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Burn the Ashes cover art

Burn the Ashes

By: John Joseph Adams - editor, Hugh Howey - editor and contributor, Christie Yant - editor
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer, Gabrielle de Cuir, Susan Hanfield, Janina Edwards, Justine Eyre, Emily Rankin, Stefan Rudnicki, Mirron Willis
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Summary

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 Ignorance Is Strength.

Edited by John Joseph Adams, Hugh Howey, 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 the following authors, in order of appearance: Carrie Vaughn, Tim Pratt, Rich Larson, Cadwell Turnbull, Karin Lowachee, Adam-Troy Castro, Caroline M. Yoachim, Hugh Howey, An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, Dominica Phetteplace, Alex Irvine, Tobias S. Buckell, Scott Sigler, Darcie Little Badger, Violet Allen, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor. 

©2020 by John Joseph Adams, Hugh Howey, and Christie Yant (P)2020 by Blackstone Publishing and Skyboat Media, Inc.

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Great stories, great performance

I find listening to sci-fi short stories as opposed to reading them more difficult than, say, listening to vs reading fantasy short stories. Not this time though, maybe due to the narrators? I thoroughly enjoyed not reading myself!

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Glad I kept going.

Book one was uncomfortable, outside of the book we are to taking on aspects of several of the dystopian stories.
Book two is less so, as the reader has arrived at the dystopia (as of writing we are not quite there yet in the UK)

Many of he ideas explored ( or expanded from the previous book), feel eerily possible post 2020. The human stories in all the tales kept me intrigued and thinking about them away from the book. Such great writing and world building.

Loved all the narrations.

Looking forward to book three!

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Makes the First Book Better

I will start by clarifying something that was unclear to me before listening to these: each story in this second book is a sequel to the corresponding story by the same author in the first book, 'Ignorance is Strength'. I believe the third book, 'Or Else The Light' has a further sequel to each story, although I haven't read it yet. Some of these sequels follow the same character as the original story, whereas some focus on a different character but still feature character(s) from the first story, and some are simply set in the same world about new characters. In some the connections aren't obvious until a bit into the story.

I would say don't get put off by this, especially with the first few story which I felt didn't add that much to its predecessor (not that they weren't good stories in their own right). Most the other stories do a better job of this, I feel.

I think that some of the stories I liked a lot in this book were sequels to ones I didn't like that much in the first book, and I think they make them better, so I would recommend this to anyone who has read the first book and thought some of the stories were just alright. These additions also mostly mitigated my criticism of the first book about some of the stories not fitting with the dystopian theme.

Some of my favourite stories in this book were 'Survival Guide' by Karin Lowachee, 'Inheritors of the Curse' by Hugh Howey and 'The Fruits of Their Labor' by Tobias S. Buckell.

These stories are technically written as stand alone, so you don't have to read the first book; however, I would say that if you're only going to read one of them, it should be the first one, I think it stands up better alone.

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Better than the last

It's not just the last book repeated the stories get more exiting more fleshed out would recomed

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Depends how you felt about volume one

If you liked volume one then you'll want to give this, and presumably volume three, a try.

If you didn't like or, like me were indifferent overall to volume one then you'll probably want to give this a miss.

It's not, what I was expecting, a collection of new stories but a continuation of the stories from the first volume - same writers and same narrators..

I personally found (most of) the tales in volume one to be clunky, overlong, unsubtle and range from "meh" to downright aggravating and although I tried this I really couldn't face it.

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