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Armageddon | Rating | |
| C | |||
| David Drake and Billie Sue Mosiman | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
Armageddon. The word conjures up visions of God's righteous fury, of plagues and war and death. The ends of the world. Here are collected a dozen stories by a dozen authors about exactly that. From a giant poisoning the land to telephone calls from God, from the serious to the silly, these stories run the gamut.
The problem, though, is that Armageddon is so very final. Once it arrives, there's nothing more one can do except wait to be saved or cast into Hell. And for a good many of the stories, that's exactly what happens. Five of the tales are nothing but a litany of despair, the characters watching the world fall apart around them and awaiting their fate. Not only is there not much of a story in that, it's damned depressing.
Of the other seven, three didn't seem to have an actual point to them, or none that I could understand. Joel Rosenberg's tale seems to fall just short of making one, as does David Drake's and L. Mark Van Name's. Or possibly the point was just a little too subtle for me to realize. S. M. Stirling's story, on the other hand, was perfectly understandable and enjoyable, but only if you'd already read his Island in the Sea of Time and its sequels. Gregory Nicoll's, though, is easy to comprehend and, to the best of my knowledge, not based on other tales. Technically it is post-apocalyptic, not about Armageddon, and it seems a little incomplete in the same way that the average episode of, oh, The A-Team was. But in light of most of the others it stands out as well above par.
The two remaining stories are actually pretty good. Harry Turtledove's contribution shows that nothing Hell can bring to bear holds a candle to modern warfare, and Esther Friesner's story about literally competing end-of-the-world mythologies is a lot of fun. Both are good, enjoyable tales that stand well on their own and aren't just people lying down getting psyched to die. By far they are the book's high points.
Anthologies are often hard to rate as a whole. One or two good stories can and do save an otherwise mediocre collection. But that is not the case, here. Most of the stories weren't just average. I actively disliked them. As good as the remainder may be, they just can't compensate.
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