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Planet of Ghosts and Other Stories by Wesley R. Bishop
May. 8th, 2026 12:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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A few years ago, on a whim, I bought the entire run of the 1979 TV series Buck Rogers on DVD at Walmart. It was early summer, and I am a teacher; I had time to lavish on a childhood favorite—even one that I’d known, as a child, to be full of illogic and plot holes.
The show was as heartwarmingly cheesy as I remembered. But what really delighted me was the dark thread of dystopianism—not necessarily woven in on purpose—that was so visible to the adult eye. Yes, I already knew that Buck Rogers was post-apocalyptic, with Earth’s humans living in a few shining cities surrounded by a wasteland crawling with mutants. But I hadn’t realized as a child how awful those sterile cities truly were, a maze of hotel lobbies patched together. Every human settlement is run by an AI, with no need for debate or voting or any human input at all. Earth can’t feed itself, and has to import food from a slave state on another planet.
Never the introspective type, Buck launches into adventure after adventure without stopping to contemplate how bad it all is. I couldn’t help but wish for a smarter reboot of the show, one that embraces this awful, dark chaos while also perhaps depicting Buck Rogers as a closeted gay man from a homophobic past, whose secret is in the future known to everyone but him. (This is the only explanation for much of Buck’s middle-school boorishness and bluster toward Wilma and other women.) Some smart person should take this mess of a universe and run with it.
Planet of Ghosts, the new short story collection by Wesley R. Bishop, may be as close as we can get to that dream. Bishop’s short stories, all set in the same broken world of enshittified technology, carry relatable characters through misadventures that readers feel compelled to follow to the end.
The core storyline is simple: At some point in the near future, Earth is dying. First, it’s the ecological crisis we all know and fear. Then some deeper human error takes place, creating a crisis that will soon cause the planet to rip itself to pieces. There is no future on this ball of rock, so Earth’s residents begin scrambling for any exit they can find. For many, that exit is the Cathedral, a cult that reassures people everything will be all right. For others, the exit means a slot on a ship off-planet. But there are still other, more chancy escape hatches, which people cling to in much the same way they cling to fad diets or conspiracy theories. Bishop is kind to even the most obviously deluded of these would-be escapees: Doom in this world is as inevitable as death, and no one can really judge anyone else’s coping strategy.
We see this moment of disaster from multiple perspectives, through stories set in our time and at various points in the far future. We follow colonizers of other planets, we hear from archaeologists digging up an extinct Walmart. We even get a glimpse of President William Howard Taft, yanked into the future and confronted with the comic indignities of time travel.
Bishop’s world is a lurid jumble of the darkest of themes in science fiction. Cults are pernicious and persistent, still able to recruit despite the damage they’ve caused. Space travel is by generation ship, and the available other worlds are perilous. Time travel exists the way AI does in our world; no one likes this technology, but no one can avoid it, because of its appeal to the unprincipled. Cheaters are everywhere.
These motifs are not jumbled because Bishop has lost track of all these complicated threads, however; they’re jumbled because, like the internet today, this future is a wild west of directionless innovation and irrational, malevolent actors. Characters in this Wesleyverse adopt new technologies in desperation, because the world is literally crumbling beneath their feet. When a new technology shows up in someone else’s hands, the characters can only groan, knowing it doesn’t get any easier from here.
This is a carefully constructed collection of short stories. The title story, “Planet of Ghosts,” could easily stand alone. It has a spiritual feel, filled with soulful characters readers will root for, hoping they’ll survive. Survival is far from guaranteed in this collection, and most stories leave the reader without a mouth and needing to scream. But the collection returns again and again to New Gem City, the setting of “Planet of Ghosts,” for another twist in the story of these otherworld colonists. The stories outside this main narrative provide wry peeks at the book’s universe, some from the very end of time, some from the beginning of the unraveling, some from the experience of time travelers, for whom everything in the world is happening at once.
Perhaps I’ve spoiled one of the best parts of the book—the joy of realizing that this is indeed a book-length narrative, a collection of related but independent short stories. Each could stand alone, although some shimmer with added meaning because of the clue they offer to the book’s overall design. For example, “The Man Who Saved the Dead,” a story about someone whose job it is to download the consciousnesses of dying people, is a keystone to the collection, providing “aha” moments that redefine the outcomes of other stories.
Dystopian writers are generally assumed to be maddened Cassandras rather than detached prophets, warning about impending doom precisely because they care so much. One might, therefore, hope for a clear diagnosis of how the disaster began, or a glimmer of hope as a new world is formed. As a history professor who publishes scholarship along with creative work, Bishop would seem to be well equipped to preach at the world in this way.
He doesn’t. Bishop refuses to hand the reader answers wrapped up in a tidy package. We must, instead, find our hope in the bravery of some of his characters, and we must search through the book’s various timelines for news that our favorite characters have landed somewhere safe. Hope never comes in an obvious pep talk, but in statements from characters who still believe in doing something to make the world a better place—because “every problem humanity faces is always only one generation away from a solution” (p. 180).
Bishop packs a great deal into 185 pages, and short books are good. After all, as Planet of Ghosts keeps reminding us, time is running out.
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