{"id":1011,"date":"2010-01-29T16:52:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-30T00:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/01\/the-end-is-near.html"},"modified":"2010-01-29T16:52:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-30T00:52:00","slug":"the-end-is-near","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/01\/the-end-is-near.html","title":{"rendered":"The End is Near"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The apocalypse novel is one of my favorite literary genres, and I’ve been thinking lately about a subgenre I’m calling the soft apocalypse. It’s halfway between Noah’s Arc and the Book of Revelation — midway between “London Calling” and “Ecotopia” — and for historical reasons has been picking up steam the last few years. It’s typically rustic, sad and often ambiguous rather than ultra-violent and abrupt. Though some of these books are described as science-fiction, there is typically little science extant in the worlds these novels describe.<\/p>\n

HERE<\/a> is my week of work on the science\/technology\/futurism\/sci-fi site io9, with the apocalypse piece as my top post. Did not have room or time for some of my almost-favorites — LeGuin’s tribal, post-apoc Napa Valley in Always Coming Home<\/i>, or Denis Johnson’s shattered seaside world of cargo-cult pop-cult superstition in Fiskadoro.<\/i><\/p>\n

Apocalypse authority Justin Taylor, whose Apocalypse Reader<\/i> I heartily recommend, has pointed out that Robinson Jeffers rugged West Coast poetry, in its relations of human beings to surrounding flora and fauna, in its individualistic way fits the category.<\/p>\n

One of my most requested pieces from the LATimes — reprinted as the lead piece in the journal The Los Angeles Review — was a an ’07 piece about apocalypse fiction and where it was going. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road <\/i>was one of the keystones.\u00a0That piece also asked, Why this? And why now?\u00a0Here<\/a> it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The apocalypse novel is one of my favorite literary genres, and I’ve been thinking lately about a subgenre I’m calling the soft apocalypse. It’s halfway between Noah’s Arc and the Book of Revelation — midway between “London Calling” and “Ecotopia” — and for historical reasons has been picking up steam the last few years. It’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[328,35,250,327,137,307],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1011","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-apocalypse","7":"category-books","8":"category-cloud-atlas","9":"category-cormac-mccarthy","10":"category-science-fiction","11":"category-silverberg","12":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}