Review of Terminal Earth Anthology

An Anthology of Apocalyptic Speculative Fiction...

Terminal Earth
Edited by Michael Stewart and Neil Thomas
Available from Pound Lit Press, Dec 2010

What will you be doing when the shadows fall and the clocks stop?

From lovers watching firestorms in exotic island locales to strangers playing a last game of baseball in abandoned America; through the eyes of sentient robot hunters or businessman suicide bombers; in the strongholds of alien-built bases and across the body-strewn beaches of Asia; looking down from spacecraft and peering up from bunkers, the only certainty is that our Earth is terminal and we will look for a way to continue, somehow, somewhere.

Reviewed by Fred Warren

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This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper
- T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Whatever narrative of the apocalypse you prefer, you’re likely to find your favorite poison in Terminal Earth, a new anthology of science fiction short stories from Pound Lit Press. Editors Neil Thomas and Michael Stewart have selected stories that focus not so much on how the world ends as on what people do about it, and this might inspire contemplation of the reader’s own response to the terminal scenario. Would I put up a fight, meekly accept my fate, work on my “bucket list,” or just stand there with my mouth hanging open, wondering what happened?

Hmm.

There are twenty-three tales of humanity’s twilight here, from the mundane to the bizarre, so settle down into your bunker, pop open a can of Spam, cue up The Doors on your MP3 player (I recommend “Riders on the Storm” or “The End”) and watch it all burn, freeze, explode, assimilate, or simply wink out of existence. I love short fiction, especially short science fiction, and there are some pretty good stories in this collection.

In "Fields," by Desmond Warzel, mankind literally goes down swinging in one last World Series before Earth is consumed by mutant wheat. Didn’t see that coming. It’s a bittersweet tale with a lot of heart, told by a homeless African-American man who finally discovers a place he belongs, just in time for the end of the world.

Barry Pomeroy’s "First at the Dump" takes us to a community of scavengers who find something unusual in their post-apocalyptic landfill. Perhaps their island isn’t the final outpost of humanity, and the world isn’t ready to end quite yet.

Two people ponder Earth’s final sunset from a balcony, naked, in Frank Rogers’ "As the Sun Sets." Not so much a story as an extended meditation on the ultimate futility of mankind.

David Turnbull posits a world subjected to death by...wait for it...tattoo, in a story sensibly titled, "Tattoo." Didn’t see that coming, either. Most of the story is spent explaining what happened, and waiting for the inevitable result, but there is some cool imagery along the way. I won’t be “getting ink done” any time soon, thank you very much.

Next is "The God Complex," by Neil John Buchanan. Alas, we should have known better. A probe searching for traces of God in the remnants of the Big Bang returns to mankind bearing delusions of God-hood, with predictable results. Standing between us and total assimilation is one woman in symbionic armor. Nifty, emotional, and spine-tingling.

A neighborhood committee attempts to maintain normalcy in the face of a cosmic catastrophe in Neil Coghlan’s "Outstanding Matters." They succeed about as well as any homeowners’ association. A gentle, sad story of good people clinging to the mundane for comfort.

Circumventing the end of the world via time travel may require more than one attempt and a little bit of good fortune in Jonathan D. Harris’ "Lucky Heather." Make that a lot of good fortune.

The world ends not by fire, but by ice, in Scott Davis’ "The Cooling Sun," but it may be history repeating itself.

Andrew Hook’s "Jump" provides a rather odd solution to the classic “planet-killing meteor” scenario that founders on a rather mundane impediment. I didn’t find the plan to save Earth plausible, but the story does illustrate the human tendency to grasp at straws in a desperate situation.

From a certain point-of-view, the end of the world might not be a bad thing at all. In Bill Schwarz’ "The Tipping Point," it mostly puts everybody's priorities in order.

Human society is pushed into the abyss with chilling ease, aided by an odd little bit of synchronicity, in Simon Hood's "You Can't Force an Owl." Perhaps the scariest story in the collection because we’ve already seen it happen on a smaller scale.

Mark Romasko offers a brief intermission with his poetic conversation, "On a Beach at the End of the World."

Speaking of beaches, Donna Burgess clues us that if dead things start washing up on the beach en masse, you might be approaching the apocalypse, in "Light at the End." In light of the odd bird and fish die-offs of recent weeks, this one seems eerily prophetic.

"The End of Dave," by Jamie Marriage, isn't cause for anxiety--it's just another corporate restructuring, though this one is a little more comprehensive than most. If you're quick on your feet, you might just end up running the whole firm. A lighthearted tale, in the spirit of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.

It's back to the beach with Alexander Zalanyj's "The Fire We Deserve," in which two people witness the fulfillment of a planet-scorching dream.

The only thing worse than experiencing the end of the world might be surviving it, as N.E. Chenier reminds us in "Fragment." This is a tale of madness--gory and sexually explicit, not for the tender-stomached.

A starship carries the hope of mankind from a dying Earth--but something else doesn't want to be left behind, and doesn’t care at all if we survive, in Amanda Taylor's "The Gloss of Midnight."

In Eric Ian Steele's "Cycle," there's not much left to do but wait to be eaten by a very large monster. From one very particular point of view, this is progress.

A young man, abandoned as a child to a life of hard labor in space, returns to Earth--what's left of it--to confront his parents, in John Atkinson's space-opera-ish "Homecoming."

Soldiers ride out the apocalypse in an underground bunker, but they aren't prepared to handle what's waiting for them outside. Natalie J.E. Potts brings the claustrophobia and paranoia in "Beyond Black."

"A Quiet Pint at the End of the World," by Robert Long, is just that--two guys share a drink in a pub and talk about a girl. It might be the likeliest future vision of them all, if not the most exciting.

Pesky humans are full of surprises as they maneuver through an alien warehouse under the watchful camera of a jaded security guard, but what do they want? Erick Mertz provides the answer in "The Beautiful Room is Empty," but despite an intriguing premise, the ending felt a little, well, empty.

Finally, "Pa's Worm Farm," by Jamie McNabb, treats us to the dreariest apocalypse of all--the Green Apocalypse. Honest farming folk just can't catch a break in the Brave Gaian World, but country boys will always find a way to survive and prosper--even if it means eating worms. Some homespun laughs here, but it’s all rather bleak when you look beyond the caricatures. I would have preferred finishing up with something more hopeful and uplifting after watching the world end twenty-two different ways.

Ah, well...you can’t have everything, even if you’re the last man on Earth. Terminal Earth is a nice assortment of apocalyptic sci-fi shorts. Overall, I think it could have used a couple more action-oriented stories and a couple less depictions of humanity talking itself to death, but if you’d rather ponder the world’s end than fight the future, don’t wait until 2012 to pick up a copy of this book.

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Note: ResAliens Press (that's me) received a review copy of Terminal Earth from Pound Lit Press and I asked Fred Warren to share his thoughts.

Review of Zero Gravity from Pill Hill Press

Guest reviewer, Fred Warren (author of The Muse and blogger of Frederation) takes a close look at Zero Gravity: Adventures in Deep Space, published recently by Pill Hill Press. And he comes away fairly impressed. Here's what he has to say:

If you love stories about lone-wolf pilots, sentient spaceships, interplanetary power politics, rogue computers, lost colonies, and Terrors From Beyond, Zero Gravity, a new anthology of science fiction adventures from Pill Hill Press, will light your boosters and shove you deep into your acceleration couch.

To infinity! And...well, you know.

Anthologies are often a grab bag of stories that don’t quite fit together. In Zero Gravity, Editor Alva J. Roberts has selected 13 short stories that coexist nicely—they all have a space opera-ish feel to them, a “new frontier” spirit embodied in a human race beginning to extend its boundaries into near space and beyond. The authors pay tribute to a variety of intrepid explorers, adventurers, and entrepreneurs—people of courage, determination, and ingenuity. We witness wonders, and horrors, in those dark, lonely places between the stars.

Zero Gravity leads off with “Junkers Fancy,” by Rosemary Jones. It’s the winsome tale of a young salvager living by her wits among the asteroid fields between Jupiter and Mars who discovers something unexpected in a wrecked spaceship. A feel-good story with a spunky heroine and a hint of romance.

A smuggler runs into trouble when his metahuman cargo escapes from a sealed compartment, in Scott W. Baker’s “Leech Run.” Leeches drain electrical energy—a dangerous ability that has marked them for genocide. The missing leech seems to have plans beyond safe passage to a friendlier star system, and if Titan doesn’t figure out what’s going on, it could cost him a lot more than his commission. A locked-room mystery that introduces an intriguing universe and characters that deserve more exploration.

The mystery of a derelict ship and its suicided crew takes a bizarre turn when the investigators’ shipboard computer discovers love in “A Space Romance,” by Paul A. Freeman. An interesting twist took this story in an unusual, and, I think, better direction than the beginning implied.

“Hawking’s Caution,” by Mark Rivett, reminds us there’s a chance we might not like what we discover in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. Beginning with a frantic warning message, the story then flashes back to the events that spawned the message, as an exploration team leapfrogs across the galaxy using a new teleportation technology. The ending had a Twilight Zone flavor, but the final reveal lacked impact—the beginning of the story gave away too much of what was to come.

A solitary hitman and his salvaged droid could be the last hope for a spaceborne community ruled by powerful criminals in David Shembri’s “Parhelion.” Though the setting was interesting, this somber story didn’t quite come together for me. The cynical tone undermined the optimistic ending and left me with serious doubts about the hero’s chance of success.

In Kenneth Mark Hoover’s “To Stand Among Kings,” a political crisis challenges the wisdom of a Papal inquisitor plunged into a struggle among rival human and post-human societies—but the future of all humanity may ultimately be decided by the most unlikely sacrifice of all. There’s a lot of byzantine intrigue in this story, but a nice payoff at the end—and some questions to ponder about what being human really means.

In “The Unicorn Tree,” Alethea Kontis tells the story of a young artist sent to recover a legendary treasure from a blasted, dying world. To her surprise, she discovers she has more in common with the survivors than she ever imagined. Not a lot of action in this one, but plenty of heart. Like “Leach Run,” this felt like an episode in a larger story worth telling in full.

A ragtag fleet of human and alien vessels from twenty worlds flees an unspeakable horror in “A Beacon of Hope,” by Gregory L. Norris, but is it all an illusion? A young woman must choose whether to continue the mission she’s trained for her entire life or join a revolution led by a charismatic rebel. A good story, but it’s plucked from the middle of a desperate multispecies exodus across hundreds of years, and we see neither the beginning nor the end of that journey.

“Tangwen’s Last Heist” by C. B. Calsing tells the tale of another lone-wolf adventurer living one step ahead of the law. She’s offered absolution in exchange for handling an awkward situation for the authorities, but she discovers there’s more than one side to the game she’s entered, and if she’s lucky, she might only end up dead. I thought Tangwen was a great character with plenty of attitude, but the conclusion, though satisfying in its own way, didn’t quite fulfill the promise of this story.

A crewmember on a long-range planetary survey mission awakes from stasis and discovers something’s very wrong with the ship and the telepresence androids operating it. Or is the problem in his own mind? Peter Butler’s been living in a virtual reality dream world for so long, he’s having trouble distinguishing between truth and imagination, and the tug to return to the comfortable world of semi-consciousness is powerful. Gef Fox spins a convincing web of paranoia in “The Stand-Ins.”

Will Morton’s “Glacier Castle” takes us to a world of eternal ice and snow—and one woman’s obsessive plan to save a doomed colony. In a story reminiscent of Moby Dick, Morton explores the fine line between genius and madness and the human drive to survive despite impossible odds. A good read.

In Margaret Karmazin’s “Rescue,” a mishap in space strands a pilot on a dead alien world that proves to be not quite so dead after all. Something’s stirring outside Kasi’s crashed spaceship, and it’s trying to get inside. A moderately-interesting first contact story that, unfortunately, didn’t venture very far beyond the first contact.

A rescue team intercepts a space freighter speeding toward uncharted space. It’s broadcasting a quarantine warning, it’s full of corpses, and the ship’s computer, Zeus, a sophisticated artificial intelligence, is the only survivor. Is Zeus responsible for the mayhem, or is there a subtler danger lurking within the ship? Murray Leeder’s “At One Stride Comes the Dark” is a whodunit, a horror story, and an exploration of the potentially hazy boundary between programming and sentience that kept me guessing until the end.

Overall, I found Zero Gravity a very solid collection of science fiction stories. While I was impressed with the variety and compatibility of the stories in this anthology, the attention to detail could have been better. There were an annoying number of misspellings and other typos in my electronic review copy, though they may have been fixed in the print version. The cover art is attractive and could double as an illustration for most of the stories in this anthology.

Blog Owner's Note: ResAliens Press received a free PDF review copy of Zero Gravity and asked Fred Warren to review it. You may purchase your copy here of Zero Gravity: Adventures in Deep Space, edited by Alva J. Roberts (ISBN-13: 978-1617060007 - Available for purchase in print or Kindle at Amazon.com.)

The Muse by Fred Warren

A friend and fellow Kansan, Fred Warren (he blogs at Frederation), has published his first book, The Muse, a contemporary fantasy novel just released by Splashdown Books. While I've not read it yet, it's on my Christmas list and so far has garnered some nice reviews at Amazon and B&N.

Here's the official blurb:

Stan Marino needs a muse. He's written himself into a corner...again. A shot of inspiration is all he needs to finish his story...where is he going to find it? What Stan doesn't know: Inspiration has found him. And it's about to take over his life. Ripped from reality, he must lead a band of lost souls in a life-or-death battle with a merciless enemy. Stan has found his muse, but will he survive it?

Splashdown Books is the brainchild of Grace Bridges, author of Faith Awakened. Billed as an independent publisher of inspirational science fiction and fantasy, this small press is based out of New Zealand and has similar goals as my own ResAliens Press. We both want to broaden the category of faith-informed speculative fiction. So toward that end, congratulations to both Grace and Fred in bringing another product to market. I look forward to reading it.

BTW, You can view the book trailer here. And here's the ad: