...And Other Disasters

The past and future intertwine in this spellbinding collection from Older (Infomocracy), which encompasses eight stories, three poems, and one fragmented serial piece that winds around them all. In “The Black Box,” memory storage devices implanted into the brain provide a public record of a person’s life. A young girl growing up with this technology grapples with the ramifications of having an omnipresent camera in her head. “The Rupture” follows an alien anthropologist who comes to an Earth university to study humanity’s final moments in the face of climate change, only to be shocked by the students’ flippancy and indifference. In “Perpetuation of the Species,” a group of midwives hurtles through space, birthing children that will grow into an army in preparation for a battle. Woven around all these tales is “The End of the Incarnation,” a retrospective look at the fall of America told in seven fragments. Each of these imagined futures are alive with unnerving plausibility. Fans of thoughtful speculative fiction will relish this lyrical, emotional collection. Agent: Peter Steinberg, Foundry Lit and Media (Nov.)