Einstein's Monsters

by Martin Amis

Einstein's Monsters is Martin Amis's impassioned fictionalized protest against nuclear weapons. These powerfully imagined stories show individuals caught first in our world's slide toward nuclear war and later in the planet's post-holocaust decline toward extinction. The subject is depressing, almost unthinkable.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Science Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Literature, 20th Century

149 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the late 1980s, nukes were the hippest reason to fear Total and Complete Destruction of Everything. In the late 2010s, nukes and Mark Zuckerberg are the hippest reason to fear Total and Complete Destruction of Everything. That involuntary shudder of unconscionable terror when contemplating a nuclear holocaust is the worst mayhem nukes have wracked so far, but as Amis reminds us in his essay ‘Thinkability’, the prospect of mutually assured destruction is a mere poop-tweet away. This amiable preamble pretty much summarises the purpose of this collection of rambling, stylistically overcooked series of short stories, in which Martin attempts dystopic SF with the muddle-headed oddness of his notorious screenplay Saturn 3. The strongest SF usually emphasises story and concept, whereas Amis as usual surrenders all to style, with clumsy attempts to stitch his comic sardonicism to funky SF nihilism. The last story, the Vonnegutesque ‘The Immortals’, is a wry satiric shrug, and the most tolerable in this limp volume.

[Tony Vacation · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the wake of having children, Martin Amis realized he suddenly gave a fuck about the fate of the world as an ecologically safe place to live (yet another reason why I never want to have children), and out of this sudden concern for trending current events and pet immanent dooms comes this thematically linked collection of writings about the big bad nuclear wolf at the door - we're talking Einstein's Monsters: the atom bomb, baby.

Amis starts off strong with "Thinkability," his essay on fearing and loathing the bomb, which serves as prologue of sorts for the five short stories that follow. However, Amis is known as a novelist and essayist for good reason; the short form of fiction is not where his talents shine.

"Bartok and the Strong force" and "The Immortals" are both solid, anthology-worthy yarns - the former uses an aging, mostly benevolent Russian strong man who acts as de facto protector for an English slum as a vehicle for Amis to riff on biblical vengeance, masculinity, and nuclear devastation (metaphorically only, whew!); while the latter is a brief, jazzy rundown of human existence from the POV of a neurotic and millennially weary lifeform that's seen it all from the dinosaurs to the null and void of human extinction (by nukes, natch).

The other three tales run a bit thin in content and form. "The Time Disease" plays off like a comedy routine that pushes its joke too far (the joke being that a disease like AIDS is doing people in by making them younger), while "Insight at Flame Lake" uses dueling journal entries about a family's stay at a lakehouse to weave a cautionary tale that, I guess, is trying to warn readers about the psychological deformities that may be lurking behind the seemingly pleasant faces of children (who can still be saved!) and how these folks can grow up to be the kind of yobs who like pressing buttons that kill thousands of people. And then there is "The Little Puppy Who Could," a slightly hokey fairy tale about an adorable puppy looking for love in a post-nuclear survivor colony beset by a fire-breathing, man-eating mutant dog.

For the record, I would have Martin Amis's children, but this collection is for fanatics only. Marty's nuclear blues work much better in the longer form of London Fields, where the atomic threat looms as an abstract background doom for the book's noirish plot. But since you, my many readers, are perched on the fence, waiting for me to tell you which way you should lean on the issue of nuclear bombs - no, nukes are not nice, and, yes, we should find other cool toys to play with. Amis's heart is in the right place, but with Einstein's Monsters, like, the center just doesn't hold, man.

[Ben Winch]

I was going to post a real evisceration of this, until I caught myself. Is Amis bad? Not really. If a friend or contemporary (Amis was 38 when he published this; I’m 41) gave me Einstein’s Monsters and said he’d written it I’d be impressed by the professionalism at the very least. But that’s just it: the professionalism. Martin Amis, on this evidence, is a man who – probably day after day, in some office, at some desk – crafts impressive, inventive, high-flown yet slang-infused sentences without stopping to consider if they correspond to any deeply felt reality at all (and by “reality” I mean anything that the mind can conceive, so long as it glows). When (in “Bujak and the Strong Force”) he says, “This is the only story I’ll ever write, and this story is true,” I believe him not at all: he only casts his narrator as a failed writer so he’ll have some excuse for the preternatural literate voice, and as to the “this story is true” trick, it takes more than paying lip-service to animate that old paradox. To me, there’s a strong whiff of salesmanship – cute, cheap, vulgar – in every one of these stories, from “The Little Puppy That Could” (“The little puppy came bounding and tumbling over the fallow fields. Here he comes, bounding, tumbling.”) to “The Immortals” (“If I thought the Permian age was the pits it was only because I hadn’t yet lived through the Triassic.”). But why should that surprise me? The guy who received the biggest advance ever for a “literary” novel (The Information, 1995)? Chances are he’s a salesman.

[Maciek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Martin Amis hates nuclear weapons. With a passion. He doesn't know what to do with them and would rather they did not exist in the first place. And who can blame him? Einstein's Monsters, a collection of five stories dealing with people living under constant threat of a nuclear war and survivors of nuclear apocalypse was published in 1987.when the Doomsday Clock stood at just three minutes to midnight - its closest position since 1953, when the clock stood at two minutes when both the Soviet Union and the United States detonated nuclear bombs within months of one another. Exactly ten years after that the world held its breath for thirteen days during the Cuban Missile Crisis; thirty years later it's deep Cold War, and the two superpowers are at race with one another to strengthen their nuclear capabilities even further. And the clock is ticking, ticking...

Amis prefaces his stories with an essay titled Thinkability, a heated introduction, seeing the world enter a state of perpetual paranoia as a result from the invention of nuclear weaponry and man's struggle for more of it. Nuclear war is seven minutes away, and might be over in an afternoon - Amis's essay full of anxiety at the face of what he considers to be an unsolvable situation: What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons.
Thinkability is a show of frustration, as Amis sees the world with nuclear warheads as being engaged in a perpetual Mexican standoff, since we opened the Pandora's box and can't possibly hope to close it again. Amis fears not death itself, but that it could come as as a conclusion to the horrifying reality of a nuclear war, which in his eyes nothing else could match in its monstrosity: Events that we call "acts of God"-floods, earthquakes, eruptions-are flesh wounds compared to the human act of nuclear war: a million Hiroshimas. Like God, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike God, nuclear weapons are real. And they are here.

Unfortunately, none of the stories contained in Einstein's Monsters match the intensity of Thinkability, and all lack its directness and urgency. It's clear that Amis, although an acclaimed novelist, is not a writer of science fiction and quite possibly not a short story writer either; in these stories he seems to struggle with finding a way to best use his ideas and themes, but fails to do what other have achieved both before him and since - create a narrative which would not just be a background for his ideas but would be a world of itself, filled with people who live and breathe on their own and are not just playing their part. Amis's stories here are far too allegorical and seem almost like pastiches, full of half-finished ideas and scenarios.
Two of the stories are set in a world tottering on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse, and three in one in post-apocalyptic reality. The first story, titled Bujak and the Strong Force, or God's Dice attracted my attention immediately, since one of my university friends' nickname was Bujak and I wondered where did Amis come up with such name? Bujak of the story was also a Polish man - here I begun to feel uncanny - who tracks down Nazi colaborators after World War 2, and whose personal hero is Einstein. Bujak lives in South London and has the gift of the "strong force", meaning literally being strong as an ox. Interestingly enough Bujak is opposted to using it, and his opposition to use of said force comes from him attributing all the evils of the world to Einsteinian strong force - knowledge of nuclear energy. The allegory is heavily handed throughout, and the ending doesn't help it.
The rest of the stories are interesting but suffer from the same symptoms: they don't quite seem to fit the subject they're describing. Insight at Flame Lake features Dan, a schizophrenic boy who stays with Ned, his uncle, after his father - who worked with delivering nuclear weapons - has committed suicide. The story consists of Dan's and Ned's respective diary entries, but the link to apocalypse and nuclear dangers is almost non-existant. The Time Disease is reminiscent of Amis's famous novel Time's Arrow, where the protagonists experiences time backwards - a play on Benjamin Button. In this story the narrator's wife has come down with the time disease - a disease which reverses the aging process and restores vitality, which is unwanted as all humans want to do is grow older, ill and die in a bizarre post-apocalyptic world. An interesting idea, but I fear that it's all there is to it - especially when a very similar concept has been done before by the same man.
The Little Puppy That Could obviously takes its title from The Little Enginge That Could an is a parody on a children's fable, where a society is preyed on by a giant mutated dog which eats one human a week. Personally, I thought that Harlan Ellison had a more interesting idea with his famous short A Boy and his Dog, where a boy and a dog work together as a team in a post-apocalyptic world. Ellison's protagonists, both human and canine, are memorable - Amis's story vanishes from memory rather quickly.
The last story, The Immortals, is probably most interesting of the lot - narrated in the first person by an entity which claims to be immortal and which narrates the end of time, as the last of humanity came to New Zealand to die from radiation poisoning after nuclear warfare. This being has existed for millions of years and observed the development of earth and evolution of life, observing humanity from the outside and offering scathing commentary: Just as I was thinking that no century could possibly be dumber than the nineteenth, along comes the twentieth. I swear, the entire planet seemed to be staging some kind of stupidity contest. I could tell then how the human story would end. Anybody could. Just the one outcome. The story is conceptually interesting and unlike other stories - with the exclusion of Little Puppy - is not narrated nor deals with any concrete characters; the unnamed immortal entity, an outside observer of humanity and its follies is a perfect way for Amis to employ his own famous ironic and biting voice without having to bother with writing it on cue cards of his characters or employ any sci-fi tropes. It reminded me of my favorite Ellison story, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream which is never a bad thing. The narrator of the last story can be Amis himself, as indeed unlike him his words are immortal, and what he has written in these pages can never die.

Ultimately, Einstein's Monsters contains a quite good introductory essay and two good stories, with The Immortals being the best of the bunch - curiously also being the Most Amis-like piece. It is however quite dated, as ironically in 1988 both the Soviet Union and the U.S. would sign treaties eliminating immediate-range nuclear forces and their relations would improve, and in 1991 the Soviet Union would dissolve altogether. However, in 1987 a year of fear of living in the shadow of a mushroom cloud could feel like a lifetime, and nuclear weapons are indeed here to stay,and we can't ever uninvent them. More remarkable fiction about the dangers and consequences of nuclear warfare has been written - such as Nevil Shute's sad and affecting novel On the Beach - and a reader interested in the topic would be better advised to skim Einstein's Monsters for its introduction and one or two stories, and read the grand classics instead.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't think much of his Heavy Water & other Stories, and this short collection was only slightly better than that. The first couple of stories were actually pretty good, in particular the second one told in diary form, but it went down hill from there.
The story about the puppy was my least favourite, and the last one was not much better than that. Can't speak highly of him when it comes to short stories, and from now on I'll stick to novels and non-fiction. There is a good chance I'll read an Amis novel over the Christmas period, and hopefully it will knock the stuffing out of this book. Two-and-a-half stars.

[Dan Witte · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you stopped here hoping that I’d finally posted my personal doomsday calculus, for once you’re in luck, my friend. Foregoing any gratuitous fanfare, let’s just get right into it: my doomsday scale basically measures the proximity of madmen to missiles, using the variables of degree of madness multiplied by mass of warheads. So as not to play favorites, this equation factors in all the warheads along with all the madmen near them, regardless of the magnitude of their moral malignancy and malefaction. (It’s worth noting here that the acronym MAD – Mutual Assured Destruction – is hardly a coincidence.) Using this formula, I’ve determined that here at the beginning of 2026, we have moved decisively into the Brown Zone, which I define by the color our collective underpants should be. In fact, things feel so bowel-shakingly shaky that I feel I have to hurry and finish this review before someone faceplants into the nuclear football during a cabinet meeting.

Conveniently, this also serves as an apt segue to Einstein’s Monsters, where Martin Amis kicks things off with an essay outlining his own doomsday equation, concluding way back in 1987 that we’d already been in this Zone since 1945. The five short stories that follow are each a contemplation of sorts on the nuclear effect, each simultaneously grim and amusing, as you might expect from Amis. Holocaust, Apocalypse, Armageddon; these serve as both settings and moods, hosting variously mutated characters who often seem like blast shadows, their lives reduced to half-lives, their humanity as warped and distorted as their post-blast DNA strands.

The first story, “Bujack And The Strong Force,” felt the most like an Amis story, told with his familiar sense of menace and irony. I thought “The Little Puppy That Could” read like a cross between Chuck Pahlaniuk and T.C. Boyle, though predating the former by a half-decade or so. My favorite was “The Immortals”, which closes the collection, and which concerns itself with only one immortal, the narrator, who reminds us of the episodic nature of global catastrophe, and describes what it’s like to go on a 95-year bender.

Martin Amis is one of my favorite writers, and I admit I tend to give him more leeway in my critical reading than I do others. I in fact wanted to give this 5 stars, just because it’s always such an agreeable thing for me to return to his themes and style. But compared to some of his other stories, and especially as compared to the superior story collection Heavy Water, this is probably more objectively a 2 or a 2.5, which I’m going to round up to 3 because – well, because it’s Martin Amis.

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a good collection of the odd and the strange. The opening essay is thought-provoking as well.

Warning for animal lovers: There is one where the dog dies, but it's what you might reasonably call a good death.

[Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

The introduction is what drew me to this book, I read the page and was immediately up for discussions on the grotesque possible realities of nuclear Armageddon and a post-nuclear holocaust, However, I am ultimately disappointed. Perhaps this is my own downfall though, as I’m not great at analytical reading and struggled to garner an understanding of this work of polemic.

[Dario Maccari · Rating 2 out of 5]

Non so cosa scrivere di questo libro.
Devo dire di aver avuto grandi aspettative, le prime 2/3 storie sono anche carine, le ultime 2 invece le ho trovato un insieme di parole confusionarie. Delle 2 sopracitate si salva solo il finale della prima “il piccolo cucciolo che poteva”, per il resto niente di che, al punto da avermi mandato in blocco.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Martin Amis is not known for his short stories, with only two collections published in his lifetime, Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998), among some later omnibus publications of collected stories which included the two volumes and some other strays. Einstein’s Monsters was apparently put together when Amis realised that the short stories he had been writing were centred around the theme of nuclear weapons. Einstein's Monsters begins with an essay called Thinkability, in which Amis outlines the true horror of the threat of nuclear weapons and the annihilation they could potentially unleash. It makes for harrowing reading and despite being written and published during the height of the Cold War, the essay is still chillingly relevant. Amis bemoans the terrible irony of the need for nuclear weapons because of the existence of those very same nuclear weapons. After this short essay the first story, Bujak and the Strong force, Or God’s Dice, provides a very decent beginning, with a Polish protagonist whose strength is such that it metaphorically mirrors the strong nuclear force. It brings him a great deal of trouble, of course, and things don’t go well for his loved ones because of it. It’s a fine, if flawed tale. Insight at Flame Lake uses contrasting diary entries to tell the story of the impact of a schizophrenic boy on his host family. The boy’s father had worked with nuclear weapons before committing suicide. Ultimately it’s a rather heavy-handed allegory for the travails of having nuclear weapons around.

The Time Disease is entertaining but doesn’t quite suit being shoehorned into a collection of nuclear themed stories. It’s futuristic in nature, featuring people who are terrified of time and its deleterious effects on aging, in this case they are aging in reverse. As with all of these stories it features enough of that trademark Amis erudite flair and biting wit to make it worth reading. The actual writing is quite brilliant, but the overall effect is diminished by the shape of the plot. The Little Puppy That Could continues in this fashion. Set in a post nuclear apocalyptic future, things are so bad that a huge, deformed malevolent dog is menacing the ill and deformed residents of a dilapidated village. Their ploy is to offer up weekly sacrifices. Meanwhile a little puppy (who doesn’t appear to be normal himself) with great persistence worms his way into the heart of a little girl. Most of the villagers are scared of the poor little puppy, due to the giant deformed canine that menaces them on a weekly basis. It’s a bit long and grotesque, but does create a nice amount of tension, particularly in the last third of the story. The story has classical mythological allusions within its twisted narrative, but it doesn’t provoke enough motivation to do the research to understand them, at least in my case. The final story, The Immortals, is one of the finer to be found within this slender collection. It recounts the life of an immortal as he traverses the gulfs of time that encompass the history of the planet. There are some great lines, included references to decades long recreational habits and how various epochs compared in terms of boredom and danger. Turns out that ultimately the future involves the imposition of nuclear warfare and the last of humanity in New Zealand who dream that they are indeed immortal. It’s clever all right, but other than its often-brilliant prose it doesn't work quite as well as you want it to. Based on Einstein’s Monster’s, Amis wasn’t really a natural short story writer and it is probably not a coincidence that he didn’t produce many throughout his otherwise brilliant career. This collection is vaguely disappointing, but even acknowledged geniuses have lapses and in the scheme of things these stories are still worth reading just to bask in the glory of Amis’s brilliant prose style.

[Robert Jr. · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was not a good book. The introduction which consisted of about a third of the whole book was interesting but got to be repetitive about half-way through. The stories were a slog with the last two being somewhat tolerable however the second to last, the Little Puppy that Could, had points that bogged it down and had a confusing ending. The only stories that had much to do with a nuclear Apocalypse aside from just using it as a background that contributed nothing to the story were the last two. It was a quick read but I cannot recommend this book, it sucked.

[Dayna Ingram · Rating 4 out of 5]

This four-star rating is based solely on the one story I read this collection, "The Immortals," which is one of the best short stories I've ever read. To tell you anything about it would be giving everything away. It's not about vampires. That's all you need to know.

[Lynda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book almost 30 years ago and the only thing I remember about it is how in one of the stories (I don't even recall which one) all highways in the future became toll roads with different price points depending on the lane, and congestion on the less expensive lanes got so bad that roads essentially turned into parking lots. I think about this every time I drive in Northern Virginia and see HOV lanes, and whenever I read reports about how people are stuck in overnight traffic jams on snowy roads. I don't think this was a great book, or probably even a good one, but that one throw-away image had as much prescience and relevance to the future as anything Orwell ever came up with.

[Mabel Illingworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

YEAH (i only read the immortals)

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

highly recommend if you’re into short stories written about the nuclear threat, probably would recommend less if you’re not into that

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Einstein's Monsters" is a thought-provoking collection of short stories that grapples with the existential threat of nuclear warfare, exploring its impact on the human psyche and society at large. This collection is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally powerful, offering a unique combination of science fiction, social commentary, and philosophical reflection. It fully earns its five-star rating.

Amis's stories take us into a variety of dystopian futures, each rendered frighteningly real by the specter of nuclear disaster. These narratives are peopled by characters struggling with the moral and emotional implications of living in a world on the brink of annihilation. The characters' dilemmas are often deeply personal, yet they echo the collective anxiety of a society living under the shadow of the atomic bomb.

Amis's writing in "Einstein's Monsters" is both sharp and evocative. His prose has a haunting quality, capturing the tension and fear that pervade these dystopian futures. He expertly interweaves elements of science fiction and social commentary, using the former to illuminate the latter. Each story serves as a chilling reminder of the potential consequences of our nuclear capabilities, making for a profoundly impactful reading experience.

The collection also includes a provocative essay, 'Thinkability,' where Amis discusses the moral implications of nuclear weapons and the idea of 'nuclear deterrence.' This essay serves as a powerful introduction to the themes explored in the short stories and underscores the urgency and relevance of the issues at hand.

Despite the gravity of its subject matter, "Einstein's Monsters" is not without moments of dark humor and irony, hallmarks of Amis's writing style. These moments provide a welcome counterpoint to the collection's darker themes, adding depth and nuance to the narrative.

In conclusion, "Einstein's Monsters" is a powerful and thought-provoking collection of short stories that offers a chilling exploration of the existential threat posed by nuclear warfare. With its combination of science fiction, social commentary, and philosophical reflection, it is a must-read for anyone interested in the impact of nuclear weapons on society and the human psyche. Its intellectual rigor, emotional power, and timely subject matter earn it a well-deserved five-star rating.

[Dionisia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know a rating of two stars is not enough to make you want to run out and grab the nearest copy of Einstein's Monsters. It's not exactly an enthusiastic recommendation for sure. I only hope that if you happen upon it in your local library you'll feel an irrational need to pick it up and read the introduction....because it is amazing.
The author's opening essay "Thinkability" is all about nuclear weapons and the absurdity of nuclear deterrence. It turned out to be both the best and the worst possible way to open this book. It sets the reader in the right frame of mind. It plants the seed that grows into unwieldy thoughts of nuclear winters and bleak postwar futures. Unfortunately, the stories that follow pale in comparison. I really only enjoyed reading the last two: "The Little Puppy That Could" and "The Immortals." Everything else was eh.

[Ligeia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edipo e la bomba


cinque racconti scritti tenedo d'occhio l'ottica della Guerra Fredda, comune in quel periodo insieme alla convinzione delle vecchie generazioni, in questo caso anche papà Amis, che la Bomba definitiva possa essere un deterrente all'autodistruzione paventata dai due blocchi...chiaro che se Martin non avesse avuto un papà così famoso e convinto che la Bomba fosse la cosa giusta, non avrebbe preso così drasticamente la posizione opposta, almeno questo è quel che si insinua nella sua autobiografia Esperienze in cui ci racconta di questi primi tentativi di opporre la sua scrittura e il suo pensiero a quelli dell'ingombrantissimo padre...si tratta ovviamente di racconti cupi e pessimisti, intrisi della paura che all'epoca ammorbava tutti gli intellettuali sensibili e le persone con un minimo di coscienza...condivisibili nella misura in cui ci si ricorda come si viveva all'epoca...io me lo ricordo

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not typical Amis at all, in style or (especially) tone. In this collection he took up Jonathan Schell's challenge to come to grips with the idea of nuclear war, and did it with a directness and humanity that I've never seen in anything else he's written. It's uneven but may be a good place to start if you're curious about his work.

[Velvetink · Rating 3 out of 5]

donated to The Smith Family charity

[Ruth Collier · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm going to be a bit harsh with this one, but I'm going to at least go into a bit of detail about why I disliked it. I know story collections can be a bit hit and miss but... wow. I think the main problem with these is that either I'm missing some of the analogous subtleties, or maybe they're just not as clever as they think they are.
It took me ages just to get through the introduction, it makes some decent points (although 'nuclear weapons are bad' is not an uncommon opinion) but I found it hard to follow the train of thought, especially when reviews of other books came into it.
The first story, Bujack, is a decent start, it's the sort of understated story of humanity that I like, but the nuclear analogy wasn't exactly subtle.
Both 'Insight at Flame Lake' and 'The Time Disease' had bit of a feeling of 50's pastiche, like twilight zone imagining the future. I found the first easier to follow, although I wasn't sure how it fit the theme of the book as much of the others, and it's use of mental health issues as a plot device is pretty bad. 'Time Disease' at least gave hints of an interesting world I wanted to know more about - I may not have understood what was going on as much but it had my attention.
The Little Puppy That Could is where most of my frustration is directed. As the title suggests, it's a nuclear fable dressed up as a children's story about a puppy, and as fits the theme of the book it's depressing as hell. I know that's the point of the book, but it doesn't exactly take a lot of writing skill to make readers sad about a lonely, sick puppy. It feels like a cheap trick. Some of the analogies in this one were obvious but there was a lot more going on that I couldn't quite figure out. As a parody/metaphor it's too busy and over-long, and as a bedtime story for adults is just not entertaining enough, unless feeling depressed is entertainment.
Finally, The Immortals, which was probably my favourite but I'm not sure how much of that was due to it following the Little Puppy and heralding the end of the book. It's short, with a good ending, it's easy to follow and links clearly into the nuclear theme without being obscure or preachy.

[David Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection by Martin Amis, in which he uses, as inspiration for five short stories, the fear of nuclear apocalypse that permeated his life since he was a few days old (he was born in 1949, just before the Soviets successfully exploded a nuclear weapon). Two of the stories take place in the conventional world and deal with nuclear/Cold War themes in very different ways; the other three see Amis head into science fiction territory, taking place in post-nuclear war times. Amis make the transition from contemporary literature to science fiction in these tales as well as he does the shift from conventional literature to detective noir in his short novel Night Train. In fact he even sort of becomes God in the final story and does it well. All five stories lingered in my mind equally after finishing the book. Great title - it took me until halfway through to book to get the meaning. Amis explains it an introduction, which I read last. The intro begins with his stating he was born a few days before Russia showed it had the bomb and while illuminating as a background to how he came about to write the stories, it is a bit too long at 23 pages. That's about the only fault in this collection. I'm becoming a fan of Amis as he is one of the few serious literary writers whose work is fast-paced.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amis is a contemporary fave of mine, an inventive, thrilling, & often hilarious storyteller. This collection checks those first two boxes but is drenched in gloom & foreboding, being conceived & executed as a response to the omnipresent nuclear threat that was in the air back in the eighties. Its vehemence & sense of urgency (particularly in the author's introductory essay) seem sadly dated today, as fear of nuclear war has been superseded by other potential catastrophes. Still, the stories are really something, showing off Amis's skills in various scenarios to great effect. The Little Puppy That Could is a ridiculously amazing & manipulative tour-de-force that continues to haunt. He seems to have mastered the art of the short story with ease, tho I confess I couldn't wait to be free from the relentless oppressive atmosphere brought on by the succession of horror & dread.

[Rachel Constable · Rating 4 out of 5]

All four of these stars are for The Immortals. The unspecified immortal being has watched humans thoroughly and irrevocably fuck the earth up and is furious about it:

"I saw what you were doing to the place. What was the matter? Was it too nice for you or something? Jesus Christ, you were only here for about ten minutes. And look what you did."

I read that bit and had to stop and stare into space for a few minutes. It was written about nuclear weapons, as are all the stories in this collection, but it's not difficult to relate it to other weapons, and wars, and climate change, and all the other planet-ruining, life-ruining things that go on here every day. We've only been here for about ten minutes, and look what we're doing.

Thanks, Martin Amis, now I won't be able to sleep.

[Michael Chance · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief and playful bunch of short stories on a horrific theme, Amis tries out a few different approaches - in wildly different tones - toward thinking the unthinkable.

The introductory essay is a passionate and fairly undeniable take down of nuclear pretensions which gets a bit repetitive, but understandably, since the subject prompts such double and triple takes of disbelief.

There is plenty of hatred for human stupidity throughout. Perhaps that’s why the stand out for me is the story about Bujak, the strongman who confronts the unthinkable and responds by ‘disarming’, showing a way out of the violent cycle and restoring a shred of dignity to our mad world.

[Hugo L.B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amis' brush with science fiction leans heavily into his deft and incisive style. His opening essays 'thinkability' and the stories 'gods dice' 'time disease' & 'the immortals' display the war centuries terror regarding the development of nuclear armament, as well as its implications. "the eternal has been placed at stake of temporal realm"

A weak emphasis on character, theme and story development hinder this collection from competing with the lucid offering of standard science fiction short story writing, and instead embellishes itself in the unique style, prose and personality of its writer.

[Giselle Bogoya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Colección de cuentos, algunos de ciencia ficción y fantasía, alrededor de las consecuencias de la bomba atómica.
Todos los cuentos trabajan sobre la idea de controlar o no la bomba que cada humano lleva en su interior. La bomba es un monstruo engendrado por monstruos. Si observamos nuestras mentes y emociones con el paso del tiempo y la acumulación de experiencias se vuelven impredecibles, caos puro. Estamos constantemente moviéndonos en estados de inestabilidad, pero retardamos el minuto de explosión, extendemos el tiempo y soportamos la carga.
¡Excelente prólogo!

[Alejandroduro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cuentos hijos del desastre nuclear.
Es la primera vez que leo un autor desconocido para mi , por medio de su traductor (Marcelo Cohen).
Algunos cuentos son mejores que otros, todos atravesados por el desastre nuclear o por ciertas interpretaciones de la mecánica cuántica.
Mis favoritos: el del esquizofrénico, el del cachorrito y los inmortales..
Su estilo es muy llevadero, a veces se complica un poco pero en gral. es un libro accesible.

[Katelyn Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eerie collection of short stories regarding apocalyptic & post apocalyptic life. My favorite was “The Immortals” portraying the narrators delusions as a way for Amis to comment on the delusions inherent in the nuclear age. Covers the topics of deterrence and nuclear survivability. However, Some of the stories I found rather slow and repetitive.

[Robert Hepple · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1987, 'Einstein's Monsters' is a small collection of 5 short stories themed around the spectre of nuclear war. The tales are a mix of allegory and fantasy, as well as a mix of good and so-so. An introductory essay about the evils of nuclear weapons allows the author to nail his colours to the mast in the clearest way. A common product of the 1980s!