Pop Apocalypse

The United States and its Freedom Coalition allies are conducting serial invasions across the globe, including an attack on the anti-capitalist rebels of Northern California. The Middle East—now a single consumerist Caliphate led by Lebanese pop singer Caliph Fred—is in an uproar after an attack on the al-Aqsa Mosque gets televised on the Holy Land Channel. The world is on the brink of a total radioactive, no-survivors war, and human­kind's last hope is Eliot R. Vanderthorpe, Jr., celebrity heir, debauched party animal, and Elvis impersonation scholar. But Eliot's got his own problems. His evangelical dad is breeding red heifers in anticipation of the Rapture. Eliot's dissertation is in the toilet. And he has a doppelgänger. An evil doppelgänger.

Mining popular media, Dark redefines the term apocalypse as a more honest, watchful way of being in the world and higlights how the imagination can expose our moral condition.

A fresh and intelligent debut that imagines the world of 2029, where many of the crises faced today--from celebrity mania to reckless foreign policy and ubiquitous government surveillance--have escalated to ridiculous new heights.

Increasingly, society questions the connection between violence in entertainment and violence in life. Moralists and censors would reply resoundingly that media violence and social violence are directly linked, but others ask the deeper question: Why do people feel the need to create images of violence, and why do audiences continually watch them? In this thought-provoking and insightful study of American violent cinema, author Jake Horsley attempts to answer these questions by tying together the multiple disciplines of psychology, criminology, censorship, and anthropology. Horsley divides the forty years of his study into two volumes: American Chaos: From Touch of Evil to The Terminator, and Millennial Blues: From Apocalypse Now to The Matrix. These volumes aim to provide both a critical overview of the films themselves and a cultural study of the social and psychological factors relating to the demand for screen violence. By doing so, Horsley raises a new dialogue between scholars and movie buffs to examine the need to portray and the need to watch violent films.

Traditional apocalyptic texts concern the advent of a better world at the end of history that will make sense of everything that happened before. But what is at stake in the contemporary shift to apocalyptic narratives in which the utopian end of time is removed? The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel offers an innovative critical model for our cultural obsession with 'the end' by focussing on the significance of time in the 21st-century post-apocalyptic novel and challenging traditional apocalyptic logic. Once confined to the genre of science fiction, the increasing popularity of end-of-the-world narratives has caused apocalyptic writing to feature in the work of some of contemporary literature's most well-known fiction writers. Considering novels by Will Self, Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel, Jeanette Winterson and others, Diletta De Cristofaro frames the contemporary apocalyptic imagination as a critique of modernity's apocalyptic conception of time and history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book historicises apocalyptic beliefs by exploring how relentlessly they have shaped the modern world.

Apocalypse, Revisited: A Critical Study on End Times explores why and how Apocalypse has been revisited in myriad contexts from literature to history, religion to social life and media to popular culture.

This book will be a key trailblazer in a new and upcoming field. The author’s predictive approach relies on simple and intuitive probability formulations that will appeal to readers with a modest knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, and statistics. Wells’ carefully erected theory stands on a sure footing and thus should serve as the basis of many rational predictions of survival in the face of not only natural disasters such as hits by asteroids or comets, but perhaps more surprisingly from man-made hazards arising from genetic engineering or robotics. Any formula for predicting human survival will invite controversy. Dr Wells counters anticipated criticism with a thorough approach in which four lines of reasoning are used to arrive at the same survival formula. One uses empirical survival statistics for business firms and stage shows. Another is based on uncertainty of risk rates. The third, more abstract, invokes Laplace’s principle of insufficient reason and involves an observer’s random arrival in the lifetime of the entity (the human race) in question. The fourth uses Bayesian theory. The author carefully explains and gives examples of the conditions under which his principle is valid and provides evidence that can counteract the arguments of critics who would reject it entirely. His deflection of possible criticisms results from two major premises: selecting the proper random variable and “reference class” to make predictions, and the recognition that if one does not know the law that governs a process, then the best prediction that can be made is his own formula.