Celebrated anthologist John Joseph Adams has team up up with Wool writer Hugh Howey to bring you a triptych of anthologies that sound like annihilation candy : The End is Nigh , The End is Now and The destruction Has amount . We talk to Adams and Howie about the three stages of Book of Revelation .
Image by Julian Faylona
The al-Qur’an will be publish starting in June 2014 , with the second volume add up in December 2014 and the final one in June 2015 . contributor include Nancy Kress , Paolo Bacigalupi , Daniel Wilson , Elizabeth Bear , and many other incredible authors ( full disclosure : io9 editor Charlie Jane Anders and myself are also contribute stories ) .
As Howey ’s bestselling novel attest , the public is thirsty for stories about the apocalypse correctly now — in everything from The walk Dead to cheesy motion picture like Thor 2 , we watch the macrocosm falling to snatch . Which begs the question — is it time to create apocalyptic subgenres , as these books do , dividing our stories up into pre - apocalypse , mid - Revelation of Saint John the Divine and berth - apocalypse ? These variety of stories do , after all , have their own convention and tropes .
I asked Adams and Howey .
Said Howey :
Personally , I do n’t cogitate we need freestanding musical genre for pre- and post - revelatory stories . . . The beauty of this triptych , for me , is the chance to read short tale with sequel , short story that take us on a journey , that tie a single world together across metre and blank space . I grew up reading the 2000AD comics , which have this storytelling technique , and I call up there ’s room for a circle more of it .
Adams added :
While I do n’t think we do n’t need disjoined genres per se , there is a distinct vibe that each of these types of stories has , and I suspect that there are lots of readers who are interested in one modality of Book of Revelation fiction or another ; some might prefer catch everything burn , while some might be more interested in seeing what take place after everything has bite , etc . , and so I mean anthology like these can be worthful for that reason . And of form , we hope that those “ individual - mode ” readers will be intrigue enough by the stories to then also see out the other volumes as well .
One of the things that ’s always interested me about apocalyptical fiction is all the questions it asks . In a story that focuses on the aftermath , we might get some hints about what direct to the crepuscule , and also what caused it , but rarely do we get much of an in - depth geographic expedition of that face of the worldbuilding ( even in apocalyptic novel ) . So I think it would be interesting to actually adjust out to specifically do just that . And also : I matte like no one had really even attempted to do so before . ( Though I may have been subconsiously inspire by Nancy Kress ’s late book After the Fall , Before the Fall , During the Fall , and Kim Stanley Robinson did something vaguely standardized with his Three Californias Trilogy , which is , in fact , a triptych . )
Not all of the authors are go away to be compose triptychs for the anthology — there will be some standalone stories as well — but we were pleased to find that a great many of them are : 85 % of the authors we invited agreed to spell stories for all three volume . So there will be triptychs aplenty .
It was only a matter of clip before trilogy madness infected the world of short stories too , but I also recollect there ’s something to be said for the estimate that we tell very different stories about different point in the apocalypse .
Learn more about the Apocalypse Triptychon the prescribed website .
BooksJohn Joseph Adams
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