Einstein's Monsters

With a new introduction by Jeff VanderMeer, this powerful collection of five short stories explores the dangers of nuclear warfare—written by the renowned author of Money and London Fields.

Reckoning with the nuclear age from one of Britain’s most incisive and unnerving cultural critics.

In Einstein’s Monsters, Martin Amis turns his formidable gaze on the atomic shadow cast over the late twentieth century. Through five unsettling stories and a scalding introductory essay, he explores what it means to live with the knowledge that humanity now possesses the means—and perhaps the appetite—for its own extinction.

Written at the height of the Second Cold War, Einstein’s Monsters blends speculative fiction, philosophical inquiry, and savage satire. Amis dissects the madness of deterrence, the numbing doublespeak of political language, and the eerie banality of apocalypse with his usual mix of moral urgency and mordant humor.

Featuring a new introduction by Jeff VanderMeer, who situates Amis’s nuclear nightmares within the context of our own age of existential dread, Einstein’s Monsters is not just a warning—it’s a mirror.