The Last Catastrophe
Stories
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A hopeful, speculative short story collection about how humanity grapples in a world transformed by climate change.
“Climate fiction does not owe readers hope, but through humor and humanity Hyde manages to present a harsh reality without descending into despair, offering a space for mourning and for reimagining life in a permanently changed world. Each of the 15 stories is swiftly paced and engaging, rich with detail, highlighting and celebrating nature as it borders on the unnatural.” —The New York Times Book Review
A vast caravan of RVs roams the United States. A girl grows a unicorn horn, complicating her small-town friendships and big city ambitions. A young lady on a spaceship bonds with her AI warden while trying to avoid an arranged marriage. In Allegra Hyde’s universe nothing is as it seems, yet the challenges encountered in these pages mirror those we face in our modern age. Spanning the length of our very solar system, the fifteen stories in this collection explore a myriad of potential futures through the concept of “global weirding,” planetary and social disruptions due to climate change. In unexpected and genre-defying ways, this revelatory collection reminds us that our world is precious, and that protecting it has the potential to bring us all together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hyde (Eleutheria) continues in the vein of her previous dystopian fiction with an inventive speculative collection. In "The Future Is a Click Away," Hyde considers the trade-offs of online shopping, imagining an algorithm that knows everything about everyone and anticipates people's needs in advance. "Loving Homes for Lost & Broken Men" explores an alternate universe where husbands are taken in and fostered by caretakers, who reform them so they can have a chance to find "forever houses." "Democracy in America," a highlight, explores the consequences of a skin-grafting treatment that promises older people the chance to look young again. In "Colonel Merryweather's Intergalactic Finishing School for Young Ladies of Grace & Good Nature," the rich find solace in space and try to populate other planets after Earth is destroyed by "unchecked industrialization." Some of the shorter entries, however, feel like filler, with underdeveloped postapocalyptic settings. Sometimes the prose radiates (during a heat wave in "Disruptions," naked mothers "jiggle and lumber through town"), but elsewhere it lands as didactic (a refrain at the beginning and end of the collection: "We were consumers to the core. We were always doomed.... We are all culpable"). Whenever Hyde commits to her creative ideas, these stories take off.
