Friday short fiction #20: pre-, per- and post-apocalypses

Larry Miller   Partial Rapture   The Church of the SubGenius, early 1980s
Seeing as tomorrow is The End Of The World As We Know It (Again)™ it's possibly no surprise that I've been unearthing some killer apocalyptic fiction this week. There are no Rapture stories here; all those I read this week were crap – anyone know any good ones? At this point I'm not sure if I'm either looking forward to or not what will be an even more ridiculously over-hyped experience next year, on 21 December 2012.

Barbara A. Barnett, 'Doom Bunny'  (FLASH ME MAGAZINE, JULY 2006)
Predictions of global significance are drawing small crowds to an American backwater town. I've read quite a bit of babarnett's short fiction that's free online and this flash stacks up nicely; she likes a laugh, often with shades of Robert Sheckley, as here.

Octavia Butler, 'Speech Sounds'  (ASIMOV'S, MID-DECEMBER 1983)
After a virus that attacks the language centres of the brain has swept the world and left civilisation in ruins, a Los Angeles woman returning home to Pasadena finds a possibility of moving forward in life. This story won the 1984 Hugo and was written after Butler had witnessed something similar to the first scene (a fight on a bus), making her wonder “whether the human species would ever grow up enough to learn to communicate without using fists of one kind or another.” It left me mildly surprised at what Butler puts her protagonist through but it still feels both authentic and heartfelt.

Orson Scott Card, 'Salvage'  (ASIMOV'S, FEBRUARY 1986)
This was the penultimate story in pnh's 2003 y/a anthology New Skies. Re-reading it now I'm struck by how understated this post-nuclear war story is, set in the remains of a drowned Utah city. I doubt I'll read anything other than whatever SF LDS fiction may have produced, although I acknowledge it's an interesting genre niche.

H.P. Lovecraft, 'The Call of Cthulhu'  (WEIRD TALES, FEBRUARY 1928)
Probably Lovecraft's most famous short story, it also contains one of his most evocative lines: "The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom." I'll never tire of re-reading Lovecraft.

Jo Walton, 'The End of the World in Duxford'  (REC.ARTS.SF.WRITTEN, 28 APRIL 1997)
papersky wrote this short prose poem as a response to Larry Niven's apocalyptic 'Inconstant Moon', which I've always found 90% unbelievable. This is Walton's unglamarous (and therefore much more plausible) British alternative, probably offered more as a counterpart than a rebuttal.

Favourite short story of the week: Sandra McDonald, 'Tupac Shakur and the End of the World'  (FUTURISMIC, 1 MARCH 2010)
After a worldwide plague has left people unable to live long after even the slightest flesh wound, a group of survivors in Florida meet their likely nemesis. One thing about post-apocalypse fiction is that the characters rarely acknowledge they're living in a world already partially mapped out by science fiction, and McDonald addresses that in a way that will either please or annoy the reader. She took a chance with this but I'm much in favour: she ably prevents the idea from appearing trite while also handling the problematic ending creatively.

Rapture ready

Created by Fragglet on Reddit... Hat tip, sir or madam. I am less amused by Camping's lunacy than appalled by his heartless manipulation of the naïve and gullible.