Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Easthampton, Massachusetts: Small Beer Press, 2011; $16.00 tpb; 200 pages
This is a collection of stories—nine in all, 6 reprinted and 3 original—that share a common theme, the effects of the apocalypse from the small end of the telescope. Or they demonstrate how large causes can have small, if very important, effects. Or they are comedies (and tragedies) of manners for the end of the world, as if Jane Austen really had written about zombies or pandemics or dirty bombs or economic collapse. And just like a Jane Austen heroine (or like Gloria Gaynor), people will survive. I read one of the stories in the volume, “Useless Things,” three years ago, and it has stayed with me. Many of the rest of these stories will stay with me, too. Strong characterization, vivid description, emphasis on the mundane courage of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances: these things make all the stories in the volume ring true.
The collection begins with zombies—a decision, I suppose, designed to appeal to their recent popularity. Here the zombies are on a preserve in a gutted future Cleveland, a colony to which people like the viewpoint character, Cahill, are condemned instead of being sent to prison. While the living people who struggle to survive inside this place divide themselves into racial and social categories hostile to one another (much like prison), they are united in their hatred of and contempt for the zombies, who are described in ways usually reserved for social outcasts or for themselves: “stupid as bricks,” “. . . ultimate trash. Worse than the guys who cooked meth in trailers. Worse than the fat women on WIC. Zombies were just useless dumbfucks” (1). These zombies act as zombies always do, staggering around trying to eat people, but McHugh makes them literalize the metaphor of class contempt. We don’t figure out why the story is called “The Naturalist” until the very end, and that’s when we also figure out that the story is much more than just another zombie story.
In the second story, “Special Economics,” the problem isn’t zombies taking over the world; it’s bird flu causing a massive human death toll with predatory capitalism filling the vacuum. This time we learn about the big changes by following a young Chinese woman trying to make her way in a factory that keeps its workers as debt slaves: they owe their souls to the company store. And that’s it. No big chase scenes, just a girl using her wits to survive in a very believable future.
This is the general pattern for all of the stories—an ordinary person, usually but not always female, making do, getting along in a near future that doesn’t feel far-fetched at all. The zombies are really an exception. In “Useless Things,” after economic collapse and climate change, a woman ekes out a living making realistic baby dolls. In “The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large,” a boy loses his memory and creates a new identity after a dirty bomb hits Baltimore. In “Kingdom of the Blind,” a woman figures out that self-aware computers are causing rolling blackouts. In “Going to France,” the most Kelly Link–enigmatic of the collection, lots of people start having uncontrollable urges to fly to France—with or without planes. “Honeymoon” describes a young woman who earns money as an experimental subject in drug tests that go horribly wrong for several of the other subjects. “The Effect of Centrifugal Forces” shows a girl coping with her mother’s terminal illness caused by eating chicken nuggets. In “After the Apocalypse,” a mother and daughter set out to find someplace safe in a near future of economic and governmental failure. This last story takes place in a future very much like the one of Octavia Butler’s Parable books but without any messianic figure. I really don’t want to say more about individual stories because their unfolding, slowly and without high drama, with each action revealing more and more, is part of their power.
In these stories, the imagined apocalypse is described only through the ways in which it impacts character, so the science-fictionality of each story is background rather than foreground, serving to show how individuals react to difficulty. But that doesn’t mean the science-fictional elements are irrelevant, because they consistently represent either likely futures we may be tested by, heightened versions of our own present, or, in the case of the stories about zombies and flying, metaphors for our present. Although none of the main characters rises to heroic levels or does exceptional things, they are all admirable. This is, then, a kind of everyday, worldly science fiction, a bit like the sort that Geoff Ryman’s somewhat playful “Mundane Manifesto” proclaimed and a bit like the women’s post–World War II sf that one editor myopically dismissed as “heart-throb-and-diaper accounts” (quoted in Larbalestier, 173). Ryman’s manifesto calls for “A new focus on human beings: their science, technology, culture, politics, religions, individual characters, needs, dreams, hopes, and failings,” and that provides a neat summary of McHugh’s accomplishments in these stories (5). Larbalestier’s citation (from a blurb for one of Carol Emshwiller’s stories in the February 1958 Future magazine) seems typical of an ongoing dismissal of domestication in Ryman’s list of concerns. There are no diapers or heartthrobs in these stories, but there are plenty of domestic concerns: how do we carry on living, working, eating, getting along, when science, technology, culture, politics, et al., fail us? McHugh shows us.
According to the publicity release for After the Apocalypse, a Booklist review compared McHugh to George Saunders for her “uncanny ability to hook into our prevailing end-of-the-world paranoia and feed it back to us.” But Saunders’s stories laugh at apocalyptic visions as mere “paranoia” rather than as plausible futures, which is an important difference between his stories and science fiction. McHugh isn’t laughing at the futures she presents us. Saunders’s stories also laugh at the poor, uneducated shlubs, as dumb as McHugh’s zombies, trying to cope with these lousy futures. McHugh never does that. Instead, when her stories are funny, it’s a dark, wry humor that laughs along with the characters at the way things can so easily devolve into chaos and at what we have to do to keep that chaos at bay for a little while. A better comparison might be to Samuel R. Delany’s stories in Driftglass (1971), which acknowledge the impact of race and class on the lives of workers in a variety of future scenarios, giving these people the dignity and seriousness that grander heroes enjoy in less mundane sf.
After the Apocalypse recognizes and illustrates how dignified and serious, how important, tragic, and funny our mundane, domestic, ordinary lives are and will continue to be. It provides both important survival lessons, and important lessons for science fiction writing.
Small Beer Press has done a great service in publishing this and other very strong short story collections. Their publication list includes collections by Joan Aiken, Ted Chiang, Karen Joy Fowler, Elizabeth Hand, Nancy Kress, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kelly Link, Karen Lord, and Geoff Ryman. Wow. Short stories can slip by the wayside, ignored, dismissed, ephemeral, but especially in sf and especially because of small presses, they will, like Gloria Gaynor and the characters in After the Apocalypse, survive. 
Joan Gordon lives in Commack, New York.
Works Cited
- Larbalestier, Justine. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
- Ryman, Geoff et al. “The Mundane Manifesto.” New York Review of Science Fiction. #226 (June 2007).
A PDF or ePub copy of the NYRSF issue in which this article first appeared is available for purchase at Weightless Books.
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