Review: Defying Doomsday

It's not too often disability collides with my various geeky interests but when it does, it's always exciting!

I heard about this book a few months ago and ordered it the second I was able to. Defying Doomsday is "an anthology of apocalypse fiction featuring disabled and chronically ill protagonists, proving that it's not always the fittest who survive."

I have to admit, when I saw the words disabled and apocalypse in the same sentence, my first thought was "The Walking Dead with wheelchairs. Cool." While that in and of itself would've been enough to pique my interest, I was surprised when the book contained nothing like that at all!

Instead, the stories in Defying Doomsday feature individuals with a wide variety of impairments like spina bifida and hydrocephalus, arthritis, autism, and schizophrenia, and look at how they cope in equally varied apocalypse and post-apocalypse scenarios such as alien invasions, acid rain, extreme drought, and even a world besieged by giant spiders!

The story that I feel showcases both disability and the apocalyptic setting the best would be the book's first, And The Rest of Us Wait, about a former pop star with spina bifida and hydrocephalus who's forced into a bunker with her family and others when part of Europe is threatened by an asteroid strike. When the impact happens, she forms a band to entertain the bunker's other occupants, while dealing with pain caused by a lack of access to medication and implants (the future!) made useless by a power-out, and facing other's concerns that her disability will hinder her should they ever return to the surface.

Probably the best part of the anthology, in my opinion, is a story featuring a war correspondent with cerebral palsy, who has a communication device implanted in her skull (seriously, the future!), protecting a fleeing spaceship from hostile aliens. Just writing that is amazing!

Not every story in Defying Doomsday is so uplifting though. Some can be pretty dark. Like one about a family afflicted with cystic fibrosis travelling through a nuclear war-ravaged landscape to a hospital hoping for a lung transplant for one of their daughters, only to find out on arrival that the
hospital was shelled. Or a story about a woman with autism whose lack of social skills, fixation on her cat, and strict adherence to routines cause her to let a former bully die in a downpour of acid rain.

Overall, Defying Doomsday was a great book to read, and I'd definitely recommend it.

Cheers!