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Introduction – Preston Grassmann
The Hour – Clive Barker
The Green Caravanserai – Lavie Tidhar
The Age of Fish, Post-flowers – Anna Tambour
Exurbia – Kaaron Warren
Watching God – China Miéville
A Storm in Kingstown – Nina Allan
As Good As New – Charlie Jane Anders
Reminded – Ramsey Campbell
The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities – Samuel R. Delany
The Rise and Fall of Whistle-Pig City – Paul Di Filippo
Mr. Thursday – Emily St. John Mandel
The Man You Flee at Parties – Nick Mamatas
Like the Petals of Broken Flowers – Chris Kelso and Preston Grassman
The Endless Fall – Jeffrey Thomas
Dwindling – Ron Drummond
Malware Park – Nikhil Singh
Maeda: The Body Optic – Rumi Kaneko
Inventory – Carmen Maria Machado
How the Monsters Found God – John Skipp and Autumn Christian
The Box Man’s Dream – D.R.G. Sugawara
Acknowledgements
About the author
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Print edition ISBN: 9781789097399
E-book edition ISBN: 9781789097405
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: September 2021
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
Introduction © Preston Grassmann 2021
‘The Hour’ © Clive Barker 2021
‘The Green Caravanserai’ © Lavie Tidhar 2021
‘The Age of Fish, Post-flowers’ © Anna Tambour 2008. Originally published in Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, edited by Ekaterina Sedia. Used by permission of the author.
‘Exurbia’ © Kaaron Warren 2021
‘Watching God’ © China Miéville 2015. Originally published in Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories.
Used by permission of Del Rey Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. In the UK, reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan.
‘A Storm in Kingstown’ © Nina Allan 2021
‘As Good As New’ © Charlie Jane Anders 2014. Originally published at Tor.com, edited by Patrick
Nielson Hayden. Used by permission of the author.
‘Reminded’ © Ramsey Campbell 2021
‘The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities’ © Samuel R. Delany (excerpt published in 1996 in Review of Contemporary Fiction). Used by permission of the author.
‘The Rise and Fall of Whistle-Pig City’ © Paul Di Filippo 2021
‘Mr. Thursday’ © Emily St. John Mandel 2017. Originally published at Slate. Used by permission of the author via Katherine Fausset at Curtis Brown Ltd.
‘The Man You Flee at Parties’ © Nick Mamatas 2021
‘Like the Petals of Broken Flowers’ © Chris Kelso and Preston Grassman 2021
‘The Endless Fall’ © Jeffrey Thomas 2017. Originally published in the collection The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions, Lovecraft eZine Press. Used by permission of the author.
‘Dwindling’ © Ron Drummond 2021
‘Malware Park’ © Nikhil Singh 2021
‘Maeda: The Body Optic © Rumi Kaneko 2021 ‘Inventory’ © Carmen Maria Machado 2018. As published in Her Body and Other Parties: Stories. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org. In the UK, reprinted by permission of Angelika
Palmer at Profile Books.
‘How the Monsters Found God’ © John Skipp and Autumn Christian 2021
‘The Box Man’s Dream’ © D.R.G. Sugawara 2021
Interior art © Yoshika Nagata 2020
The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the author of their work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Preston Grassmann
MY earliest memory of a literary apocalypse was discovered in the remainder bins of a local bookstore. The Ruins of Earth (edited by Thomas M. Disch), with its emblematic cover of an egg-shaped world about to crack open, contained stories of ecological catastrophes and end-time scenarios that were so impressionable to my young mind, it might’ve been me emerging from that shell. But it was one story, in particular, that has remained with me through the years—“Cage of Sand” by J.G. Ballard. In that quintessential narrative, Ballard describes an abandoned Cape Canaveral inhabited by drifters of a lost space-age, where “the old launching gantries and landing ramps reared up into the sky like derelict pieces of giant sculpture.” That might’ve been the first time, in those early golden-age years, that I realized that some kind of beauty can be salvaged from the relics of the past. I went on from there to read The Drowned World, High Rise, and Concrete Island before I found my way to other writers who could sing among the ruins—many of them are in this book.
In more recent years, I had the opportunity to attend an exhibition at London’s Tate gallery called “Ruin Lust,” (derived from the German word Ruinenelust). It was filled with images of decaying structures, pieces of castle walls, the remnants of ghost-towns and demolished buildings. I remember feeling a mix of dismay and nostalgia at first, but that soon gave way to that same sense of excitement that I’d felt when reading Ballard. Here was proof that whatever falls apart in our world can be turned into something new. The surreal photographs of Paul Nash or the abandoned-London images of Jon Savage we
re about reimagining the world in the wake of destruction, not reveling in its end. They were about finding a way out, of transforming those Ballardian gantries and landing ramps into something of value. During that exhibition, I realized just how much scenes of ruin can traverse the present moment, pointing back in time while offering a glimpse of tomorrow—one where salvage and survival was (and is) possible.
It wasn’t that long ago that public health officials announced an event that felt (and still feels) like a harbinger of the end times. We’ve lived through a global crisis that has taken lives, stalled world economies, and altered our sense of reality in ways that none of us could foresee. For many of us, this continues to be an apocalyptic moment; a cataclysm that can both ruin and leave ruins in its wake. But as is true with all the cataclysms of history, we survive through our creations, salvaging the remains of our past to build something new. On a societal level, we can raise new cities and systems of belief. As individuals, we can rise out of our own private ruins; the versions of ourselves that survive. In this, a single poem or a story (or a photograph in the Tate gallery) can be as revealing as a city.
The idea of apocalypse as an end-of-the-world event is a modern conception. The ancient Greek word, apokalypsis, was about revelation and disclosure, uncovering what was once concealed. In Middle English, it referred to insight and vision or hallucinations. The word itself, if you’ll pardon the indulgence, has emerged from the ruins of its previous definitions, while holding on to some part of its origins. As you’ll see from the stories that follow, all of its potential meanings have been salvaged. In China Miéville’s “Watching God” or Kaaron Warren’s “Exurbia,” the survivors uncover their truths in the ways they’ve adapted to the ruins they inhabit. Others offer their end-of-the-world insights with levity, as in Paul Di Filippo’s “The Rise and Fall of Whistle-pig City” and Charlie Jane Anders’s “As Good As New.” In stories like Emily St. John Mandel’s “Mr. Thursday” and Ron Drummond’s “Dwindling,” the ruins can be a verb, where the scale of revelation comes down to the lives of individuals—the ways in which they emerge from the wreckage of their private histories. In John Skipp and Autumn Christian’s “How the Monsters Found God,” or Nina Allan’s “Storm in Kingstown,” hope is what remains, the revelation we take away. But all of the stories that follow have their apokalypsis, with unique visions of what worlds can be or what they might become. And no matter how dark they are, they also acknowledge that each of us can excavate something of value from the ash of our end times and make something new.
Great things can be born Out of the Ruins.
by Clive Barker
The Hour! The Hour! Upon the Hour!
The Munkee spits and thickets cower,
And what has become of the Old Man’s power
But tears and trepidation?
The Hour! The Hour! Upon the Hour!
Mother’s mad and the milk’s gone sour,
But yesterday I found a flower
That sang Annunciation.
And when the Hours become Day,
And all the Days have passed away,
Will we not see—yes, you and me—
How sweet and bright the light will be
That comes of our Creation?
Lavie Tidhar
EVERY winter around January the Green Caravanserais began to make an appearance around the Ghost Coast between Taba and Nuweiba. They were slow moving, patient and cautious—as well they should be, Saleh thought. For the paths they traversed were hard and the Ghost Coast itself could be deadly.
Saleh crouched on top of the unfinished castellated tower of what had once been, or could have been, a grand hotel. He could look out for miles. The Red Sea sparkled to the east, with the Saudi mountains rising behind on the shores on the other side of the gulf. The outlines of empty swimming pools dotted the landscape of heavily built, abandoned buildings each grander than the rest—
Bavarian Romanesque castles jostled against basilicas built in faux-Gaudí style, which in turn nestled against miniature Egyptian pyramids. Moorish arches vied with Doric columns next to a vintage American diner and an extensive garden, maintained by rusty, salvaged robots, was set up like a budget Alhambra.
Here and there Saleh could see craters of the ancient wars, where nothing lived and no one had settled, and fresh holes which a giant sandworm—the Vermes Arenae Sinaitici Gigantes were another relic of the war—might have dug. This strip of endless hospitality architecture ran all the way from the ancient border with what was now the entwined dual polity of the digitally federated Judea-Palestina Union to Sharm El-Sheikh, near the tip of the peninsula.
Beyond it lay the desert, eternal and hostile to humans as it always was.
It was from the desert that the Green Caravanserai came. Saleh, eyes bright, watched the distant, slow procession. The goats came first, a brown and white herd treading with an easy gait. Robed figures moved between them. Then, behind them, came the elephants.
There were several elephant families in the herd. Saleh watched enraptured, for he had always loved elephants. These were sand-coloured from the long march, and they moved with a kind of majestic unhurriedness, unencumbered by humans, seemingly indifferent to the elements. They were desert elephants, and in a lifetime could make the slow back-and-forth crossing many times. Moving between them were more humans, robed and with traditional keffiyehs covering their heads. Small robots and drones crawled and hovered and slithered in between.
And now Saleh could see solar gliders rising overhead on the hot winds.
Behind the elephants came the first of the caravanserai proper, though in the idiom of the travellers it was still called by its old name of a khan. Saleh watched as the building slinkied itself across the sands. The old caravanserais or khans were rest stops for the merchant trains along the silk and perfume roads. Now the Green Caravanserai brought their own buildings with them, semi-sentient machines that could build and rebuild themselves with ease and adapt to their surroundings, drawing energy from wind and sun.
Camels came behind the khan and hordes of children, horses, wagons pulled by snail-like robots until the whole thing resembled less a caravan than a carnival.
Saleh always looked forward to the caravanserais’ arrival each year, though until now he had never gone near one, for his father was always the one to represent the tribe at the trade meeting, and Saleh was not allowed to come.
But not this time, he thought. This time he had his own thing to trade, paid for in blood and despair.
His father was gone.
No. This time he, Saleh, would go. This time he would meet the elephants.
He watched as the Green Caravanserai reached just beyond the old coastal road that bisected the Ghost Coast from the desert. There they stopped, in successive waves. The khans reassembled and formed into simple, solid shapes that looked a little like round beehives. The small robots formed a fence and the people of the caravanserai laid down solar sheeting and set up atmospheric water generators. The kids played with the elephants. The goats chewed on the bark of trees.
Saleh abandoned the castellated tower of the old hotel. He slid down stairwells and in and out of windows. It was not protocol to go alone. The Abu-Ala foraged the Ghost Coast for old machines and they had long ago made arrangements with the caravaners, so Salah would be going against both tribe wishes and simple decorum.
He paused in the entrance of the old hotel. The sun beat down. The Ghost Coast—this endless strip of vintage neo-kitsch architecture suspended in time and gently falling apart—spread away from him.
He stared at the road then, almost unwillingly it felt to him, he began to march towards the Green Caravanserai.
* * *
Elias scratched hair out of his eyes and looked with curiosity at the boy striding nervously across the road. The boy had no way of knowing this, but right then he had the attention of several heavily armed drones, a detachment of caravaner rangers and of old Umm Kulthum, the matriarch of the eleph
ant herd herself, and if he set one foot wrong or drew any kind of weapon or if he just sneezed, really, he’d turn into hot desert dust long before his brain could even process the idea.
Which would be a shame, really, Elias thought, because the boy seemed nice, if rather nervous.
This really wasn’t protocol.
The thing about the Sinai was that, beyond the stretch of the Ghost Coast, and after centuries of sporadic warfare, nothing in the desert was particularly safe. It was littered with old mines, traps, unexploded ordnances, mutated bio-weapons and sentient machines that no one even remembered designing in the first place. The only people to cross it were the caravaners, who went in search of old military tech that had resale value, and to get through it time and time again they had become proficient in the art of not dying.
They were not specialists in the tech: it was people like the Abu-Ala tribe of the Al-Tirabin, for example—who foraged the Ghost Coast—that collected the stuff. The caravaners just haggled for it, then carried it back across the mountains and wadis and the desert, ranging from Cairo in the west to the glittering sprawl—Al-Imtidad—of Neom in the east and sometimes even to Djibouti in the south.
Elias watched as the boy crossed the road. Elias was mounted on top of the now-stationary khan, and he’d been observing the boy for quite a while now, ever since his heat signature was detected on top of a tower in the dense network of abandoned buildings that made up the coast.
Long ago, the coast was a busy hive of activity as tourists came from all over the world, from Israel and Russia and the European mass and that big island just off Europe the name of which Elias could never remember, but was an important polity for a short time back in the sometime or other. But then the tourists stopped coming, the ever more lavish hotel and resort buildings were never completed, and then the wars came, and with them the Leviathans that still haunted the depths of the Red Sea, and the Rocs that snatched the unwary and carried them to nests high up in the mountains and laid their larval eggs in them, and the sandworms—and whose stupid idea was that one? —that still bred and grew enormous in the sands.
Out of the Ruins Page 1
