Burn the Ashes
edited by John Joseph Adams, Christie Yant, and Hugh Howey
The Dystopia Triptych #2
We burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, that’s the motto of the Firemen who hunted down and burned books wherever they found them. Bradbury warned of a world where our literary history is taken from us. In Burn the Ashes, some of the best science fiction authors working today continue to explore the dystopic worlds they introduced in volume one.
Edited by bestselling author Hugh Howey and award-winning editors John Joseph Adams and Christie Yant, The Dystopia Triptych is a series of three anthologies of dystopian fiction. Ignorance is Strength—before the dystopia—focuses on society during its descent into absurdity and madness. Burn the Ashes—during the dystopia—turns its attention to life during the strangest, most dire times. Or Else the Light—after the dystopia—concludes the saga with each author sharing their own vision of how we as a society might crawl back from the precipice of despair.
Burn the Ashes features all-new, never-before-published works by Hugh Howey, Seanan McGuire, Carrie Vaughn, Scott Sigler, Cadwell Turnbull, Karin Lowachee, Caroline M. Yoachim, Adam-Troy Castro, An Owomoyela, Tobias S. Buckell, Tim Pratt, Rich Larson, Alex Irvine, Darcie Little Badger, Violet Allen, Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, and Dominica Phetteplace.
NOTE: A number of readers have had difficulty getting the correct Kindle file from Amazon for The Dystopia Triptych ebooks. We’d been told that the issue is now resolved, but if you purchased the ebooks and you received a very short, unrelated ebook instead, please contact me at johnjosephadams@gmail.com to let me know so we can look into it further.
Praise for Other Books Edited by John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey
The Apocalypse Triptych is the most ambitious, audacious undertaking of its kind […] [containing] stories of loss, love, betrayal, and survival pitted against a backdrop of earth-shattering cataclysm […] superbly written.
—NPR
Adams and Howey are a two-man tour-de-force of post-apocalyptic lit. […] Ultimately, the best thing about The End is Nigh is how elegantly it balances on the thin line between beauty and devastation. There’s no story in the book that didn’t break my heart at least a little, and there’s none of the twenty-two that hasn’t stuck with me, hard.
—Wired
The End is Nigh delivers the “endtimes” in a wide variety of ways. It’s the opening volume of “The Apocalypse Triptych,” a series of three anthologies focusing on the three stages of the apocalypse: before (The End is Nigh), during (The End is Now) and after (The End Has Come). It’s a great way to bring fresh new perspectives to a type of story that’s been told for as long as storytelling has been around and, if this first volume is any indication, the “Triptych” is destined to be a favorite among end-of-the-world enthusiasts.
—FEARnet
I used to be averse to short story collections but The End is Nigh edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey changed that last year with the beginning of The Apocalypse Triptych. […] The idea behind The Apocalypse Triptych was a brilliant one. The editors did such a great job or curating the short stories. […] Even if you aren’t typically a fan of short stories, really do pick this up. If you love apocalypse stories, pick this up. Actually no matter what you like, pick this up…seriously.
—Seattle Geekly