Rebecca Bligh
James W Hedges
Introductory Essay: A Short History Of The Apocalypse
As above, so below: from New York to New Orleans, a micro- to macrocosmic tale of road-tripping the 2012 apocalypse, at the end of the 13th Mayan b’ak’tun. Picaresque cast including Don, the gentle, friendly gun nut; T. McKenna, the Order of Nine Angles, Hurricane Sandy, the author, James himself, and of course the eschaton.
Christina Chalmers
The Arms Left Over
A breath of anthropocene air: of being-inextricable, as Eros dukes it out with Thanatos to reconcile in one fierce archetypal person: Atalanta, who, becoming multiple, hunts down the freaks-to-come. The analogous remainders ain’t pretty.
“Good morning, America!” the ABC News slogan,beleaguered by endtimes content.
Classic post-pulp science fiction, as a “chance” encounter on a bus leads to anatomically diverse sex, strange memories of surgery and prophetic recitations; TV news reports of UFOs and more-than-dreams of flying lead to the end of all complacent modes of world.
Verity Spott
To Early Spring Swap Finish
Spott’s vernal, post-syntactic prosody swims in and out of Millenial focus; a shifting of states as receptive, spongiform, intention alternates with brittle, coralline, apophenic sense; fractured, fragments re-cohere, extrude apocalypses, affect, eulogia and occasional, reflexive marginalia.
Cécile B. Evans
AGNES (the end is near)
Script from a video message from a bot named AGNES, who has heard that the end is near. Things are about to get intense, but we’ll make it through somehow. LITF <3 AGNES I.D.S.T.
Paul Ingram
Toward Twenty Twelve
An archaeology of New Age eschatology; pseudo-Mayan countdown to no future.
Quentin S. Crisp
Antinatalism: A Thought Experiment
A sympathetic, circumambulatory treatise on the various doctrines of antinatalism. From compassionate to misanthropic, all shades of this philosophy coincide in the reasoned desire for an end to births = an end to us, before too long.
(Click here to read a Mandarin Chinese translation of this essay by Ling Gu)
David Rudnick
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Shot on the M Train, NY #nofuture
Llew Watkins
Hinterland Shift (Part five of nine)
Things get strange for Emily in this second, non-sequential installment. Life, bios, consciousness and its various substrates get loose and become re-entangled in so many new ways, including juridical; maybe the machine elves could’ve helped, if only they had stuck around.
A engineer’s enthusiasm for shanty-town planning, and camp residents’ accounts. A detail may jar us out of this present, but, we are reminded, war, disasters and displacements are ongoing; apocalypse now now now now now now now now now now now now now now now now now
Isabella Martin
Nighttime Holes in a Daytime Sky
A series of ink drawings paired with allusive, allegoric auguries. But what will happen when the sky runs out?
Ellen Yeon Kim
Under Bare Cloth
Retelling of a harrowing, prophetic dream, dreamt 24/05/2011. Hard to be old or infirm; one might feel oneself a burden. How much more starkly so, when the infrastructure’s down?
Aimee Heinemann
becoming-woman
becoming-faggot
becoming-optical fiber
becoming-server farm
becoming-rubble
Because, like, after all, ‘Cartesian dualism is so 2000’.
Yuri Pattison
[image,transcript]
Tempus Edax Rerum: Time devours all things. Nonetheless salvaged from the net’s maw, this real-life Y2K chatroom transcript encapsulates the story of time traveller John Titor (screen name TimeTravel_0)
Chameleon Street
Thogdin Ripley
On the violence of balmy, Ballardian suburbs; of those incremental, cumulative processes by which the normal—as more of the same, business as usual—is nonetheless relentlessly and irrevocably transmuted. Of surviving personal catastrophe.
Philippa Snow
The Atrophied World
Adapt, adapt; even to the end of times, whose integration is impossible. The biomass gets freaky in a HELLO! magazine hell. Seems like David Icke was right about some things.
Hard-genre science fiction, set in a near future when not just Scotland, but the great Northern fracking fields have seceded from the former Union. A new regional capital is being built with shale-rush money, only, the earth tremors have not been factored in…
Here for more than 250 million years, individuals of this hardy survivor species can take 15x the exposure to radiation than humans, and can live for up to a month with no head.
Brent Bellamy
The Work of the Future in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time
Connie’s shock treatment brings on visions of the future as a state of constant war. Ecologically farmed, egalitarian postgendered enclaves battle for their existence with a heavily dystopian hyper-now. Brent Bellamy’s careful reading of this classic of feminist science fiction reminds us that it’s up to us to choose and act now.
The real is not a desert, it’s a sandy beach; stranded, cybernauts bid welcome to the singularity.
Gregor Rozanski
American Apocalypse
And it’s “Goodnight, America” over on CNN: Ted Turner’s TV channel-prep, and an apocryphal video flag-planting. Earth’s destiny made manifest, the band plays on…
Charissa Glidden
Science and Non-Fiction
Ailing, dreaming, human and heavenly bodies are brought into cosmic alignment with goddesses, heroines, UFOs and it’s only me, Bob. Expect ski pants, a medical Ouija board and a musician with phoenician eyes.
Sometime on some earth, after many extinction cycles, a body-modified grader of quantified, productized affect aims to kick back after work. AaTC, or something like that. Strange days indeed.
Chris Roaf
An Ending of Something That Has Not Yet Been Overed
A glitching presence; a memory, a ghost, or a virtual companion? Who knows, but it seems better than being alone now.
Liam Sparkes
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A back, inscribed with bestial revelations.