T.S. Eliot claimed, “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” That whimper is the sound of me being buried under novels about it., reviewing a new one, reading a forthcoming one and wearily eyeing two more. Clearly, we’ve arrived at the future in which everyone writes about the collapse of civilization for 15 minutes. If the world is really about to end, I wish it would hurry up. The strange thing about doomsday, though, is its infinite adaptability.
Note, for instance, how graciously the eschatology of previous millennia swelled to accommodate fears of nuclear annihilation in the 20th century. And now climate change, seasoned with a soupçon of political tyranny, promises to cook all our anxieties in a final vat of despondency. The result is a literary doom loop that keeps spinning faster. Over the last few years, I’ve read so many dystopian novels that I had to look up the plural spelling of “apocalypse.”Despero, ergo sum!Juli