he bundles up his family and drives them to his wife's parents More...

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Feb 01, 2010

The Blurb rated it:

Steven Amsterdam's "Things we didn't see coming" is a series of scenes from a future where an event (only vaguely hinted at) has caused societal collapse.

We never find out the name of the central character who is the storyteller - beginning from the eve of the event, where he is a child - age unclear.

Each chapter is a new point in time, describing life in a chaotic world, with challenges ranging from lack of water, to ceaseless rain, to disease, to pestilenc More...

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Oct 10, 2009

Paul rated it:

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher, Pantheon Books.

Steven Amsterdam is a native New Yorker working in Melbourne, Australia. Things we didn't see coming is this ex-pat's collection of linked short stories in an alternate history where things after Y2k went a little...wrong. A

The protagonist is never named either, and we follow him and the world for years after Y2k's troubles (and more troubles in the course of the stories) have led to a post-apocalyp More...

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Nov 20, 2010

Emily rated it:

I think I didn't get this book. The concept of moving through time so quickly for each chapter wasn't so much interesting as distracting. I kept turning the pages back wondering what happened in between and where the other characters suddenly went. What the hell happened in the years between chapter 4 and 5? How old is the narrator now? Who the hell are these people??

I ended up just floating through the narrative, not really interested but not totally disinterested. It was short and I More...

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Aug 01, 2010

Skipper rated it:

Things We Didn't See Coming is one of those wonderfully unexpected books, a wolf in sheep's clothing in a way. It's short and unassuming in appearance, only 200 pages long, and that with fairly large font. It reminds me of my favorite Vonnegut books in the way it packs every page with meaning; there is nothing extraneous, no frills and no filler. (Apologies to Vonnegut for my use of the much-hated semicolon there.) It's also not what you could call a fun, easy read, but is instead terrifyingly h More...

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May 29, 2010

Pete rated it:

It's a lighter post(sort of)-apocalypse.

There are some interesting elements to the book, for sure. The style of having a series of short stories that take us through the narrator's life allow us to see the re-crumbled society, some of the middle, and then the end.

There are some really good scenes in here, but if you're looking for a sort of action-packed apocalypse/survival thing, this isn't your best bet.

The two stars are only two because the book went into a More...

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Apr 23, 2010

Patrick rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Feb 01, 2012

Leonie rated it:

What I like most about this is the scale; the person by person day by day version of life after the apocolyptic disaster. There's no big shiny concept or plot. The concept of constant coping amidst battering or uncertainty, and how that shapes an ordinary person's life, is all that's on offer. I liked the cynicism and the occasional moment of moral panic that still came across as cynical to me. I thought the writing style was confident, but still could have really made the novel if it had be More...

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Jun 27, 2010

David rated it:

I finished reading Steven Amsterdam's Things We Didn't See Coming a few days ago, and I was very glad. The book is nine stories loosely set in a similar post-apocalyptic future, and most of them are quite downbeat, depressing, and cynical in their takes on human nature. Worse, the future that Amsterdam envisions is somewhere between statist and totalitarian, but the amazing part is that the people living in it don't rebel at all against it. The presumption is that all purpose and sense of morali More...

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Jan 23, 2012

Kat rated it:

Things We Didn’t See Coming is the story of one young boy, 9 years old on the eve of the millennium, and his subsequent journey through a world irrevocably changed by Y2K. As the world falls slowly apart and suffers through drought, flood, fire and disease, he teeters on the fence of petty crime and respectable government employment and experiences all facets of the evolution of human civilization.

The writing is beautifully stark, poetic and chilling, and the story twists and turns al More...

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Feb 11, 2010

Liviu rated it:

From my FBC review,a discussion of the each story with the first sentence or so excerpted:

1:What We Know Now
"For the first time, Dad is letting me help pack the car, but only because it’s getting to be kind of an emergency."

The narrator at 14 on New Year's Eve 1999-2000 and the beginning of the "troubles". The one pure mainstream story, it seems a later addition for the sake of completion but the last story connects back here and illuminat More...

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Apr 03, 2011

Kirsty rated it:

This was an interesting take on the post-apocalyptic genre. It was advertised as a collection of short stories and is structured this way, however it is more of a novel that is serialised over the protagonist's life. I struggled with whether to rate this a 3 or a 4 as to be honest it's more a 3.5 but I settled with a 3 because whilst I did enjoy it, it didn't capture me.

It was kind of like The Road in that we don't actually know what happened for the world to end up like it is, and w More...

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Feb 17, 2010

Taffnerd rated it:

Each section of this book is a snapshot of the world of the narrator. We first meet him as a young boy on New Years eve 1999, fleeing with his family in a Y2K panic. Next he is a teenager in a world where someting unnamed has gone wrong. He and his grandparents are Urbans who are not welcome outside the city; the Rurals have all the food and most of the land and want to keep it that way. Then, he is working for the government, relocating people who have been displaced by massive climate upheaval More...

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Feb 11, 2010

Lisa rated it:

“They never saw it coming.” Often meant as a comfort, this statement carries with it the scent of ignorance — blissful, willful or otherwise. Should they have known? Should they have looked? Should they have asked?
Most of the people in “Things We Didn’t See Coming,” a sharp debut from Steven Amsterdam, not only didn’t see things coming, they refuse to see them once they’re here.
The book consists of nine separate but connected stories, all told by the same nameless narrator at vario More...

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Apr 14, 2010

Katherine rated it:

I'm always wary of books of short stories. Maybe it's because I like to sink my teeth into characters and settings and plots, and sometimes short stories don't give you a chance, or they end just as you're getting invested and you're left hanging, wishing there was more.

So I read the first story in this book with trepidation. The protagonist, as a boy, is fleeing the city with his parents on the eve of Y2K. Tension is high. His mother is detached and complacent. His father is highly More...

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Jul 16, 2010

Adrienne rated it:

A dystopian set of short stories, all with the same narrator at different stages in his life. The first story begins on the eve of Y2K, as the narrator's father flees the city with his family in case of impending doom. I imagine in this alternate reality, all the things we were scared of at Y2K actually happened. Another story seems to deal with the Avian Flu virus causing mass infections and death. Characters appear in multiple stories, so you are able to track how the narrator's life meshes wi More...

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Apr 02, 2010

Amy marked it as to-read

This collection of short stories was released in February and is definitely going to get some big press. The author, Steven Amsterdam, is a native New Yorker who moved to Australia in 2003. He is youngish and it comes through in the feel of these stories: one unlike any others I can remember. I’ve read many collections before, but often it seems they are told by an older ‘voice’, usually an introspective older man or woman. In the case of my beloved Tim Winton short stories, the voice changes th More...

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Aug 28, 2010

Katie rated it:

This was one of those books where the topic and idea itself turned out to be much more interesting to me than the execution. This book describes a near-future alternative reality postapocalypse. Something in our very recent history turned out differently than it did in reality, and everything went awry from then on. It follows one man's progression through the years from childhood through middle age and he lives in this new postapocalyptic world, and how the world changes (chaos and famine, foll More...

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Dec 01, 2010

Thomas rated it:

Beginning with the threat of the Y2K disaster. Amsterdam takes on a journey through a world that is quickly deteriorating. We catch glimpses of this world every few years as we follow our narrator on his incredible journey through a world that quickly becomes unrecognizable. The thing that stopped me from enjoying more is that we never get to really learn about what is happening, what has happened and why. We simply drift in and out of the narrator's life catching only pieces of the world. Is th More...

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Dec 09, 2011

Shawn rated it:

I genuinely enjoyed reading this book, but it had flaws. This book provides segments of our character's life, living in a near-apocalyptic US. Each section gives us a few days of our character's life, jumping decades ahead, leaving big gaps and questions. We never really get to know the character, making it difficult to truly care about him.

But what works for the book is less about our character and more about the intrigue of how the world has changed as time progresses. Amsterdam does More...

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Dec 15, 2010

ehnonymus rated it:

i grabbed things we didn't see coming in a two minute jaunt into the public library, just snagged a couple of books that looked interesting and got back to my errands. this method of book choosing usually results in epic fail, so my expectations weren't that high going into it. but lo and behold, i quite liked this book. in fact, i am tempted to give it four stars for enjoyability, but i'm not sure that i am going to remember the plot at all even a month from now so i'll stick with three. i More...

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Aug 20, 2010

Lauren rated it:

Steven Amsterdam's Things We Didn't See Coming is a collection of nine short stories, all told from the same unnamed narrator. It takes place over the span of 10 years, starting with the Y2K scare in 1999. The text is simple and surprisingly unemotional, considering the environment in which the stories take place. We see what society may have become if the Y2K scare had devastated society, like some had predicted. It's strange reading about a futuristic post-apocalyptic society of a ten year spa More...

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Sep 12, 2011

Stephen rated it:

Interesting and original book about life after some unnamed disaster. Instead of writing a classic dystopian novel in the mould of McCarthy's 'The Road' or 'Mad Max', Amsterdam's book is much more subtle about the changes that have taken place. There are no cannibalistic tribes running amok or raging infernos, just a series of stories about trying to survive. The dialogue and characterisations are very strong and he's clearly a good writer but the book is let down by its structure. The book is d More...

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Oct 24, 2010

Janice rated it:

I don't often like short stories, but this volume of inter-connected stories reads more like subsequent glimpses into the life of one central character. That character is a youngster in the first story, which tells of his families' flight from an unnamed city on the eve of Y2K. His dad is extremely anxious, believing that the end, or at least something very catastrophic, is near. His mother is disdainfully anxious as well, in reaction to her husband. The young boy is torn between his parents More...

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Sep 27, 2011

Debbie rated it:

Told in first-person by an unnamed young man, this book of linked stories describes what happens to the world after a Y2K disaster. Beginning at age nine, the narrator tells of the gradual breakdown of nearly everything familiar and the attempts to rebuild society in the face of growing anarchy. With no electricity, food shortages and massive weather changes, survival is difficult and life precarious--and love is hard to come by, with people doing anything necessary to survive. A dark humor p More...

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