The End of the World Audiobook By Martin H. Greenberg - editor cover art

The End of the World

Stories of the Apocalypse

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The End of the World

By: Martin H. Greenberg - editor
Narrated by: Suehyla El Attar, Nicholas Tecosky
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Famous stories of the apocalypse by the world’s best science fiction writers.

Before The Road by Cormac McCarthy brought apocalyptic fiction into the mainstream, there was science fiction. No longer relegated to the fringes of literature, this explosive collection of the world’s best apocalyptic writers brings the inventors of alien invasions, devastating meteors, doomsday scenarios, and all-out nuclear war back to with a bang. The best writers of the early 1900s were the first to flood New York with tidal waves, destroy Illinois with alien invaders, paralyze Washington with meteors, and lay waste to the Midwest with nuclear fallout. Now collected for the first time ever in one apocalyptic volume are those early doomsday writers and their contemporaries, including Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, Lucius Shepard, Robert Sheckley, Norman Spinrad, Arthur C. Clarke, William F. Nolan, Poul Anderson, Fredric Brown, Lester del Rey, and more. Relive these childhood classics or discover them here for the first time. Each story details the eerie political, social, and environmental destruction of our world.

©2010 Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. (P)2012 Audible, Inc. Adventure Anthologies & Short Stories Fantasy Fiction Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction

Editorial reviews

What will humanity’s demise look like?

To answer that question, veteran anthologizer Martin Greenberg selects unsettling stories from masters of apocalyptic fiction. The team of Suehyla El Attar and Nicholas Tecosky play off each other in performance of individuals and groups who face the end, or have to live in a time and world where all we now experience is long gone. Here is the world’s political, social, and environmental destruction as envisioned by geniuses of speculation, including Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, Robert Sheckley, Norman Spinrad, Arthur C. Clarke, William F. Nolan, Poul Anderson, and Lester del Rey.
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old sci-fi stories,some better than others but all interesting. performance ok but the writing styles made some of the stories hard to follow. Doomsday stories are not cheerful, so you might want to listen to a few at a time.

Doom, despair and agony!!!

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I will admit that I did not finish this book. I skipped a couple of the stories because they just didn't grab my attention. Others had horrible endings; in fact, I really didn't realize they were finished until the next story started. That one thing seemed to be a theme for most of these stories. As with most anthologies, there were a lot of stories that seemed to be filler instead of being selected for their quality. Or, maybe they were selected for the author. I'm not sure.

There were a couple that were unique and entertaining, namely "Hum" and "I Can Get Them for you Wholesale". A lot of the stories were mostly sci-fi and really didn't involve "the end of the world" (at least in my opinion).

All in all, I was disappointed in this book and I am glad that I didn't spend any money on it, instead borrowing it through Kindle Unlimited. The narrator did a pretty good job, but a lot of his performances were pretty lackluster.

The End of the World

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Listening to this was quite enlightening. Not in terms of having any idea what the future will be, but in terms of how our own biases determine our views of the future.
Not a single author in this collection, envisioned, personal computers, cell phones, or social media, all of which were only a couple of decades away from when they were writing. for god’s sake, even in Star Trek in the 1960s, they had communicators! Why didn’t any of the authors wrong with that?
Some of the mores of the time that the authors wrote in came through loud and clear. Several of the stories had language that smack of sexism and racism, or at least with today we would call micro aggressions. You would think that maybe at least one of these authors, in imagining a future “golden age“, might have imagined the society in which women wouldn’t be put down, turned in which it wouldn’t be important to mention a person’s race.
Any one of these stories might be depressing to listen to. Bingeing all of them at once can be a really serious downer! Any future listeners should be warned to listen to one or two stories, then listen to something else, and then come back for one or two more.
The reader was quite good, although I think for a compendium like this, it would have been better to have the different stories read by different leaders. As I recall, there was one story, told in female, first person, with a woman reader for that only. Again, if there never been women writers who explored this subject?

They can’t even get 50 years right! So much for the end of the world!

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The good stories carried the narrator, but the others only enhanced a droning and rather flat performance. Such a combination almost made me put the book down for good several times.

Mix of good and terrible stories.

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Here's an interesting idea, suppose they gave an apocalypse and no zombies came? This anthology bucks the trend of zombies ruling over the apocalypse that is so prevalent in today's science fiction and horror literature (the stories collected here were written before the recent zombie craze.)

Actually, there is one story (The Underdweller by William F. Nolan) that is somewhat zombie-like in the same way that Richard Matheson's I Am Legend is, in that the world is overrun with monsters. Exactly what kind of monsters though remains to be seen until the shock ending.

Contents:
1. Introduction: Dancing Through the Apocalypse - Robert Silverberg
2. The Hum - Rick Hautala
3. Salvador - Lucius Shepard
4. We Can Get Them for You Wholesale - Neil Gaiman
5. The Big Flash - Norman Spinrad
6. Kindness - Lester del Rey
7. The Underdweller - William F. Nolan
8. Lucifer - Roger Zelazny
9. To the Storming Gulf - Gregory Benford
10. The Feast of Saint Janis - Michael.Swanwick
11. The Wheel - John Wyndham
12. Jody After the War - Edward Bryant
13. Salvage - Orson Scott Card
14. By Fools Like Me - Nancy Kress
15. The Store of the Worlds - Robert Sheckley
16. Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels - George R. R. Martin
17. "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth..." - Arthur C. Clarke
18. Afterward - John Helfers
19. When We Went to See the End of the World - Robert Silverberg
20. Flight to Forever - Poul Anderson

The Apocalypse Without Zombies

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This book did not play the sories. It only played a part of the international part then stopped and went to rate book. Please find out why it will not play off refund book. Thank you.

Book does not play

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Kept reading hoping the next story was better. Never happened. Found my self fatty forwarding to the next story often.

ehh...

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The primary narrator was monotonic, which killed the mostly mediocre stories. Hard to listen to.

Mostly disappointing

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