The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) (Volume 1)

This anthology of apocalyptic fiction looks at the time before the catastrophe arrives. Its characters are the people who see the end coming, while everyone around them goes on as usual.

The book is the first of three volumes in The Apocalypse Triptych, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. The second volume covers life during the apocalypse, and the third covers life after it, with survivors trying to rebuild.

The stories draw on both traditions of the end of the world. The biblical version has four harbingers: Famine, Death, War and Pestilence. The science fiction version relies on literal causes such as nuclear war, engineered plague or pandemic, ecological collapse and cosmic disaster.

Every story in this volume is new and previously unpublished. Ten of the named contributors are Hugh Howey, Jamie Ford, Seanan McGuire and Jonathan Maberry, along with Paolo Bacigalupi, Tananarive Due, Robin Wasserman, Nancy Kress, Charlie Jane Anders and Ken Liu, with many more besides. The volume stays with the waiting, the warnings and the dread that comes before the disaster.