HOW TO GET TO APOCALYPSE AND OTHER DISASTERS
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ERICA L. SATIFKA
2021 ENDEAVOUR AWARD WINNER!
The apocalypse can take many forms. Possibly our end will come by way of an addictive cell phone game that manipulates its users into a crowd-sourced mass murder. Or perhaps our downfall involves aliens drugging us into bliss and then taking it away. Maybe it'll be technological redundancy that leaves loved ones without a purpose, or corporations replacing the natural world with creatures more amenable to market pressure.
All these apocalypses and many more can be found in Erica L. Satifka's debut collection, which gathers together twenty-three short stories from the past decade.
- November 2021 978-1-933846-17-0
- Cover art by Anders Hemlin
- trade paperback
- Order below, or buy print or ebooks of this title from these dealers
2021 ENDEAVOUR AWARD WINNER!
The apocalypse can take many forms. Possibly our end will come by way of an addictive cell phone game that manipulates its users into a crowd-sourced mass murder. Or perhaps our downfall involves aliens drugging us into bliss and then taking it away. Maybe it'll be technological redundancy that leaves loved ones without a purpose, or corporations replacing the natural world with creatures more amenable to market pressure.
All these apocalypses and many more can be found in Erica L. Satifka's debut collection, which gathers together twenty-three short stories from the past decade.
FROM THE JUDGES:
"We are delighted to help shine an eerie phantasmagorical glow of regard onto a book of such spiky originality as this. Satifka's How To Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is a fractal triumph that works on every level, from individual sentences and stories to the splendidly counterintuitive jigsaw of the whole. Rather than forming a seamless sameness, they constitute a fully interlocking kaleidoscope of moods and modes. These 23 stories take a gorgeously broad view of the genre, jacking especially into the cyberpunk mainframe, while exploring 21st-century concerns in language that raises a shower of sparks on every page. One juror compared this book to classic collections by Avram Davidson and R.A. Lafferty, which is the same as saying it's basically incomparable; another juror summed up by saying, simply: ‘I'm very impressed.’ We also must honor the chutzpah of a book that identifies all the stories therein as disastrous."
— Catherine Asaro, Andy Duncan, & Fran Wilde
TABLE OF CONTENTS
States of Emergency • Human Resources • Days Like These • The Big So-So • A Child of the Revolution • Lucky Girl • Bucket List Found in the Locker of Maddie Price, Age 14, Two Weeks Before the Great Uplifting of Mankind • Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse? • After We Walked Away • Sea Changes • Loving Grace • The Species of Least Concern • Thirty-Six Interrogatories Propounded by the Human-Powered Plasma Bomb in the Moments Before Her Imminent Detonation • A Slow, Constant Path • Sasquatch Summer • The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest • Signs Following • Act of Providence • Automatic • Where You Lead, I will Follow: An Oral History of the Denver Incident • Trial and Terror • Useful Objects • The Goddess of the Highway
"We are delighted to help shine an eerie phantasmagorical glow of regard onto a book of such spiky originality as this. Satifka's How To Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is a fractal triumph that works on every level, from individual sentences and stories to the splendidly counterintuitive jigsaw of the whole. Rather than forming a seamless sameness, they constitute a fully interlocking kaleidoscope of moods and modes. These 23 stories take a gorgeously broad view of the genre, jacking especially into the cyberpunk mainframe, while exploring 21st-century concerns in language that raises a shower of sparks on every page. One juror compared this book to classic collections by Avram Davidson and R.A. Lafferty, which is the same as saying it's basically incomparable; another juror summed up by saying, simply: ‘I'm very impressed.’ We also must honor the chutzpah of a book that identifies all the stories therein as disastrous."
— Catherine Asaro, Andy Duncan, & Fran Wilde
TABLE OF CONTENTS
States of Emergency • Human Resources • Days Like These • The Big So-So • A Child of the Revolution • Lucky Girl • Bucket List Found in the Locker of Maddie Price, Age 14, Two Weeks Before the Great Uplifting of Mankind • Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse? • After We Walked Away • Sea Changes • Loving Grace • The Species of Least Concern • Thirty-Six Interrogatories Propounded by the Human-Powered Plasma Bomb in the Moments Before Her Imminent Detonation • A Slow, Constant Path • Sasquatch Summer • The Fate of the World, Reduced to a Ten-Second Pissing Contest • Signs Following • Act of Providence • Automatic • Where You Lead, I will Follow: An Oral History of the Denver Incident • Trial and Terror • Useful Objects • The Goddess of the Highway
"The stories in Satifka's debut collection are inventive and gritty, bleak and satirical, hilarious and horrifying. Her work is reminiscent of Philip K. Dick at his best in revealing the struggles and resilience of everyday people caught up in the machinery of the future."
— Tim Pratt, author of Prison of Sleep and the Axiom series
"Satifka is one of the most exciting writers around and still sadly under the radar. Her mordant stories grapple with technology and society in a way that brings to mind the cyberpunk greats. The tales in her first collection range from a grim story of dead children turned into flesh puppets for a TV show to an incredibly effective response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."
— Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Washington Post
"The 23 stories gathered together in How To Get to Apocalypse display Satifka's biting sense of humour, her appreciation of the bizarre and surreal, and her concerns, both political and social, at the pervasive nature of neoliberalism. . . . A common feature of Satifka's work, which we see portrayed in 'Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse,' is the slow death of society, typically brought about by the rapacious appetite of capitalism (and sometimes alien invaders). . . .For all the despair and dystopia in Satifka's fiction, there's an acerbic thread of humour that runs through most of these stories. Several of them are even out-and-out hilarious. . . .There are so [many] terrific stories—I could speak rapturously about 'Automatic' (the piece [Nick] Mamatas plucked from the Clarkesworld slush pile) and "The Goddess of the Highway"--but I think it's best that you immediately purchase a copy of How to Get to Apocalypse and discover these treats for yourself."
— Ian Mond, Locus Magazine
"Perhaps my favourite of the year’s cyberpunk releases: Erica Satifka’s debut collection, How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters. . . . These are the apocalypses of automation and redundancy; social stratification and malignant ignorance. Satifka has an incredible—unparalleled, even—ability to pack each story filled with technological concepts and imaginative conceits. It is excellent world-building, with every element strange and wondrous, but all perfectly plausible and naturally woven. It is a wave of new ideas, but never once feels like an onslaught, because the stories themselves are character-driven; about deeply empathetic people in these recognisable, if unsettling, worlds. These are stories that are not only immediately relevant, but will stand the test of time. Science fiction—cyberpunk, even—at its finest."
— Tor.com
"What I love about Erica Satifka’s fiction . . . is that she writes bleak, cynical stories about messy people with messy lives living in messy societies--people that aren’t simply stand-ins for the reader. Her characters are not paragons of moral virtue and you’ll find no didactic lessons being taught here. She doesn’t provide answers or give signposted directions about how to make things better. What she does do is shine a spotlight on authoritarianism, income inequality and the balance of power in capitalist societies. She asks us to think about how we would navigate the worlds she presents, and the answers aren’t always easy."
— Parsecs & Parchment
"Satifka (Busted Synapses) presents 23 strange and captivating stories about the end of the world. None of these endings call for rains of fire and brimstone. Instead, these apocalypses are most often brought about by extraterrestrials, and the tales explore a wide variety of human-alien relationships . . . displaying wide-ranging creativity. Fans of speculative fiction are sure to be pleased."
— Publishers Weekly
"[Satifka] has established herself as a significant voice in what might be considered the post-Philip K. Dick apocalyptic wasteland of cyberpunk. [Her work] takes the tropes of science fiction utopias—virtual reality, alien uplift, technological progress—and shows how their realization would in fact impact society for the worst, largely by exacerbating current economic disparities. Her apocalypses are terrifying in that they’re not so much a sharp break with what has gone before as they are the logical playing-out of trends we already see around us. . . . In all of Satifka’s writing, though, what’s so effective—and bleak—is how believable her apocalypses are. Abject poverty, despair: in Satifka’s futures, technology only compounds inequity and ennui. No one in her stories is particularly happy, unless it’s a manufactured state of consciousness from drugs or the mental influence of mutants, as in 'Child of the Revolution.' Even the aliens that abduct the narrator in 'Thirty-Six Interrogatories' seem depressingly familiar in their facelessness and casual manipulation. Any humor is the humor of tragedy. Reading this collection straight through may leave you with an ache that doesn’t come from a sense of wonder or joy. These stories’ bleak believability, along with Satifka’s sharp focus on the day-to-day experiences of her characters and a refusal to write tidy arcs in which the characters “figure things out” or “solve their problems,” may be exactly the point: that’s the situation, she seems to be saying, that we find ourselves in right now."
— Strange Horizons
"Nobody knows for sure how the world will end, but many people have speculated. The subject has been written about more times than anyone could count. Erica Satifka has come up with a few ideas of her own, twenty-three in fact. How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is a collection of some of the most interesting, highly inventive short stories on the theme. Satifka’s imaginative ends range from selling body parts to pay for luxuries, to a children’s show reboot with computer-controlled corpses, to a nuclear missile strike caused by a game app. As Satifka explains, she preferred reading sci fi short stories. In this book, she proves you don’t need a lot of words to create great art. Some of her stories are whimsical, while others are more macabre. Many of the stories can be very thought provoking. While exploring multi-dimensional realities, one story also includes descriptions of self-harm that could be triggering to some readers. Don’t look to Satifka’s stories for sunshine and daisies. Her tales are more like dried roses: although dead, they remain beautiful while retaining their thorns. If you enjoy your end-of-day reading in short form, then this is a perfect book for you."
— Manhattan Book Review
"The death of the world is imminent in Erica L. Satifka’s short story collection How to Get to Apocalypse, which, flecked with cyberpunk details, explores its many possible endings. Although Armageddon is often projected as an atomic blast or a cataclysmic meteor strike, this collection discovers smaller-scale devastations. In 'Lucky Girl,' a woman who’s racked with depression plants herself 'in the basement like a root vegetable' after her eleventh suicide attempt. In 'Trial and Terror,' villagers practice drawing and quartering straw-stuffed dummies in anticipation of executing criminals. These cruelties may not have the impact of an asteroid, but their cumulative effect is catastrophic. The collection’s exquisite world-building turns on a dime, and each story constructs startling, unique landscapes that are then deconstructed, one mini-apocalypse at a time. 'Sasquatch Summer,' stands out; it’s about a worm-eating child’s encounter with a tribe of mythical, black-haired creatures in the forest during a union conflict. As Lou is adopted by the sasquatches and assimilates into their group, he becomes their conduit to the human world, which sees them as filthy beasts. The story includes subversive social commentary about family structures, capitalism, unions, and labor. Its allusions to Indigenous land rights are another layer of social critique. Other stories in the book are as laced with imaginary creatures, languages, and conflicts as this compelling tale is, too. This insightful, unsettling book balances elegant storytelling with a black sense of humor. Unconventional comparisons create jarring images: in one story, a besieged city’s walls are 'studded with endless fields of gemstones all cut into wicked facets,' while elsewhere, a full-time Florida sea god yearns for his family in the oceanless Midwest. Immersed in viable, plausible speculative futures, How to Get to Apocalypse is an unforgettable collection."
— Foreword Reviews
"Erica Satifka has a knack for building unusual, strange worlds that are filled with horrifying wonders and characters. She writes provocative, thoughtful genre fiction that isn't afraid to challenge readers and push boundaries."
— Jason Sizemore, editor-in-chief of Apex Book Company
"It’s generally easier to break things than to make them. So while there are an unlimited number of ways to have an apocalypse, there are precious few ways to fix what’s broken. In How to Get to Apocalypse, Erica L. Satifka explores 23 different apocalypse scenarios and brings us along for an edgy ride. The range of her stories is delightfully broad, bringing us from an 1800’s logging town to an unknown number of years in the future far reaches of space. . . . There’s a common thread among the stories of the cloying humiliation of abusive relationships. Whether that be aliens, rich people, greedy scientists, or just Mother Nature herself. These stories are about small people who don’t matter, deciding to go for broke to try to get what they need, even if that’s just a few answers. The characters aren’t always particularly likable, but whether they’re working to take down the establishment, or simply finding happiness despite their oppression and loss, the book repeatedly and artfully explores the painful birth that comes with the transition from a bad situation to the unknown."
— Apex Magazine
"If you're like me you've been expecting the end of the world for a while now, and it takes a hell of a writer to make the apocalypse fresh anymore. Everything you'd expect is in this Pandora's box of dire scenarios--from aliens to ancient cryptids, rising waters to biodiversity collapse, drugs that make people inertly happy, to video games that drive them to kill. But, as familiar as these disasters may sound, each and every one of them is brilliantly twisted, quite different from what you'd expect. And at the bottom of it all, to complete the metaphor, there's a tiny bit of hope."
— Carrie Laben, author of A Hawk in the Woods
"These are electric, melancholic, and hilarious stories crafted from the ashes of our Big Tech future. If science fiction has any satirical zeal left, Erica Satifka is among its sharpest stars."
— Jason Ridler, creator of the Brimstone Files
"An uncanny chronicler of the human — and inhuman — condition."
— Jason Heller, author of Taft 2012
— Tim Pratt, author of Prison of Sleep and the Axiom series
"Satifka is one of the most exciting writers around and still sadly under the radar. Her mordant stories grapple with technology and society in a way that brings to mind the cyberpunk greats. The tales in her first collection range from a grim story of dead children turned into flesh puppets for a TV show to an incredibly effective response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."
— Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Washington Post
"The 23 stories gathered together in How To Get to Apocalypse display Satifka's biting sense of humour, her appreciation of the bizarre and surreal, and her concerns, both political and social, at the pervasive nature of neoliberalism. . . . A common feature of Satifka's work, which we see portrayed in 'Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse,' is the slow death of society, typically brought about by the rapacious appetite of capitalism (and sometimes alien invaders). . . .For all the despair and dystopia in Satifka's fiction, there's an acerbic thread of humour that runs through most of these stories. Several of them are even out-and-out hilarious. . . .There are so [many] terrific stories—I could speak rapturously about 'Automatic' (the piece [Nick] Mamatas plucked from the Clarkesworld slush pile) and "The Goddess of the Highway"--but I think it's best that you immediately purchase a copy of How to Get to Apocalypse and discover these treats for yourself."
— Ian Mond, Locus Magazine
"Perhaps my favourite of the year’s cyberpunk releases: Erica Satifka’s debut collection, How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters. . . . These are the apocalypses of automation and redundancy; social stratification and malignant ignorance. Satifka has an incredible—unparalleled, even—ability to pack each story filled with technological concepts and imaginative conceits. It is excellent world-building, with every element strange and wondrous, but all perfectly plausible and naturally woven. It is a wave of new ideas, but never once feels like an onslaught, because the stories themselves are character-driven; about deeply empathetic people in these recognisable, if unsettling, worlds. These are stories that are not only immediately relevant, but will stand the test of time. Science fiction—cyberpunk, even—at its finest."
— Tor.com
"What I love about Erica Satifka’s fiction . . . is that she writes bleak, cynical stories about messy people with messy lives living in messy societies--people that aren’t simply stand-ins for the reader. Her characters are not paragons of moral virtue and you’ll find no didactic lessons being taught here. She doesn’t provide answers or give signposted directions about how to make things better. What she does do is shine a spotlight on authoritarianism, income inequality and the balance of power in capitalist societies. She asks us to think about how we would navigate the worlds she presents, and the answers aren’t always easy."
— Parsecs & Parchment
"Satifka (Busted Synapses) presents 23 strange and captivating stories about the end of the world. None of these endings call for rains of fire and brimstone. Instead, these apocalypses are most often brought about by extraterrestrials, and the tales explore a wide variety of human-alien relationships . . . displaying wide-ranging creativity. Fans of speculative fiction are sure to be pleased."
— Publishers Weekly
"[Satifka] has established herself as a significant voice in what might be considered the post-Philip K. Dick apocalyptic wasteland of cyberpunk. [Her work] takes the tropes of science fiction utopias—virtual reality, alien uplift, technological progress—and shows how their realization would in fact impact society for the worst, largely by exacerbating current economic disparities. Her apocalypses are terrifying in that they’re not so much a sharp break with what has gone before as they are the logical playing-out of trends we already see around us. . . . In all of Satifka’s writing, though, what’s so effective—and bleak—is how believable her apocalypses are. Abject poverty, despair: in Satifka’s futures, technology only compounds inequity and ennui. No one in her stories is particularly happy, unless it’s a manufactured state of consciousness from drugs or the mental influence of mutants, as in 'Child of the Revolution.' Even the aliens that abduct the narrator in 'Thirty-Six Interrogatories' seem depressingly familiar in their facelessness and casual manipulation. Any humor is the humor of tragedy. Reading this collection straight through may leave you with an ache that doesn’t come from a sense of wonder or joy. These stories’ bleak believability, along with Satifka’s sharp focus on the day-to-day experiences of her characters and a refusal to write tidy arcs in which the characters “figure things out” or “solve their problems,” may be exactly the point: that’s the situation, she seems to be saying, that we find ourselves in right now."
— Strange Horizons
"Nobody knows for sure how the world will end, but many people have speculated. The subject has been written about more times than anyone could count. Erica Satifka has come up with a few ideas of her own, twenty-three in fact. How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is a collection of some of the most interesting, highly inventive short stories on the theme. Satifka’s imaginative ends range from selling body parts to pay for luxuries, to a children’s show reboot with computer-controlled corpses, to a nuclear missile strike caused by a game app. As Satifka explains, she preferred reading sci fi short stories. In this book, she proves you don’t need a lot of words to create great art. Some of her stories are whimsical, while others are more macabre. Many of the stories can be very thought provoking. While exploring multi-dimensional realities, one story also includes descriptions of self-harm that could be triggering to some readers. Don’t look to Satifka’s stories for sunshine and daisies. Her tales are more like dried roses: although dead, they remain beautiful while retaining their thorns. If you enjoy your end-of-day reading in short form, then this is a perfect book for you."
— Manhattan Book Review
"The death of the world is imminent in Erica L. Satifka’s short story collection How to Get to Apocalypse, which, flecked with cyberpunk details, explores its many possible endings. Although Armageddon is often projected as an atomic blast or a cataclysmic meteor strike, this collection discovers smaller-scale devastations. In 'Lucky Girl,' a woman who’s racked with depression plants herself 'in the basement like a root vegetable' after her eleventh suicide attempt. In 'Trial and Terror,' villagers practice drawing and quartering straw-stuffed dummies in anticipation of executing criminals. These cruelties may not have the impact of an asteroid, but their cumulative effect is catastrophic. The collection’s exquisite world-building turns on a dime, and each story constructs startling, unique landscapes that are then deconstructed, one mini-apocalypse at a time. 'Sasquatch Summer,' stands out; it’s about a worm-eating child’s encounter with a tribe of mythical, black-haired creatures in the forest during a union conflict. As Lou is adopted by the sasquatches and assimilates into their group, he becomes their conduit to the human world, which sees them as filthy beasts. The story includes subversive social commentary about family structures, capitalism, unions, and labor. Its allusions to Indigenous land rights are another layer of social critique. Other stories in the book are as laced with imaginary creatures, languages, and conflicts as this compelling tale is, too. This insightful, unsettling book balances elegant storytelling with a black sense of humor. Unconventional comparisons create jarring images: in one story, a besieged city’s walls are 'studded with endless fields of gemstones all cut into wicked facets,' while elsewhere, a full-time Florida sea god yearns for his family in the oceanless Midwest. Immersed in viable, plausible speculative futures, How to Get to Apocalypse is an unforgettable collection."
— Foreword Reviews
"Erica Satifka has a knack for building unusual, strange worlds that are filled with horrifying wonders and characters. She writes provocative, thoughtful genre fiction that isn't afraid to challenge readers and push boundaries."
— Jason Sizemore, editor-in-chief of Apex Book Company
"It’s generally easier to break things than to make them. So while there are an unlimited number of ways to have an apocalypse, there are precious few ways to fix what’s broken. In How to Get to Apocalypse, Erica L. Satifka explores 23 different apocalypse scenarios and brings us along for an edgy ride. The range of her stories is delightfully broad, bringing us from an 1800’s logging town to an unknown number of years in the future far reaches of space. . . . There’s a common thread among the stories of the cloying humiliation of abusive relationships. Whether that be aliens, rich people, greedy scientists, or just Mother Nature herself. These stories are about small people who don’t matter, deciding to go for broke to try to get what they need, even if that’s just a few answers. The characters aren’t always particularly likable, but whether they’re working to take down the establishment, or simply finding happiness despite their oppression and loss, the book repeatedly and artfully explores the painful birth that comes with the transition from a bad situation to the unknown."
— Apex Magazine
"If you're like me you've been expecting the end of the world for a while now, and it takes a hell of a writer to make the apocalypse fresh anymore. Everything you'd expect is in this Pandora's box of dire scenarios--from aliens to ancient cryptids, rising waters to biodiversity collapse, drugs that make people inertly happy, to video games that drive them to kill. But, as familiar as these disasters may sound, each and every one of them is brilliantly twisted, quite different from what you'd expect. And at the bottom of it all, to complete the metaphor, there's a tiny bit of hope."
— Carrie Laben, author of A Hawk in the Woods
"These are electric, melancholic, and hilarious stories crafted from the ashes of our Big Tech future. If science fiction has any satirical zeal left, Erica Satifka is among its sharpest stars."
— Jason Ridler, creator of the Brimstone Files
"An uncanny chronicler of the human — and inhuman — condition."
— Jason Heller, author of Taft 2012
- About the Author