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 honest and heartbreaking, yet hopeful, always propelling one forward to open the box that is the next story.

The book begins at the start of modern civilization's much prophesied apocalypse, on New Year's Eve in an alternate Y2K, with a nine-year-old narrator fleeing to the countryside with his parents. Each story jumps ahead in the narrator's life (often many years ahead) to the new reality of his situation, to the new world he lives in.

It reads like a novel in some ways; I forgot it was a collection of stories and kept expecting the threads of the previous chapter to pick up with the next one, since the narrator remains the same, and the story is linear, (albeit with large gaps in time). Eventually, one gives themselves over to not knowing what to expect next, which struck me as being masterfully pulled off by the author, as it mirrors the protagonist's unstable, chaotic life. In the end the threads of his life tie together, and the payoff was immense and illuminating for me. It brought me to tears.

The writing is spare, darkly honest, desperate at times, and yet there is the best of human optimism and hopefulness at its core. The story and the world does what the best of science fiction does. It warns, shows possible outcomes, is loaded with portents, but never preaches. It might not thrill some fans of adventurous science fiction, but it does have cross-genre appeal, and might just as easily be filed in mainstream or literary sections.

I do recommend this demanding, lovely little book highly.