*Named a best short story collection of the year by The Chicago Review of Books, Electric Lit, Our Culture Magazine, and Largehearted Boy*
*Named a best LGBTQ+ book of the year by them*
“Climate fiction does not owe readers hope, but through humor and humanity Hyde manages to present a harsh reality without descending into despair, offering a space for mourning and for reimagining life in a permanently changed world. Each of the 15 stories is swiftly paced and engaging, rich with detail, highlighting and celebrating nature as it borders on the unnatural.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“While The Last Catastrophe is a brilliant collection from many angles, Hyde particularly excels in one notoriously difficult way: making the amorphous and incomprehensible aspects of climate change and its effects feel tangibly real. The climate crisis, unfortunately for activists and everyone else who inhabits this planet, can be simultaneously unfathomable and more than a bit boring in the technical details of how many degrees Celsius the temperature can rise before we’re all done for. Fortunately for readers, The Last Catastrophe is neither unfathomable nor boring. Quite the opposite. The stories proceed jauntily and are each so captivating that by the time you reach the last story—“The Eaters,” which, at over fifty pages, qualifies as a novella—you’re even a little sad it isn’t longer.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“Urgent and timely.”
—Electric Lit
“This short story collection from the author of last year’s novel Eleutheria is one of the most compelling books I’ve read in years. . . . The book flies by. . . . This was a no-skips collection for me, and I can’t recommend it enough.”
—Sarah Neilson, them
“Filled with powerful, brilliant stories of the future brough to life by a masterful storyteller.”
—Largehearted Boy
“Amazing. . . . Each story presents personal catastrophes amid the larger, more cataclysmic catastrophe of climate change.”
—Buzzfeed
“The Last Catastrophe is akin to watching an episode of Black Mirror. The stories are strange and dissociating and unapologetically bizarre. Hyde is a strong-voiced writer with an energy that pulsates on the page. This control of language amplifies the story’s speculative elements. . . . A personal favorite is “Cougar,” where forty-something LeeAnn from Dallas is sent to the Udall-Meyers Treatment Center for Digital Disorders. . . . LeeAnn herself is in denial about the effects of her own disorder, which is initially kept from the reader, and the ending of this story is as satisfying as one might find in one written by George Saunders. . . . Hyde is a writer utterly her own. For readers interested in the speculative and short stories outside the usual subjects and forms, “The Last Catastrophe” is one to add to the shelf.”
—Newcity Lit
“Hyde follows up last year’s environmentalist satire Eleutheria with a new collection of brisk and somewhat upbeat speculative stories about a girl with a unicorn horn, foster husbands looking for forever homes, and more.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“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.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“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. . . . There’s a sublime, filmic quality to the stories, in which Hyde expertly inverts the familiar. . . . 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.’”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Allegra Hyde wrote one of 2022’s best novels, Eleutheria, and her second story collection, The Last Catastrophe, contains more optimistic visions of the future than most of the books on this list, despite the specter of climate change.”
—Polygon, "The Science Fiction and Fantasy Books We’re Excited for in 2023"
“Dazzling, inventive, and glinting with dark humor, Allegra Hyde’s stories stare apocalypse straight in the eye and find precious glimmers of grace therein. This enthralling collection speaks powerfully to our time, and to those times that are still to come.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
“I always keep an empty space on my bookshelf for my next favorite book, and The Last Catastrophe has taken that spot. A dazzling and unassumingly brilliant collection, Allegra Hyde’s stories take hold and never, ever let go. These aren’t stories you will forget—these are stories that will become part of your DNA: undeniable elements of the human experience. The Last Catastrophe is a masterwork of hope against a changing—and oftentimes unforgiving—world.”
—Morgan Talty, author of Night of the Living Rez
“Even the ghosts in this fierce, visionary story collection are vibrantly alive, full of questions about the precarious world we’ve made, and who we might become as we hurtle forward to uncertain futures. What awaits us there, in Allegra Hyde’s rowdy, unsparing imagination, is not just devastation, but sharp humor, delightful strangeness, and flashes of deliverance.”
—Caitlin Horrocks, author of Life Among the Terranauts
“I’ve admired Allegra Hyde’s stunning stories of near future and small apocalypses for years. This new collection is electrifying, filled with astonishing beauty and lyricism at the same time that it warns us of the horrors of what our futures could become and what America already is. Zookeepers, RV nomads, high school drama teachers who glow with light, body-switching beauties, zombies—the voices in this collection will keep you rapt, awestruck at what unfolds.”
—Brenda Peynado, author of The Rock Eaters
“A Molotov cocktail is a bottle of gasoline. An Allegra cocktail is a collection of stories. Both are on fire and should be hurled at the nearest representative of a corrupt regime."
—Matthew Baker, author of Why Visit America and Hybrid Creatures
2023-02-23
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.
