Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

by John Joseph Adams

  [Uncomfortable silence]

  Political Activism

  The next ten years of Prince’s life were marked by political activism. Violence in Africa and Asia led to the rise of the Repatriation Movement, which fought for the return of former North Americans to their home continent. While most countered the movement on practical grounds—North America simply wasn’t habitable yet—Prince saw the movement as something deeper and darker. He felt the movement was about rejecting Africa and Asia and the expatriates’ hosts more than a desire to return to their devastated homeland. [21][22]

  In a widely quoted speech in 2034, Prince said:

  This is not a movement about returning home. This is a movement about rejecting friends. This is not a movement about finding comfort in familiar lands. This is a movement about fearing those who wish to help. This is not about repatriation. This is about rejection. [23]

  Prince was a prolific essay writer during this period, but nothing ever approached the popularity and power of his earlier work. His essay “Rejecting Home” (Der Spiegel, 2035), an acerbic and politically pointed update of his essay “Coming Home,” was described by critic Gerald King as “a sad attempt by Prince to leverage his earlier brilliance to make a point about what many are starting to see in him as a naïve perception of unity in people who want no such thing.” [24]

  Prince ceased his anti-repatriation activism when parts of North America were re-opened for settlements in 2038. [citation needed]

  Excerpt from Rhythms of Decline by Julian Prince (Knopf, 2029)

  Simon had hoped that all would be normal in the end. He would tuck Annie into bed, pat Arthur on the head, and then kiss them both goodnight. Jason would wander off, falling asleep to the dull glow of some video game or another. Later, Simon would poke his head in, mutter a goodnight, and then turn the electronics off. Finally, he and Annie would hold each other and let the night take them. That was his dream—that they would fall asleep as a family and never wake up.

  Yet, somehow, this seemed better. Their tears, their grief, and their fear tapped into a well deeper than family ritual. They were together in a moment when being alone seemed profane and wrong.

  Jason joined Simon and began to cry as they all held each other. No one said anything. They breathed the air that gave them life. They shared the love that made them family. They cried the tears that made them human.

  And then they died.

  Later Life and Novels

  Prince lived the rest of his life in Capetown, South Africa. He only published three more novels; all were well-received but garnered far less praise than The Grey Sunset and Rhythms of Decline. [citation needed]

  Countdown (Knopf, 2040) told the story of a young man named Franklin Proudman who had decided to repatriate to North America. Proudman lands and finds life a lot different than he expected. Much of the book is a rambling series of anecdotes around the hopeless efforts of Proudman to build a life. He eventually dies from starvation, the ground still too damaged to produce crops.

  Lost in North America (Knopf, 2045) is Prince’s only foray into the science fiction genre.[25] The novel tells the story of the Winkler family, who hide in a fallout shelter in Rapid City, South Dakota. Despite Rapid City being ground zero for the Meyer Impact, the family survives and exit the shelter a year later to rebuild their lives. When it becomes clear that there is no food or wildlife, the family begins a journey, foraging for food across North America. The book has clear allusions to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but the emptiness of the landscape provides for a uniquely Princean view. The book generated significant positive critical press. [26][27]

  Prince’s final novel, Crater (Knopf, 2056), was released the year before his death. The book continued his exploration of the dark aspects of repatriation.[28] The novel follows a scientist, William Ho, and his assistant Wendy Singh, as they attempt to descend to the bottom of the Meyer Crater. Like Prince’s other novels, Crater is rife with introspection. As Ho and his assistant get closer to the bottom, they realize they are in love. It is when they have reached ground zero of the Meyer Impact when the two realize they have found their future together. The novel’s ending is ambiguous, as the two are attempting to climb out of the crater but are uncertain if they will ever escape. While thematically similar to his earlier novels, Crater employs a denser prose style, with long paragraphs that often include a stream-of-consciousness technique. Despite its ambiguity and often dark scenes, the novel was marked by some as a return to the optimism of “Coming Home.” Crater was a bestseller and re-established Prince as a popular figure in post-Impact literature. [29][30]

  Personal Life

  Prince was romantically connected to several celebrities during his life, including actresses Renee Diaz [citation needed] and Janet Skillings. [31] None of these relationships lasted more than a few weeks, however. In 2050, unofficial Prince biographer Susan Nillson announced that she had uncovered proof that Prince had left a girlfriend and child behind in North America. The document, a digitized copy of a Texas State birth certificate backed up on a European server, showed that Prince fathered a child named Samuel to a mother named Wendy Reynolds. Prince never acknowledged Nillson’s allegations, although most contemporary historians consider the claim accurate. [32]

  * * *

  Excerpt from Julian Prince’s final interview (Paris Live!, 2056)

  Aliette Rameau: You’ve achieved so much, Monsieur Prince. Do you have any regrets?

  [Pause]

  Rameau: Monsieur Prince?

  Julian Prince: I’m sorry. Your question is a bit overwhelming. My life is full of regrets.

  Rameau: Is there anything specific you could share with us?

  Prince: No. [Takes drink of water] I’m sorry. Could we change the subject, please?

  Death and Legacy

  Prince died on August 20, 2057 in Capetown, South Africa, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He left no suicide note. Having died without any heirs, Prince bequeathed his literary estate and assets to The 300 Million Ghosts Foundation, which was founded to record, research, and archive the stories of those who died during the Meyer Impact. [33][34]

  Prince’s legacy continues to define and influence artists to this day. While Impact Nihilism has fallen out of fashion, Prince’s stark images and deep themes can be seen in everything from the paintings of Ellen Winslow to the music of the Bluefins. His use of introspection and stream-of-consciousness has influenced writers as diverse as Joe Lguyen and Isabel Shoeford. [citation needed]

  The play “Coming Home” debuted on the anniversary of Prince’s death in 2058 at the Globe Theater in London. Adapted by Nobel-winning playwright Andrew Hillsborough, the play was an unabashedly optimistic look at a world that survived an extinction event and came away smiling. Hillsborough noted on BBC, “Oh, I’m sure old Prince would have hated it. But the words are all his. Somewhere along the way he changed. Just because he decided that facing the abyss meant that we were all doomed to fall in, doesn’t mean we have to agree with him.” [35]

  Epitaph on Julian Prince’s gravestone

  “Finally home.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to the following:

  My Publisher/Editor: Steve Saffel, for acquiring and editing the book, and to the rest of the team that worked on the book at Titan Books.

  My Agents (past and present): Joe Monti (former) and Seth Fishman (present) for being awesome and supportive.

  My Mentor: Gordon Van Gelder, for being a mentor and a friend.

  My Colleague: Ellen Datlow for revealing the mysteries of anthologizing.

  My Family: my amazing wife, Christie; my mom, Marianne, and my sister, Becky, for all their love and support.

  Author/Contract Wranglers: Marie Florio, Ty Franck, Patricia Rogers, Laura Bradford, Kathleen Bellamy, Gavin Grant, and Duvall Osteen.

  Second Opinion Corps: Robyn Lupo, Caleb Jordan Schulz, Andrew Liptak, Benjamin Blattberg, Kristin Centorcelli, Lashawn Wanak, Lisa Rogers, Louise Kan
e, Paul DesCombaz, Robert Barton Bland, Stephanie M. Loree, Theresa Glover, and Patrick Stephens for providing feedback on the stories during the editorial process.

  Intern: Extra special thanks to my former intern, Amber Barkley, who not only provided feedback on stories, but also helped out a lot with other behind-the-scenes stuff on this anthology.

  My Writers: Everyone who appears in this anthology.

  My Readers (last but not least): Everyone who bought this book, or any of my other anthologies, and who make doing books like this possible.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Ann Aguirre is a New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestselling author with a degree in English Literature; before she began writing full-time, she was a clown, a clerk, a voice actress, and a savior of stray kittens, not necessarily in that order. She grew up in a yellow house across from a cornfield, but now she lives in sunny Mexico with her husband, children, and various pets. She likes books, emo music, and action movies. She writes all kinds of genre fiction for adults and teens.

  Megan Arkenberg lives and writes in California. Her work has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, and the inaugural issue of the horror magazine Aghast, among other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance.

  Paolo Bacigalupi is the bestselling author of the novels The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, and the collection Pump Six and Other Stories. He is a winner of the Michael L. Printz, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, and was a National Book Award finalist. A new novel for young adults, The Doubt Factory, came out in 2014, and a new science fiction novel, The Water Knife, is due out in May 2015.

  Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel, One for Sorrow, which has been made into the recently released Sundance feature film Jamie Marks is Dead. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards. He is also the author of two collections: Birds and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories, and Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies, which won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. He grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. His next novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, will be published by Knopf in Fall 2015. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.

  Lauren Beukes (laurenbeukes.com) is a South African novelist, TV scriptwriter, documentary maker, comics writer, and occasional journalist. She is the author of the novels Moxyland, Zoo City (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award), The Shining Girls, and Broken Monsters. She’s also written rollicking nonfiction about maverick South African women, TV scripts, and comics for Vertigo. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Armored, Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse, and The Apex Book of World SF.

  David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international bestselling novels include The Postman, Earth, and recently Existence. His nonfiction book about the information age—The Transparent Society—won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.

  Orson Scott Card is the bestselling author of more than forty novels, including Ender’s Game, which was a winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards. The sequel, Speaker for the Dead, also won both awards, making Card the only author to have captured science fiction’s two most coveted prizes in consecutive years. His most recent books include book three of his Pathfinders trilogy, Visitors; three books in the Formic War series co-authored with Aaron Johnston, Earth Unaware, Earth Afire, and Earth Awakens; an Ender’s Shadow novel, Shadows in Flight; and book two of the Mither Mages series, The Gate Thief.

  Junot Díaz is the author of the bestselling novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and the books Drown and This is How You Lose Her. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker many times, and also in Glimmer Train and African Voices. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Books Critic Circle Award and most recently the MacArthur Fellowship. The fiction editor at The Boston Review and the co-founder of the Voices of Our Nation Workshop, Díaz teaches writing at MIT.

  Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema and Little Brother and novels for adults like The Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.

  Tananarive Due is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers’ Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller The Living Blood won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology The Ancestors, received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction.

  Nashville native Toiya Kristen Finley is a writer, editor, game designer, and narrative designer/game writer. Her fiction has been published in Nature, Fantasy Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, The Best of Electric Velocipede, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2010. She is the founding and former managing/fiction editor of Harpur Palate and a co-founder and instructor at GDC Online’s Game Writing Tutorial. Her work in games includes Academagia: The Making of Mages and its DLC, Fat Chicken, and a list of unannounced/suspended-production social-network RPGs and mobile games whose existence shall remain forever a secret (hey, that’s the game industry for ya). The Game Narrative Toolbox (Focal Press), a book on narrative design she’s co-authoring with Jennifer Brandes Hepler, Ann Lemay, and Tobias Heussner, will be out in early 2015.

  Milo James Fowler (milojamesfowler.com) is a teacher by day and a speculative fictioneer by night. When he’s not grading papers, he’s imagining what the world might be like in a dozen alternate realities. He is an active SFWA member, and his work has appeared in more than 90 publications, including AE SciFi, Cosmos, Daily Science Fiction, Nature, and Shimmer. His novel Captain Bartholomew Quasar and the Space-Time Displacement Conundrum is now available from Every Day Publishing, and his other stories can be found wherever e-books are sold.

  Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the upcoming young adult skyship novel Magonia from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings, the memoir The Year of Yes, and co-author with Kat Howard of the short horror novella The End of the Sentence. With Neil Gaiman, she is the New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the monster anthology Unnatural Creatures, benefitting 826DC. Her Nebula and Shirley Jackson award-nominated short fiction has recently appeared in Lightspeed (“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream,” “The Traditional”), on Tor.com, The Toast, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean Online, Uncanny Magazine, Glitter & Mayhem and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven and The Book of the Dead, as well as in a number of Year’s Bests, most recently Year’s Best Weird. She lives in Brooklyn with a collection of beasts, an anvil, and a speakeasy bar through the cellar doors. Find her on Twitter @MARIADAHVANA or on the web at mariadahvanaheadley.com.

  Hugh Howey is the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wool, whi
ch became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of novelettes, the Wool omnibus is frequently the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.com and is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. The book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. The story of Wool’s meteoric success has been reported in major media outlets such as Entertainment Weekly, Variety, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Deadline Hollywood, and elsewhere. Howey lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and his dog Bella.

  Keffy R. M. Kehrli is a science fiction and fantasy writer currently living in Seattle. Although his degrees are in physics and linguistics, he spends most of his time in a basement performing molecular biology experiments for fun and profit. In 2008, he attended Clarion UCSD where he learned that, unfortunately, rattlesnakes don’t always rattle. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Lightspeed, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye.

  Jake Kerr: After fifteen years as a music industry journalist Jake Kerr’s first published story, “The Old Equations,” was nominated for the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America and was shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon and StorySouth Million Writers awards. His stories have subsequently been published in magazines across the world, broadcast in multiple podcasts, and been published in multiple anthologies and year’s best collections. His young adult novel, Tommy Black and the Coat of Invincibility, was released in January 2015. The third and final volume in the series will be released later in the year. A graduate of Kenyon College, Kerr studied fiction under Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegría. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and three daughters.