So what’s the plural of apocalypse anyway?
The 2012 "apocalypse" has come and gone. That's a whole 14 months since the previous apocalypse set for Oct 21 2011. There were of course at least two popularly noted apocalypses (Apocalypsi?) in 2011 with the October date being a re jigged date from the previously hailed May 21st apocalypse. Looking up apocalypses that have come and gone on Wikipedia, along with a few yet to come, it seems there were two other lesser known apocalypses in both 2011 and 2012! Clearly, there's no end of ends of the world.
I've always seemed to have plenty of apocalypses to get excited about. When I was a kid, I owned a copy of Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth. It had a sort of cool cover because the earth was cracked in half like an egg (though the one with the earth on fire looked way cooler) Although my copy predicted that the end of the world would be 1988 the library has the relatively new (and hopefully revised) 2007 edition (but the image is just a pair of headphones because it's an e-audiobook). Perhaps a subsequent edition should be called The Fashionably Late Great Planet Earth!
But there is cause to despair! Take a look at that Wikipedia entry again. In my life there have been dozens of apocalypses with never more than a year or two to look forward to one. When someone confessed to me how disappointed they were to see that there was in fact no apocalypse today, I consulted the above mentioned list hoping to assure them that another one was right around the corner.
But imagine my horror when I took note: there are only three left that we can reasonably hope to see in our lifetimes! Not only that but as of Dec 21st 2012, there's no mention of another one for a whole five years at the very least. What's more, it's hopelessly vague and could be anytime over the subsequent decade! Now how am I going to convince my family that it's o.k. to rack up another 60 grand of debt? What effect is this dearth of immanent world destruction going to have on Western economies? Forget the fiscal cliff, we need another eschaton, and we need it soon!
In the meantime we please enjoy these apocalyptic library materials:
Fiction:
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut World – ends in ice-9
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke – we find out we are and always were irrelevant
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury – short stories, 3 of which concern the end of all.
DVD's
Last Night a film by Don McKellar – The end of the world hits Toronto
4:44 Last Day on Earth a film by Abel Ferrara – The end of the world hits Manhattan
Audiobooks
The End of the World Club by John and Pamela Voelkel – Two intrepid teens try to thwart an evil scheme.
E-audiobooks
How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It: Tactics Techniques and Technologies for Uncertain Times by James Wesley Rawles. Non fiction title requiring no further description.
Music:
Naturally, no End-of-the-World resource list would be complete without a list of relevant tunes.
Rather than try to come up with one myself here's a book on eschatological music
Apocalypse Jukebox by David A Janssen
And three lists from online magazines.
Here's one from the Independent
Enjoy them while you can.
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