Things We Didn't See Coming [Kindle Edition]

Things We Didn't See Coming is a delightful, quirky and unsettling read. It presents a series of sequential short stories, each following the same unnamed protagonist, moving on from the evening of the Millennium Bug into a dystopian future of catastrophic climate; disease; disintegration of society and more.

I had the privilege of hearing Steven Amsterdam read from the book and answer questions. My question was, given that nothing dates faster than the future, did Steven Amsterdam think this was a book about the future or a book about our present fears and anxieties. Without hesitation, he replied that it was about the present day. In starting out with the Millennium Bug - the disaster that never happened - we are shown our own fallability in predicting the future. Later on, our hero watches Robocop and laughs at how badly wrong the predictions of the future turned out to be. This is no attempt at prediction; it's no warning about what might happen if we don't tackle climate change. No, it's a story very much about our thirst for doom, our neuroses of all that might go wrong in our own lifetimes.

The narration is not always easy. Steven Amsterdam writes in a spare, haunting style. He presents images rather than fine phrases. Our hero is a man of few words. A latterday cowboy, drifting from one job to another, pretty ambivalent to issues of right and wrong. He's neither good nor bad, he just is - in a world where those with more polar personalities fall by the wayside. Our hero is a survivor without ever truly understanding how it is he who survives.

The visions of Hell are interesting - especially the segregation of urban and rural people. As shortages start to bite, it's interesting to see the food producers in the countryside start to eclipse their starving urban neighbours; but by the end we see the urbanites draw strength again from their tighter social structures. It's interesting, as the antithesis to so many post-Apocalyptic novels, to see currency continue to be useful - rather more so than the hi-tech goods it once purchased. Perhaps a reflection of our present wish to make ever more money despite our lack of faith in the longevity of so much that we buy.

There are some delightful cameo characters. Our hero's survivalist father; Margo, his partner. Most intriguing, though, is Jeph - a rich child in a commune. His private wealth means that even though he is the youngest member of the commune, ostensibly looked after by all the other members, he really calls all the shots. The child who finds he has adults at his beck and call is a dangerous creature indeed.

For all the bleakness, though, there's a really black sense of humour running through the stories too. And more than a sense that the joke's directly between the author and the reader with the story just used to illustrate the joke.

Really, this is a stonking read. I don't want to spoil all the fun - just read it. It's superbly written, has playful ideas a-plenty and is a million miles away from preaching. It'll also be completely misunderstood by every environmentalist in the land.

The literary world has had a number of post-apocalyptic novels to consider in recent years. This, I suspect, will not be on many top ten lists for the genre.

For a novel to trace the story of a young man through his life in a country devastated by some terrible event, you would expect to see some character development as well. However the central voice does not change - whether a teenager, a young man in his twenties or beyond towards the end of his life - he speaks in the same way, with the same thoughts, the same tone. I would have thought that the unspoken event which causes the collapse of society would have had a significant effect on those left behind - but apparently our 'hero' is unchanged throughout his life.

Add to this the rather unconnected and fragmented chapters, we are left with something that really fails to engage the audience into the lives of the sketchy characters on the page.

I really fail to see why this has been received so positively. It is a shallow piece of writing and one that shows very little promise.

This book comes highly recommended but I was disappointed. The narrative meanders about and characters lack depth, motivation or the ability to instill empathy in the reader. Set in a post-apocalyptic world (we never really get to find out what happened but nuclear war seems the most likely with a lot of cancers about) we follow the life of a 9 year old boy in interspersed fragments of time until he reaches his forties, in that time the world seems to get worse. We meet a cast of characters along the way - most of which are difficult to read or understand. There is not enough background and too much is left for the reader to fill in. Maybe its the intention of the writer to get across a sense of dislocation in this way, but for me its just too fragmented.

Its been compared to The Road, but I think post-apocalyptic scenario aside, its got very little in common with it. The Road is a visceral read, full of near biblical prose, imbued with meaning. It has characters with a sense of love, sacrifice and humanity - we are there with them pushing that cart, starving hungry, battling to survive. The Things We Didnt See Coming on the other hand presents us with shallow characters whose motivations and desires seem petty, banal and more than a little confusing. I think in some sense thats what Amsterdam was after - that we go on being flawed beings even in the wake of events such as the near destruction of mankind. There are moments, for example in the closing chapters, where you almost begin to care for the people he depicts; I liked the dreamlike feel of the protaganist meeting up with his shaman father towards the end as he attempts to heal his son. Amsterdam's own background in palliative care has enabled him to sensitively portray the plight of people struggling to cope with terminal illness, and this was handled authentically, without being overly sentimental. That said, after reading this, I dont really know what the landscape and the world was supposed to be like and I couldnt seem to buy into it; we get glimpses, hints, of the authors vision, no more than that. I felt detached from the narrative and characters. The central character seems unchanged by events or the passage of time. For me too flimsy and light to make a real impression.