This book deals with legends and images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in film and graphic arts, literature and lore from early to modern times and from peoples and cultures around the world. It reflects an increasingly popular leitmotif in literature and visual arts of the 21st century: humanity’s fear of extinction and its quest for survival -- in revenant, supernatural, or living human form. It is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture. The first two volumes of the series, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) focused on the vampire legend. The third, The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic (2016), focused on a range of supernatural beings in literature, film, and other forms of popular culture.

Drone and Apocalypse is an exhibit catalog for a retrospective of twenty-first-century art. Its narrator, Cynthia Wey, is a failed artist convinced that apocalypse is imminent. She writes critical essays delineating apocalyptic tendencies in drone music and contemporary art. Interspersed amid these essays are “speculative artworks”, Wey’s term for descriptions of artworks she never constructs that center around the extinction of humanity. Wey’s favorite musicians are drone artists like William Basinski, Celer, Thomas Köner, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and Éliane Radigue, and her essays relate their works to moments of ineffability in Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Robert Burton, Hegel, and Dostoyevsky. Well after Wey’s demise, the apocalypse never arrives, but Wey’s journal is discovered. Curators fascinated with twenty-first-century culture use her writings as the basis for their exhibit “Commentaries on the Apocalypse”, which realizes Wey’s speculative artworks as photographs, collages, and sound/video installations.

Salaam, my friends. My name is Omar Ismail. I was born in Calgary, Alberta, to a Somali Muslim immigrant father and a white Canadian mother. Growing up, I never really fit in anywhere. Life is not exactly easy for interracial families out here in redneck country. When I started classes at Mount Royal University, I thought I'd finally be free. Then the Zombie Apocalypse happened, and I found myself in a military unit dedicated to eradicating the Undead. My unit was attacked by a new threat, the Legion of Vampires. Alawa Anakausuen, a Vampire Queen of Cree First Nations descent, turned me into one of them. Now, along with my new Vampire allies, I must battle both the living and the dead to survive in this mad world. Welcome to my absolutely fabulous Afterlife.

While the contemporary era has witnessed a series of spectacular failures with severe and widespread global consequences, failure is still broadly understood on an individual level, while its broader causes and consequences receive little attention. This book reconceptualises failure as a method for characterising and critiquing systems and institutions on both a global and a local level. It defines global failure as comprising global inequality, economic crisis, and ecological disaster, and as a condition which informs and is informed by localised failure. It examines the negotiation between global and local failure in narratives of failed quests by four contemporary authors: Cormac McCarthy, Julia Kristeva, Michael Ondaatje, and Basma Abdel Aziz. As a genre, the quest narrative is associated with the idea of hard-won success. The failed quest narrative, or the narrative of the failed quest, is therefore the ideal vehicle through which to examine the socio-political and institutional conditions of failure. Primarily a contribution to the field of world literature, this book is also relevant to those with an interest in the contemporary novel, failure studies, and the quest narrative.

The idea of the frontier--once, the geographical borderline moving further and further West across the North American continent--has shaped American science fiction television since its beginnings. TV series have long adapted the frontier myth to outer space and have explored American Wests of the future. This book takes a deeper look at the futuristic frontiers within such series as Star Trek, Firefly, Terra Nova, Defiance and The 100, revealing how they rethink colonialism, the environment, spaces of risk and utopian/dystopian worlds. Harnessing forms of speculation and the post-apocalyptic imagination, these series engage with matters of the present, from the legacies of colonialism to climate change and the increasing integration of humans and technologies. In doing so, these series question in novel ways the very idea of borders and reshape cultural binaries such as Self/Other, wilderness/civilization, city/nature, human/non-human and utopia/dystopia.

Video games are a global phenomenon, international in their scope and democratic in their appeal. This is the first volume dedicated to the subject of apocalyptic video games. Its two dozen papers engage the subject comprehensively, from game design to player experience, and from the perspectives of content, theme, sound, ludic textures, and social function. The volume offers scholars, students, and general readers a thorough overview of this unique expression of the apocalyptic imagination in popular culture, and novel insights into an important facet of contemporary digital society.

This book develops an examination and critique of human extinction as a result of the ‘next pandemic’ and turns attention towards the role of pandemic catastrophe in the renegotiation of what it means to be human. Nested in debates in anthropology, philosophy, social theory and global health, the book argues that fear of and fascination with the ‘next pandemic’ stem not so much from an anticipation of a biological extinction of the human species, as from an expectation of the loss of mastery over human/non-humanl relations. Christos Lynteris employs the notion of the ‘pandemic imaginary’ in order to understand the way in which pandemic-borne human extinction refashions our understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The book challenges us to think how cosmological, aesthetic, ontological and political aspects of pandemic catastrophe are intertwined. The chapters examine the vital entanglement of epidemiological studies, popular culture, modes of scientific visualisation, and pandemic preparedness campaigns. This volume will be relevant for scholars and advanced students of anthropology as well as global health, and for many others interested in catastrophe, the ‘end of the world’ and the (post)apocalyptic.

In ""Apocalypse Procrastination Club,"" the sleepy town of Lastchance, USA, becomes the unlikely epicenter of a looming doomsday. Sarah Laterday, the club's president, valiantly attempts to motivate her ragtag group of misfits into action as the end of the world approaches. From a conspiracy-obsessed librarian to a doomsday prepper more interested in binge-watching TV than actual preparation, this motley crew stumbles through their apocalyptic checklist with hilarious results. As the days tick away in reverse countdown fashion, the town's residents find themselves caught in a whirlwind of botched preparations, misinterpreted prophecies, and ever-changing emergency siren tests. Through deadpan humor and laugh-out-loud situational comedy, the story explores the absurdity of societal expectations in the face of impending doom. Yet beneath the surface of this quirky tale lies a heartwarming exploration of friendship, community, and the importance of living in the moment – even when that moment might be your last.

A fascinating collection of predictions for the end-times in the year 2000 The Year 2000 is at hand. The end of the millennium means many things to many people, but it has significance for almost everyone. A thousand years ago, monks stopped copying manuscripts and religious building projects came to a halt as panic swept Europe. Today, anxiety about global warming, government power, superviruses, even recycling, is on some level rooted in the fear of irreversible cataclysm. In a landscape shadowed by racial conflict, technological upheaval, AIDS, and nuclear weapons, we reasonably fear the end of history. 2000 looms large in our religious, political, and cultural imagination. But while 2000 brings dread it also raises the prospect of transformation. There is hope to be found in the apocalyptic. This panoramic volume explores how the Year 2000 operates in contemporary political discourse, from Black evangelical politics to radical right-wing rhetoric. One section is devoted specifically to apocalyptic violence, analyzing twentieth-century cults and cultural movements, from David Koresh—who renamed his Waco compound Ranch Apocalypse and perished in a modern-day Armageddon that fueled the millennialist angst of other extremist groups—to environmental campaigns like Earth First! that also rely on the language of violence and imminent doom in their greening of the Apocalypse.

Since ancient times, explorers and adventurers have captured popular imagination with their frightening narratives of travels gone wrong. Usually, these stories heavily feature the exotic or unknown, and can transform any journey into a nightmare. Stories of such horrific happenings have a long and rich history that stretches from folktales to contemporary media narratives. This work presents eighteen essays that explore the ways in which these texts reflect and shape our fear and fascination surrounding travel, posing new questions about the "geographies of evil" and how our notions of "terrible places" and their inhabitants change over time. The volume's five thematic sections offer new insights into how power, privilege, uncanny landscapes, misbegotten quests, hellish commutes and deadly vacations can turn our travels into terror.