Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse and Other Possible Situations

by S.B. Divya

A sickly biologist shuts herself off from the world and its deadly pollutants to research her beloved microbiota in peace – until a chance encounter drives her to venture out into an unliveable Bangalore.

In a dystopian Arizona, a couple performs forbidden life-saving abortions amid the threat of tanks and drones, the strict report of automatic weapons and the spying eyes of neighbours.

A young woman competes in a gruelling challenge, determined to win a place in a world where body modifications equal class and grant people the privilege of transcending gender.

In this collection of 14 layered stories featuring dying cities, undying humans, amorphous bodies, cyborg racers and magic beetles, internationally acclaimed writer and data scientist S.B. Divya treads the line between the present and the future, while exploring the eternal
conundrums of identity and love in speculative worlds.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

Kindle Edition

First published August 25, 2019

About the author

S.B. Divya (she/any) is a lover of science, math, fiction, and the Oxford comma. She is the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of Meru (2023), Machinehood, Runtime, and Contingency Plans For the Apocalypse and Other Possible Situations. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and she was the co-editor of Escape Pod, the weekly science fiction podcast, from 2017-2022. Divya holds degrees in Computational Neuroscience and Signal Processing, and she worked for twenty years as an electrical engineer before becoming an author. Born in Pondicherry, India, Divya now resides in Southern California. She enjoys subverting expectations and breaking stereotypes whenever she can.

Reviews

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Divya is gender non-conforming (and okay with any pronoun) and this collection is delightfully nonbinary and transhumanist, meaning several of the stories imagine futures in which humanity has been radically altered by biotechnology. Divya features queer and disabled characters, feminist themes, and fascinating premises. I was moved and geeked out in turn and all at once reading these stories.

Here’s a taste of some of my favorites - in Microbiota and the Masses, Moena, an eccentric biologist who’s turned her home into an experimental biome risks venturing outside for a chance at love. In Dusty Old Things, Anita realizes she’s receiving communication from a parallel universe. The Boy Who Made Flowers imagines a world where people develop unique manifestations at puberty, and Charlie struggles with his flustering power to drip flowers from his ears when he feels emotions. The short and sweetly romantic Strange Attractions imagines a marriage that evolves over centuries. In Soft We Wake, Hikaru wakes in a far-flung future without his family and grapples with how to integrate into the vastly different world.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating is solely for "Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse" by S.B. Divya, a good but very dark near-future political/paranoia SF story. Free link: https://uncannymagazine.com/article/c...

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good collection of stories that showcase a dazzling imagination in terms of ideas and concepts. My only complaint was that a lot of these stories are too small and do not allow for proper exploration of said ideas and concepts.

[Richa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edit: ok actually after a few days I am going to list my favorites, the ones I’ve continued to think about! Again there was something I loved about each story but these (in no particular order) stood out to me:

- Loss of Signal
- Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse
- Nava
- Binaries
- Ships in the Night
- Soft We Wake

This is a really interesting collection of speculative fiction. I appreciate how Divya consciously placed queerness and disability at the heart of each of her stories. Each story deals with vast technological and fantastical changes to the world but asks the simple question of “what’s it like to live there?” I felt like some of them ended too quickly, but maybe it’s a good thing that they left me wanting to know more. I was going to list my favorites, but there’s something I love about them all so I don’t think I could!

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a bit to get into this book but once I did and after I finished it, I found it a unique and intriguing SyFy anthology.

What I loved:
- The way all the stories are taking place in the same future universe, even though they have different narrators and exist in different parts of the world (or other worlds)
- How the author re-imagines what could be the mundane of life events like puberty, falling in love, having children into future situations and what may be when science and/or fantasy come into play
- The chapters "The Boy Who Made Flowers", "Strange Attractors", and "Runtime"

What I struggled with (at first):
- That there wasn't a singular narrator in the story, even though the same author wrote all these stories
- That it took until the end in the Acknowledgments to understand that all the stories were previously published at other times in different publications. Knowing that as a forward would have probably avoided my initial disjointed feelings the first few chapters.

Final take-away:
I want to read more from this author !!

[Miti Vaidya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, just loved this one. It's such a joy (and a slight pride even) to "discover" a new author. These days, I almost always check the goodreads rating before buying a book. But this one didn't have any ratings. I bought it as an experiment for a short flight + weekend away. And it was a fantastic read. Each story has a different theme and world, so it doesn't feel repetitive at all. The writing is lucid and simple, making sure the world, the story and the characters are heroes. Even the concept-heavy stories felt light. I liked that not all of them fell into sci-fi; some were definitely more fantasy. My faves were Microbiota & the Masses and Dusty Old Things. But I would probably have something nice to say about each. Strongly recommend for all sci-fi and fantasy fans.

[Chris Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of adventures from a fascinating and capacious mind…

I adore this collection. Such creativity and variety. There is a great spectrum of beings, from an ordinary family to slightly enhanced humans, to greatly enhanced humans, to radically altered posthuman beings in space. Also, a spectrum of ethnicities/cultures, and gender orientations. Mostly sci-fi themes, but also some fantasy elements in at least one story.

If you want to expand your mind and light up your brain with new and inspiring perspectives, this collection will do it for you, I have no doubt. Eleven stars!

[Rory Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not entirely sure how I bumped into this collection of short stories, but let me emphasize how grateful I am that it happened. S.B. Divya does an amazing job at portraying a multitude of worlds that feel so far away and yet so close, some so plausible we might just blink and see them actualized in a handful of years. Despite the realtively brief nature of these encounters, some of these characters will stay with me for a while, and let me say it, it's good company. I look forward to reading more from this incredibly promising author.

[John Folk-Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse and other Possible Situations by S.B. Divya, author of Machinehood and Meru, is a deeply interesting collection of fourteen stories, many quite short, all of them posing life-changing choices for each central character. The prose is supple, ranging from lushly sensuous description to stripped down action. The author perfectly matches style to story and covers an impressive range. Whether taking up a few pages or novella length, S.B. Divya creates an immersive world where I immediately cared about each character.

...........
At the heart of most of these stories are the critical choices that each character has to make to achieve their goal or even to survive. The most fully developed story that turns on moral choice is the Nebula finalist novella, Runtime. Marmeg, its central character also faces a series of choices on running a race through the mountains. She has plenty of enhancements, in the form of implanted chips and exoskeletons, but because she has no money, she has had to scrounge among trashed parts, repair them and cobble together a makeshift outfit. The prize money will solve all her problems if she can place among the lead runners, but trouble starts when some of her equipment fails and she is offered a chance to win by shady means. What will she do?

..........
Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse and Other Possible Situations is the full title of the collection and that covers a lot of ground. But all the situations and the choices they impose are fraught with danger, pain, emotional loss or a life-changing cost. In “Ships in the Night” what happens when a woman who can foresee but never change the future, including the end of every relationship, falls in love with someone with her own disastrous history of failed relationships. That woman struggles with the knowledge that she will live forever and so outlast everyone she has ever known. What choices will they make?

...........
Every story poses a life-challenging question or requires the central character to deal with a force that could change them forever. In beautiful prose that is carefully adapted to the tone of each story and each character’s life, Divya proves herself a master of the shorter fictional forms.


Read the full review at SciFi Mind.

[Divya Pal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful SF anthology – stories tinged with an Indian flavour, addressing topics like OCD, lust, mutants, quantum communication between parallel time-lines, the taedium vitae of immortality, the inevitable future dystopia etc. An Unexpected Boon is story that could be a new sub-sub-genre of SF viz., vedic-punk.
Runtime is a Nebula Award Finalist and, frankly, deserved to win.

[Oviya · Rating 5 out of 5]

4-5*

[Arun Rajappa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic collection of scifi short stories, and always so much fun to discover a new author with such a distinct voice & so much heart in her writing. Loved microbiota & the masses, binaries, an unexpected book and other stories in this collection. Will eagerly look forward to reading more from this author...

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always a delight to find a new author who writes compellingly and has a refreshing twist on her stories. I highly recommend her.