Burn the Ashes

The Dystopia Triptych, Book 2

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

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.

Highly political yet only in one direction.

This collection of stories and basically all liberal agenda. Some of them are fun and interesting and subtle about it, Some are simply obnoxious. Part of telling a story is having a thread of truth in it. I would venture to say that many of these lack that thread that makes things believable in an otherwise fantastic world. If you want some interesting listen I think the first few are pretty good, but after that they go down the tube pretty quickly.

Half good, half sleepy.

I’m only here for the Scott Sigler. Almost all of these stories were too PC for reality. Prepare to use the skip button.

Dark, thought provoking dystopian sci-fi

Dystopian works are nearly always political commentary, or commentary on the state of mankind or our view of reality. These stories, when listened to with their counterparts in the other two collections in this series, are incredible.
These stories ask you to reflect on yourself, our society, and our future. Wonderful.

Great Compilation

Excellent collection of stories. The narrators were skilled and believable. I recommend this book for dystopian loves everywhere.

Bad. Just bad.

The only thing worse than an anthology pushing politics is badly written, boring, and preachy anthologies pushing politics.

I read to escape NOT to be battered by shallow stories with a single narrative that is most definitely NOT dystopia or apocalypse but a rather obviously a reaction to todays politics. I might have even been able to overlook the obvious bias if the stories were not so awful. Good writing requires more than just woke ideology. JJ Adams used to know that but obviously his politics are now more important than providing entertaining and DIVERSE perspectives in fiction.