The last catastrophe : stories /

Hyde's new short-story collection asks: When everything is over, and the earth overheats, or there's no more food, or the animals are dying out, what will we become--and will we be able to face the world we've created? In 15 stories, Hyde explores the disasters humanity is liable to create. In "Mobilization," caravans of people travel across the U.S., cutting off ties and the internet in hopes of outrunning the increasing violence and bad news of the world. In "Algorithm," a predictive Amazon-like company sends things to you by drone before you need them--but what happens when a local woman sends back all her deliveries? In "Democracy in America," young beautiful people can sell their beauty via "consignment" in order to afford a new chance at life. These excellent stories dig into ruined biomes and food chains, reveal humans haunted by the ghosts of trees and creatures that have gone extinct. Hyde explores what humanity will do to distract itself from the destruction it's wreaked and what illusions we'll create to hide from the damage we've done--while exposing the absurdities of trying to survive in a world increasingly warped by climate change, hunger, and capitalist priorities.

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.)

After Eleutheria (2022), Hyde returns to the climate crisis with a collection of short stories that jump between dystopias and parallel universes, seamlessly blending humor and tragedy. The book's dedication--"For who we'll be"--immediately signposts its fundamental concern: The way humankind (and more specifically, Americans) will navigate an increasingly inhospitable climate. There's a sublime, filmic quality to the stories, in which Hyde expertly inverts the familiar. A swarm of caravans roam America, artists are kept in glass enclosures, and rehab facilities treat digital disorders. Hyde's preoccupation with material (duct tape, tar, fiberglass) and endless references to environmental collapse (glacial melt, phosphorus runoff, extinction) don't hinder the stories' unrelenting pace. Indeed, it is within the quotidian that she gestures toward the West's soporific response to the climate crisis. While the pilgrimaging caravaners of "Mobilization" obsess over refueling--dwindling resources are "probably a localized issue"--the reader grows agitated by their self-necrotizing, reckless consumption. The quintessential freedom of the American dream is continually exposed as an impossibility, the pursuit of which is entirely bound to the systems of capitalism and colonialism. In "The Future Is a Click Away," paying for the automated convenience of "individualized commodity distribution" destroys the finances and mental wellbeing of entire communities, highlighting the impossibility of consumer free will. In the subterranean village of "The Eaters," a celebrated historian observes that "our planet evolved on the premise of interdependence, yet human beings have insisted upon exceptionalism. No system can save us." The gender dynamics of heteronormative relationships are skewered in "Loving Homes for Lost & Broken Men," and the fetishization of youth is exposed as essentially grotesque in "Democracy in America." For Hyde, the U.S. is the "paradise no one could truly enter." We're invited along on an often bizarre ride in which we see the ridiculousness of our own world reflected back at us, with Hyde managing to stress the urgency of the climate catastrophe without lecturing us. At once a testament to and a caution against "the despairing human's capacity for ingenuity." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.