A collection of 11 apocalypsi (apocalypses?) – I think the thing that impressed me the most was how very different all the apocalypsi were, apart from a common environmental theme. Well written stories, and I enjoyed reading all excepting one (What Goes Around, which I just didn’t get). My favourite is probably The History of Photography, but Blue Train, The Abbey Engine, and Those Graves of Memory also made pretty good impressions. Day’s Hunt didn’t overly appeal – it was pretty gruesome in fact – but still well-written. I have the feeling if I met most of the protaganists in the street I’d possibly cross it to avoid them, but somehow despite that Derryl Murphy made me care about almost all of them, leaving only the viewpoint character in the final story (Laura, from Summer’s Human’s) and everyone in the aforementioned What Goes Around that I was happy to leave.

Bottom line: Skip the foreword, go straight into the stories. A lot of interesting apocalypsi await you.

Note: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme

This is the newest edition of Wasps at the Speed of Sound, with 11 short science fiction stories (the original had 10). All of the stories have an environmental warning but this enhances the stories rather than detracts from them.

My favourite story was the Blue Train in which most of humanity that still exists after an extreme water shortage travels the world on a gigantic train in search of water and their subsequent freedom from this train by one man who dared to question the company’s monopoly on the earths water.

Murphy constructs the world of each story so well, with little extraneous language as possible so the reader can create a vivid image of their own. Truly a pleasure to read for any science fiction fan and possibly for any environmentalist too.

Very thought-provoking and entertaining stories. Most of them have an underlying environmental element to them. My favorite story is Those Graves of Memory-about a boy, memories and a very distant future. Others go from a human who has a chance to leave the earth and save himself and possibly humanity or stay and die, to changes in the human body on an alien planet far from earth. These stories are well told with characters solid enough for a short story. The good variety is one reason I read short stories. I received this free as an ebook through Library Thing giveaways for an honest review.