Apocalypse
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This Week in Short Fiction
Sometimes, literary magazines fold. It happens all the time because of funding, or manpower, or editorial differences. Usually, print back issues remain for sale and online content is preserved indefinitely, or at least until someone forgets to renew the domain.…
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A Whole Host of Western Woes
True, a marital murder-suicide does take place on the way, but it’s an act of calculated altruism, done for the good of the group. For the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz reviews Lionel Shriver’s twelfth novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047.
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Weekly Geekery
Facial recognition technology is a little racist. Two writers talk about the end of the world and more importantly, the end of social media. Robots are just babies—tiny, terrifying babies. Nabokov and butterfly sex.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Ghosts of St. Louis
If I was a ghost, I wouldn’t want nothing to do with the world that killed me.
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The Rumpus Interview with Paul Kingsnorth
Author and poet Paul Kingsnorth talks about writing an entire novel in a “shadow-tongue” of Old English, and what that taught him about our contemporary world.
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The Rumpus Interview with William Gibson
Legendary technomodernist William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, talks about his latest book, The Peripheral, predicting the future, and how writing about Silicon Valley today feels like his early work.
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The Last Book I Loved: Station Eleven
In the distance between me and the story, I can see all the ways I would have to change without technology, because of all the ways technology has already changed me.
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The First Urban Apocalypse
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a bronchial spasm. For the Public Domain Review, Brett Beasley examines Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City, widely considered to be the first science fiction novel…
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The Literary Zombie Dream Team
At Ploughshares, Matthew Burnside assembles a literary dream team for the impending zombie apocalypse.
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Word of the Day: Eschaton
(n.); the last thing, as a theological reference to the climax of history at Judgment Day; the day at the end of time following Armageddon when God will decree the fates of all human beings; from the ancient Greek eskhatos…
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An Anti-anti-science Novel
“It is a comfort to know how swiftly and thoroughly a civilization can crumble when nobody wants it anymore,” Rowan says early in his story…that observation is more than just a wry criticism of our current defunding of space exploration.…
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The Rumpus Interview with Maxwell Neely-Cohen
Maxwell Neely-Cohen discusses smart teens, furious parents, the apocalypse, and how our screens change how we see the world.