Confirmed my suspicion that the characters were Eastern European puppets more than people when the main character, imprisoned because his friend made jokes at a parade, meets Tito and a brutally dictatorial Indira Ghandi (?) touring his prison. Given a chance to talk to Tito and even explain why he'...
I think you either share his taste in stories or you don't, and I don't. Most of the stories were very abstract and I'd say only a quarter dealt with the apocalypse in a traditional sense, the rest seemed to deal more with cataclysmic change in an individual's life. Only a few were character based...