The End of the World: Stories of the Apocalypse

By Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg

Book Overview

Before The Road by Cormac McCarthy brought apocalyptic fiction into the mainstream, there was science fiction. No longer relegated to the fringes of literature, this explosive collection of the world's best apocalyptic writers brings the inventors of alien invasions, devastating meteors, doomsday scenarios, and all-out nuclear war back to the bookstores with a bang. The best writers of the early 1900s were the first to flood New York with tidal waves, destroy Illinois with alien invaders, paralyze Washington with meteors, and lay waste to the Midwest with nuclear fallout. Now collected for the first time ever in one apocalyptic volume are those early doomsday writers and their contemporaries, including Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, Lucius Shepard, Robert Sheckley, Norman Spinrad, Arthur C. Clarke, William F. Nolan, Poul Anderson, Fredric Brown, Lester del Rey, and more. Relive these childhood classics or discover them here for the first time. Each story details the eerie political, social, and environmental destruction of our world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1602399670
• ISBN13: 9781602399679
• Release Date: July 2010
• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

What happened?

Talk about being disappointed! This anthology of different scenarios about the end of the world has a huge number of top rated authors, so I thought this would be a superior collection of stories. It isn't. There are one or two stories that stir the imagination, but many of the stories felt like they had been heavily edited. A few times I turned the page to be shocked that the story had ended. When I looked at the copyrights page I realized that one of the problems may be that some of these stories are almost 80 years old, so they feel dated. I just didn't find enough content to find anything new or cutting edge, or even never done before. Sorry, this one didn't cut it.