Last Week's Apocalypse

"It’s legitimate SF, and it’s ‘mainstream,’ and it’s metafiction: I don’t know anyone else doing quite what Lain is doing; fascinating work, moving, strikingly honest, powerful.”—Rich Horton, Locus MagazineGore Vidal meets Philip K. Dick in this collection of “lit-fabulist” stories. Douglas Lain’s work has been attracting high profile attention throughout the genre, and this collection features some of his finest and most controversial fiction. These stories present electric messiahs, identity constructs, the Beatles, and even nuclear Armageddon as comic foils for Lain’s everyman characters. Here is an America where the packets of Sea Monkeys that arrive in the mail contain secret messages and the girl next door can breathe underwater. With Last Week’s Apocalypse, Douglas Lain arrives with a punch line and a warning.

From Publishers Weekly

Being paranoid provides no reason to doubt that They are not out to get you, as Lain's ambitious postmodern story collection proves. In homage to past warriors against totalitarianism, contemporary Winston Smiths battle the trap of capitalism's ever-receding promise of a meaningful life via meaningless work ("Instant Labor"). Picking among the castoffs of baby boomer consumerism, Lain's Gen-X protagonists desperately try to construct an identity in a culture where novelty undermines authenticity. The simplicity of sea monkeys ("The Sea Monkey Conspiracy") and the rigidity of the Cold War ("I Read the News Today") are the closest to fixed values that can be found, and even they are uncertain at best. Characters learn, via a malfunctioning holographic Jesus ("How to Stop Selling Jesus"), that salvation is not granted but attained. Lain intrudes in his narratives, exploiting metafictive devices like direct address and references to other stories, tying a character's quest for identity to his own quest to unravel the stifling logic of America's malled-in society. Distracting typographic tricks contribute to the atmosphere of uncertainty. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Lain takes full advantage of sf's surrealist possibilities, with results that one sometimes wishes were funny rather than disturbing and provocative. In one story, a man dismissed from the navy as crazy tries to reconnect with reality by labeling things; for instance, he writes "swimming pool" on a card he tosses in the water before he can dive in. In another, after a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India triggers a globe-circling current of lethal radiation, the narrator eventually splits in two, reflecting perhaps his determination to continue with wife and lover as before; they'll all die soon, anyway. In one of the best, a salesman of interactive Bibles learns "How to Stop Selling Jesus" when a holographic Christ insists he take his place on the cross. The forms of some stories are as outre as their developments; they're set in whole or in part as Q-and-A interviews or as a numbered list of propositions or one--sentence precis of famous books. Sf comes no stranger, nor for some, surely, more gratifying, than this. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Douglas Lain is the author of Billy Moonand After the Saucers Landed, the editor of two speculative fiction anthologies,In the Shadow of the Towersand Deserts of Fire, and the publisher of Zero Books, which specializes in philosophy and political theory. He hosts the Zero Squared podcast, interviewing a wide range of fascinating and engaging people with insights for the new millennium. Lain lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children.

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