Disastrous!: Three Stories of the End of the World

by Scott Overton

Let’s admit it, there’s a guilty pleasure in imagining how civilization could end!
An invasion from beneath our feet. A hammer blow from the sky. A genetic crop modification that could bring about humanity’s extinction.
Tartarus Rising: The most critical business centres of the world are suddenly swallowed into the ground, a chemical explosion devastates New Jersey, and survivors flee the rumours of invaders from beneath the Earth. (First published in the anthology "Doomology" from Library of Science Fiction & Fantasy Press, 2010).
Saviour: A killer asteroid is headed for the Earth and the defence against it depends on one man. But what if he’s the wrong choice?
The Cleansing: The people of a far-future pastoral Earth discover that their forbears genetically modified their crops to be protected from mutations by occasional die-offs. Except no-one has a plan when all of the crops start to die at the same time.

Three short stories with a total word count of about 16,000.

Kindle Edition

First published December 3, 2014

About the author

With a long career as a radio morning show host, Scott’s always had a way with words. But his lifelong devotion to science fiction was destined to lead to a second career as a writer. Although his first novel, the mystery/thriller Dead Air was set in the radio world (and shortlisted for a Northern Lit Award in Ontario, Canada) all of his writing since has taken the reader to even stranger places, including the human bloodstream in his SF novel debut The Primus Labyrinth, a science fiction thriller that readers compare to Michael Crichton and Dan Brown. His most recent novel Naïda chronicles a reluctant hero with an alien being living inside him. Scott strongly believes that science fiction should involve compelling themes and important issues, along with memorable characters.
His short fiction has been published in magazines such as On Spec, AEscifi, Neo-opsis, Penumbra and anthologies including Future Visions 3, Casserole Diplomacy: The On Spec 25th Anniversary Anthology, Canadian Tales of the Fantastic, In Poe’s Shadow, and Tesseracts Sixteen: Parnassus Unbound. Fifteen of his SF/fantasy short stories have been gathered in the collection BEYOND: Stories Beyond Time, Technology, and the Stars. Many more SF novels are on the way. Scott’s distractions from writing include scuba diving, music, and collector cars. He lives with his wife on a private island in Northern Ontario.

Reviews

[Rickie Allen Higgins]

Interesting

Very interesting and entertaining. I would highly recommend this book to anyone that enjoys reading this kind of Apocalyptic fiction stories.Thank you author for this book.👍

[Raymond St. Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nope

Nope don't recommend this for keeping one awake at night the story drags onward with no real satisfying conclusion in my opinion.

[James Crawford · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book of three short stories. One was about someone who wanted to wipe out the human race due to how badly they treated the environment. Another story takes place in the future where the human race has incredibly major problems getting enough food and civilization has fallen apart. People in one place decide the only way to allow the race to go on with enough food was for the people older than 25 to go off into the wilderness (where they would undoubtedly die), leaving enough food for the others to survive. (There's more to the story and it's really good.)

The other story was good for what there was of it but it left too many things unexplained. Civilization is being wiped out by Trogs, underground creatures that are causing cities to fall into holes and be destroyed. The problem is there's no reason given for the Trogs doing what they are doing at that time. There is also no attempt made to stop them (which would be difficult, granted, but someone in the government would have tried something, surely. )