Dear Reader,

I’ve read that every generation thinks that theirs will be the last. If Michael Stipe is right, there will be birds and snakes and music maestros to usher in our final end. I can hear them now, the trumpets blowing when Leonard Bernstein comes again to lead that one last symphony. But I await no judgment, whether in mezzanines or front row seats or even from the pit. Because as obsessed as I am with apocalypse, I’m skeptical of revelation.

I write a lot about disaster (thank you, Hurricane Katrina), and it’s always doomsday this and cataclysm that and what rough beast is slouching towards us at last (and please, won’t you stand up straight?). The end of the world starts with an earthquake, but it ends with a second coming that kicks off the automatic recount of our souls. In that final judgment, we get prophecy’s fulfillment and spiritual fillet-ment as we’re flayed and left exposed before the judgy eyes of God. But revelation only happens through overwhelming disaster. There is “a great mountain, burning with fire” (Revelation 8:8) hurtling towards us and no Bruce Willis or Ben Affleck to save us. When it strikes the earth at last, the world as we know it will end.

Whether it’s the asteroid of Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars or the super-flu in Stephen King’s The Stand, such apocalyptic destruction reveals the wickedness of the old world to usher in a more egalitarian new one. This pattern exists in countless apocalyptic media, their calamity and ruin exposing the iniquities of racist, sexist, classist, ableist, heteronormative systems under capitalism. And the blueprint for these stories ultimately stems from Christian eschatology, which insists the world is sinful, but through its destruction, its sins can be uncovered and overcome.

I loved both of the books I mentioned above, and I am an obsessive consumer of apocalyptic media. I think, in part, I love such stories because New Orleans faced its own little apocalypse, and I will always be coming to terms with that. But apocalyptic narratives offer spectacle and escapism, and more than that, they demand that for us to be saved, we must first be destroyed. In the Book of Revelation, an eagle cries as the trumpets blow, “Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth and all who live in the shadow of data centers.” I’m paraphrasing perhaps, but in that passage, the waters are poisoned and the climate is changing, and the math all feels so easy—first we suffer in this world and then we find salvation. To get the keys to the kingdom, first this world must die. But I like this world. It’s where I keep my stuff.

So, I am skeptical of revelation, skeptical of salvation through annihilation. The best narratives of apocalypse are, I think, those that resist that possibility—the ones that say, “We cannot end our suffering by suffering yet more.” So, offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I won’t decline.

Think about it, dear reader, and thank you, as always, for reading,

Leon

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Leon Perniciaro, Editor

Haven Spec Magazine

© Leon Perniciaro