Introduction: dancing through the apocalypse / by Robert Silverberg -- The hum / by Rick Hautala -- Salvador / by Lucius Shepard -- We can get them for you wholesale / by Neil Gaiman -- The big flash / by Norman Spinrad -- Kindness / by Lester del Rey -- The underdweller / by William F. Nolan -- Lucifer / by Roger Zelazny -- To the storming gulf / by Gregory Benford -- The feast of Saint Janis / by Michael Swanwick -- The wheel / by John Wyndham -- Jody after the war / by Edward Bryant -- Salvage / by Orson Scott Card -- By fools like me / by Nancy Kress -- The store of the worlds / by Robert Sheckley -- Dark, dark were the tunnels / by George R.R. Martin -- "If I forget thee, oh Earth -- " / by Arthur C. Clarke -- Afterward / by John Helfers -- When we went to see the end of the world / by Robert Silverberg -- Flight to forever / by Poul Anderson
The best writers of the early 1900s were the first to flood New York with tidal waves, destroy Illinois with alien invaders, paralyze Washington with meteors, and lay waste to the Midwest with nuclear fallout. Now collected for the first time ever in one apocalyptic volume are those early doomsday writers and their contemporaries, including Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, Lucius Shepard, Robert Sheckley, Norman Spinrad, Arthur C. Clarke, William F. Nolan, Poul Anderson, Fredric Brown, Lester del Rey, and more. Relive these childhood classics or discover them here for the first time. Each story details the eerie political, social, and environmental destruction of our world