Total Oblivion-More or Less

One of the hallmarks of post apocalypse stories is that things go from bad to worse on a very regular basis.  But most of them start off in the fairly familiar, fairly common world and something goes terribly wrong-zombies, atomic war, pandemic plague, EMP, or just some mysterious something that puts an end to life as we know it. But rarely have I seen a mysterious something else quite as odd as the one used in Total Oblivion-More or Less.   The Earth finds itself over run by hordes of barbarian Scythians and people from something like the Roman Empire.  But…

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Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut

Too many modern books are either parts of a series, or 700 pages long, or both.   Too many classic novels suffer from the same problem, War and Peace and pretty much anything by Dickens is a long term project.  Somewhere along the line a number of writers decided to bang out books that could be read in one or two sittings.  Kurt Vonnegut was one of those writers. Slapstick is another good old fashioned End of The World book-Kurt Vonnegut loves that whole post-Apocalyptic thing.  People die by the millions, nations crumble into ruins, and the Chinese learn to control…

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