I read “The Naturalist” straight through and then, ignoring the usual advice to wait a while before starting the next story in a collection, kept right on going to “Special Economics.” It focuses on a young girl making a little money by performing hip-hop in a Chinese market, one that overflows with second-hand stuff: “When over a quarter of a billion people died in four years, there was a lot of second-hand stuff.” The cause, it turns out, was a massive bird flu epidemic. However, Jieling eventually finds a job working in a biotech factory, helping to make “bacterial computers,” largely for the American market. Before long, “Special Economics” segues into a study of friendship and survival.
Well, after that I couldn’t stop reading. In “Useless Things” an unnamed woman fabricates “reborns,” dolls that look like newborn infants. “The point is to make them look almost, but not quite, real. People prefer them a little cuter, a little more perfect than the real thing.” Living alone, the narrator depends on her dogs for protection and on a well that is going dry. Global warming has escalated dramatically, and people regularly head north, toward the Great Lakes. There are hints that the Southwest is reverting to tribalism.
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
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(Small Beer Press) - "After the Apocalypse: Stories" by Maureen F. McHugh
Every story in “After the Apocalypse” takes place in the near future, and usually in the aftermath of some global disaster. In “The Kingdom of the Blind,” two programmers for a medical facility realize that their giant software system has achieved “awareness.” In “The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large,” a pair of dirty bombs explode in Baltimore, one at the Inner Harbor, the other near BWI. In “Going to France,” certain people gain the ability to fly. And in the last story, “After the Apocalypse,” a young mother and her junior-high-school-age daughter join the refugees heading toward Canada. In the wake of “the big Disney World attack where a kazillion people died,” the United States’s economy simply falls apart, and not even the natural bonds of family survive it.
McHugh possesses a wonderfully easygoing narrative voice, one that sucks you right into her stories, whether she’s focusing on convicts, computer nerds, Chinese teenagers, fat girls desperate for love or an amnesiac young man suffering from dissociative identity disorder. Think of “After the Apocalypse” as a series of Phildickian futures, as seen through the eyes of working-class characters out of Jayne Anne Phillips. The nightmarish surroundings quicken each story’s sense of threat and danger, but the real interest remains in depicting ordinary people trying to get on with their ordinary lives as best they can, despite diminished expectations or radically altered circumstances.
One last thing: If, for some reason, you are one of those people who still regard all science fiction as cowboy adventures in space, just try any of the stories in “After the Apocalypse.” I’m willing to bet that you won’t be able to read just one.
Dirda reviews each Thursday in Style and conducts a book discussion for The Post at wapo.st/reading-room. His latest book, “On Conan Doyle,” has just been published.
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