Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam

As we enter the second decade of this new millennium, Steven Amsterdam welcomes us with an eerily humorous dystopian future. Things We Didn’t See Coming is a series of discrete stories in which we follow an unnamed male narrator through a series of post-apocalyptic possibilities. Each chapter resonates with the reader with the sense that this could happen. We made it past midnight, January 1st, 2000, and here we are ten years later. But what about ten years from now? Or twenty?

The narrative opens at the brink of year 2000 (not explicitly stated, but assumed) with a worried father and family fleeing the city. The reader follows said narrator through nine chapters spanning three decades. Amsterdam introduces a social commentary early on in the narration and we are left with an unease about what that commentary tells us about ourselves. “This whole thing is symbolic, symbolic of a system that’s hopelessly shortsighted, a system that twenty, thirty years ago couldn’t imagine a time when we might be starting a new century,” the narrator’s father says.

Why didn’t we have the foresight that, at some point, our year would roll over from beginning with a one to a two? Did we think we wouldn’t make it? Or did we just not think? That’s how limited an animal we are. Do you get it? A whole species didn’t think to set its clocks the right way. We are arrogant, stupid, we lack humility in the face of centuries and centuries of time before us.

As with many end-tales, Amsterdam indulges himself and us in biblical reinterpretation and something that approaches a sort of comic homily. In one chapter, for example, a Barricade has gone into effect and the land has now been separated into urban vs. rural. Rural is a lush land of plenty, something prelapsarian none of our characters has ever seen. They speak of fruit and water as of riches and jewels in this scene, but a chapter later, Amsterdam juxtaposes his scenes of rural plenty with a harsher clime. We move from heavy floods and incessant rain to an arid and waterless land. “No, that’s not right,” Amsterdam’s narrator claims. “We’re sun-scorched and dirty. It’s never been Eden. I’ve always been a thief.” And though the story’s protagonists are strikingly non-religious, there is a sense of spirituality in it all. “I have not,” the narrator declares, “found religion, but life has presented itself in these stark terms, like they used to use in political campaigns: I feel fallen.”

Politics and government are also a recurring thread. By the end of the book, the government’s role has been compartmentalized to a point where words like Verification, Grief, Rescue, and Central are in departments; people are homeless, applying for grants. Maybe it’s not so different than what is in place now, we just use less literal titles to describe the compartmentalization. Our protagonist has encountered every disaster possible. He mentions a Summer of Hurricanes as just another passing apocalyptic event. And if weather-related disasters weren’t enough, Amsterdam throws in an insect plague for good measure. “Some Brazilian bug with a one-inch stinger has gotten comfortable since the last dry spell, and the heat has simmered them into mating season so the air is dotted and dangerous.”

Amsterdam’s levels of apocalypse are darkly comic– and perhaps would be even more so if they didn’t seem so possible.  Amid urban and rural landscapes, where technology and destruction reign supreme, what conditions are necessary to be a survivor?  In answer, Amsterdam mixes wit and intellect to give us Things We Didn’t See Coming, an entertaining and thought-provoking read.

Reviewed by Danielle Dahlin

Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam
Pantheon Books, 2010
Cloth, 208 pp, $24.00
ISBN-13: 9780307378507