Veteran SF author John Shirley has just released “The Other End,” a novel about the “apocalypse” if it had been envisioned by lefties instead of right-wing Christian nuts. It’s the left-wing response to the “Left Behind” books. Fantastic idea!
THE OTHER END is an “alternative apocalypse” novel. When you have dominionists, armageddonists, right-wing theologies and theocrats creating this end-times paranoia, like the Left Behind books-the best selling books (and basis for movies) that dramatize the dominionist fantasy about the fulfillment of the Book of Revelation in the Bible, the Rapture, the destruction of non-fundamentalist-Christians, the coming of the antichrist and other hallucinatory material. The Book of Revelation was actually about the Roman empire and has nothing to do with predicting our times; the Rapture is not mentioned, the antichrist as such is not mentioned. These people made up their own bullying pseudo-theology to browbeat others into submitting to their right-wing bigotry. If you just accept their version of what a Judgment Day would be like, you’re letting them create a paradigm that affects people’s decisions. You’re letting them justify a world in which gays are oppressed and even moderate Muslims are not tolerated and art is put through an ideological filter, and people are submissive to the power brokers claiming to be Christians.
So—what if you could create your OWN end-times, your own Judgment Day? What would you create? This is mine. It isn’t God, per se, and definitely not aliens, behind it all, but it is a kind of Judgment Day—a Judgment Day that the left, instead of the right-wing, might envision.