Einstein's Monsters is a collection of short stories

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 by British

Great Britain

Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

 writer Martin Amis

Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...

. Each of the five stories deals with the subject of nuclear weapons.

Contents

Einstein's Monsters consists of five thematically-linked short stories prefaced by a long introductory essay called "Thinkability." (Amis includes another essay on nuclear weapons in his collection Visting Mrs. Nabokov

Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov is a 1993 collection of non-fiction writing by the British author Martin Amis.-Essays:The pieces include book reviews and interviews Amis conducted with other authors, and occasional journalism that Amis wrote while working for The Observer, The Guardian, and other...

, "Nuclear City: The Megadeath Intellectuals." It was written during the publication year of Einsten's Monsters and covers similar ground: "When nuclear weapons become real to you, when they stop buzzing around your ears and actually move into your head, hardly an hour passes without some throb or flash, some heavy pulse of imagined supercatastrophe.")

The five stories are:

• "Bujak and the Strong Force, or God's Dice"
• "Insight at Flame Lake"
• "The Time Disease"
• "The Little Puppy That Could"
• "The Immortals"

"Thinkability"

The book is introduced with an essay entitled "Thinkability", where Amis argues that many previous efforts at writing about nuclear warfare are flawed (with the notable exceptions of Jonathan Schell

Jonathan Schell

Jonathan Edward Schell is an author and visiting fellow at Yale University, whose work primarily deals with nuclear weapons.-Career:His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, and TomDispatch...

's The Fate of the Earth

The Fate of the Earth

The Fate of the Earth is a 1982 book by Jonathan Schell. This "seminal" description of the consequences of nuclear war "forces even the most reluctant person to confront the unthinkable: the destruction of humanity and possibly most life on Earth". The book revitalized the anti-nuclear movement ...

and The Abolition) because they presume that the damages of nuclear warfare can be placed into proportion and therefore debated about, mitigated, even justified. Amis contends that the magnitude of nuclear warfare is so inconceivable that such presumption is immoral and "subhuman", and that writers are only beginning to learn how to write about them properly. (He writes: "My impression is that the subject resists frontal assault.")

"The Immortals"

Warning: The following summary reveals the ending of the story, “The Immortals”. “The Immortals” is a story of an apocalypse. The story is told from the first person point of view of a being who is immortal and has existed for millions of years. The narrative of the story consists of the story of the development of the earth including the evolution of all life including humans and the history of the human race through nuclear Armageddon and the end of human life on earth. This narrative is interspersed with a narrative of the narrator’s interaction with the world including humans and a pet elephant that lived a hundred years and his satiric, snobbish evaluation of various time periods or people. In reality, the whole story is the imaginings of one of a group of people by a polluted well in New Zealand at the end of the world all of whom imagine themselves to be immortal when in reality they are dying. The narrator, an ultimate unreliable narrator, acknowledges that this is the case with the others at the well, but that he really is immortal.

Links

• http://www.scribd.com/doc/21648985/Martin-Amis-Einstein-s-Monsters* Einstein's Monsters in its entirety at Scribd.com