Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
About this audiobook
Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the harbingers of Armageddon—these are our guides through the Wastelands.
From the Book of Revelation to The Road Warrior, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Road, storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving eschatological tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. In doing so, these visionary authors have addressed one of the most challenging and enduring themes of imaginative fiction: the nature of life in the aftermath of total societal collapse.
Gathering together the best postapocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today's most renowned authors of speculative fiction—including George R. R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King—Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon. Whether the end of the world comes through nuclear war, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm, these are tales of survivors, in some cases struggling to rebuild the society that was, in others, merely surviving, scrounging for food in depopulated ruins and defending themselves against monsters, mutants, and marauders.
Wastelands delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre's core.
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About the author
John Joseph Adams is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, including Wastelands, The Living Dead, and The Way of the Wizard. A six-time Hugo finalist and five-time World Fantasy Award nominee, he is also the editor and publisher of the magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare as well as the cohost of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Holly, Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
Jonathan Lethem is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Motherless Brooklyn. Lethem’s stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times, among others. He lives in New York City.
George R. R. Martin sold his first story in 1971 and has been writing professionally ever since. He spent ten years in Hollywood as a writer-producer, working on The Twilight Zone, Beauty and the Beast, and various feature films and television pilots that were never made. In the mid ’90s he returned to prose, his first love, and began work on his epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire. He has been in the Seven Kingdoms ever since. Whenever he’s allowed to leave, he returns to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives with the lovely Parris, a big white dog called Mischa, and two cats named Augustus and Caligula, who think they run the place.
Orson Scott Card, a New York Times bestselling author, has won several Hugo and Nebula awards for his works of speculative fiction.
Gene Wolfe has won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and many other awards. In 2007, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. In 2013, he received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. He lives in Barrington, Illinois.
Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, one of very few African American women in the field. She won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and in 1995 was the first science fiction writer ever to receive the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant.
Paolo Bacigalupi is the author of the highly acclaimed The Drowned Cities and the New York Times bestseller Ship Breaker, which was also a Michael L. Printz Award winner and a National Book Award finalist. He is also the author of The Windup Girl and Pump Six and Other Stories and is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, John W. Campbell Memorial, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial awards. He lives in western Colorado with his wife and son.
M. Rickert has published the short story collections Map of Dreams, Holiday, and You Have Never Been Here. Her stories have been collected in numerous anthologies including American Fantastic Tales, The Big Book of Ghost Stories, Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, and Shadows and Tall Trees 7. She is the winner of the Crawford Award, World Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award. Her first novel, The Memory Garden, won the Locus award.
Tobias Buckell is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tangled Lands, Crystal Rain, and Halo: The Cole Protocol. His other novels and more than fifty short stories have been translated into seventeen languages. Bucknell has been nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, the Prometheus, and the Campbell Award for Best New Author. He lives with his family in Ohio.
Jack McDevitt is an American science fiction author who won the 2006 Nebula Award for his novel Seeker. He has served as an officer in the US Navy, taught English and literature, and worked for the United States Customs Service. He lives with his wife, Maureen, in Georgia.
Cory Doctorow is a blogger, journalist, and author science fiction and nonfiction. His writing has won numerous awards, including three Locus Awards, two John W. Campbell Awards, three Prometheus Awards, two Sunburst Awards, the White Pine Award, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, among others. He has served as Canadian regional director of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is coeditor of the blog Boing Boing, and he was named one of the web’s twenty-five “influencers” by Forbes and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a contributing author to Wired magazine, and his writing has been published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Globe and Mail, the Boston Globe, Popular Science, and others.
Richard Kadrey is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim supernatural noir books. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime” and is in development as a feature film. Some of his other books include The Wrong Dead Guy, The Everything Box, Metrophage, and Butcher Bird. He also writes the Vertigo comic Lucifer.
Nancy Kress is the author of more than thirty books, including more than a dozen novels of science fiction and fantasy. Her novels have won two Hugo and six Nebula awards as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel. She lives in Seattle.
Elizabeth Bear, also known as Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky, is an American author known for her speculative fiction. Among her many awards, she is one of only five writers who have gone on to win multiple Hugo Awards for fiction after winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She also won a Sturgeon Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. She is the author of the acclaimed Eternal Sky series. Elizabeth Bear shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins.
Carol Emshwiller is the author of many acclaimed novels and story collections, including Carmen Dog, The Start of the End of It All (winner of the World Fantasy Award), Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories, I Live with You and You Dont’ Know It, and The Mount (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award and a Nebula Award finalist). She teaches in the NYU Continuing Education program, and divides her time between homes in New York City and California. Visit Carol online at www.sfwa.org/members/emshwiller.
DALE BAILEY is the critically acclaimed author of seven books, including The End of the End of Everything and The Subterranean Season. His story “Death and Suffrage” was adapted for Showtime’s Masters of Horror television series. His short fiction has won the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, has been nominated for the Nebula and Bram Stoker awards, and has been reprinted frequently in best-of-the-year anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. He lives in North Carolina with his family.
John Langan is the author of two novels, The Fisherman and House of Windows, and two collections of stories, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. With Paul Tremblay, he coedited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters. He’s one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, for which he served as a juror during its first three years. Currently, he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine.
Claire Bloom, CBE, is an English film and stage actress, known for leading roles in plays such as Streetcar Named Desire, A Doll’s House, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, along with nearly sixty films and countless television roles, during a career spanning over six decades. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2013 Queen’s birthday honors for services to drama.
Susan Hanfield is an Audie Award–winning narrator who comes from a strong classical theater background and loves bringing deep characterizations to all of her work. She has narrated over twenty books, including Ru Emerson’s six-book Night-Threads series. On camera, she has been seen commercially and in numerous international, national, and regional network spots. She also played the title character in Magdalene, an award-winning short film.
J. Paul Boehmer is an American actor best known for his numerous appearances in the Star Trek universe. Hkis audiobook narrations have garnered nine AudioFile Earphones Awards and two prestigious Audie Awards for Best Narration, besides being a finalist for the Audie Award in 2012 and 2015. Between narrations, he is active in regional theaters across the country. His television appearances include guest spots on Nip/Tuck and Numb3rs.
Gabrielle de Cuir, award-winning narrator, has narrated over three hundred titles and specializes in fantasy, humor, and titles requiring extensive foreign language and accent skills. She was a cowinner of the Audie Award for best narration in 2011 and a three-time finalist for the Audie and has garnered six AudioFile Earphones Awards. Her “velvet touch” as an actor’s director has earned her a special place in the audiobook world as the foremost producer for bestselling authors and celebrities.
Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) wrote and edited more than 120 books and more than 1,700 stories, essays, and articles, as well as dozens of screenplays and teleplays. He won the Hugo Award nine times, the Nebula Award four times, the Bram Stoker Award six times (including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996), the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America twice, the Georges Méliès Fantasy Film Award twice, and was awarded the Silver Pen for Journalism by PEN, the international writer’s union. He was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2006.
Hillary Huber is one of the most successful voice talents in Los Angeles. Recent books read for Blackstone Audio include Him, Her, Him Again, the End of Him by Patricia Marx, A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read, and A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart.
Alex Hyde-White is an actor and a producer of two films and hundreds of audiobooks thru his label Punch Audio.
Arthur Morey has won three AudioFile Magazine “Best Of” Awards, and his work has garnered numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and placed him as a finalist for two Audie Awards. He has acted in a number of productions, both off Broadway in New York and off Loop in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has won awards for his fiction and drama, worked as an editor with several book publishers, and taught literature and writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed.
Lisa Reneé Pitts is an accomplished actress in theater, film, and television, appearing in The Practice, The Shield, and Law & Order. A native New Yorker, she holds a BFA in theater arts from Rutgers University and resides in Burbank, California.
Emily Janice Card (a.k.a. Emily Rankin) is an actor, writer, and singer. In addition to being a narrator, she has directed numerous audiobooks, including the 2007 Audie and Earphones Award winner Hubris, Legacy of Ashes by Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, and Them by Nathan McCall. Her own audiobook narration has won her four Earphones Awards.
Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than five thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than nine hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.
Judy Young is a voice talent and audiobook narrator.
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