The Last Catastrophe

Hyde (Eleutheria) continues in the vein of her previous dystopian fiction with an inventive speculative collection. In “The Future Is a Click Away,” Hyde considers the trade-offs of online shopping, imagining an algorithm that knows everything about everyone and anticipates people’s needs in advance. “Loving Homes for Lost & Broken Men” explores an alternate universe where husbands are taken in and fostered by caretakers, who reform them so they can have a chance to find “forever houses.” “Democracy in America,” a highlight, explores the consequences of a skin-grafting treatment that promises older people the chance to look young again. In "Colonel Merryweather's Intergalactic Finishing School for Young Ladies of Grace & Good Nature," the rich find solace in space and try to populate other planets after Earth is destroyed by “unchecked industrialization.” Some of the shorter entries, however, feel like filler, with underdeveloped postapocalyptic settings. Sometimes the prose radiates (during a heat wave in “Disruptions,” naked mothers “jiggle and lumber through town”), but elsewhere it lands as didactic (a refrain at the beginning and end of the collection: “We were consumers to the core. We were always doomed.... We are all culpable”). Whenever Hyde commits to her creative ideas, these stories take off. Agent: Erin Harris, Folio Literary Management. (Mar.)