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Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things
A Personal Preface Part One / The Dream of Last Things 1. The End 2. A Short History of Doomsday Part Two / Archetypes 3. Circles and Lines 4. The Wheel of Time 5. The Day of the Lord 6. Form Sacred to Secular Part Three / The Etiology of Doomsaying 7. Fears 8. The Excluded Self 9. The Universe as the Jaws of Hell 10. Report from Cainsmarsh Part Four / The War of the World Views 11. Paradigms of Doom 12. Lest Ye Die 13. Prometheus Unbound 14. Follies and Mysteries Part Five / Aftermaths 15. Blind Alleys and Return Trips 16 The End of First Things Notes Selected Sources Index
256 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1982
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June 3, 2026
Part One / The Dream of Last Things
1. The End
This chapter highlights the massive mid-to-late 20th-century resurgence of public interest in doomsday scenarios, eschatology, and "disastermania". It outlines the dual nature of modern doomsaying: religious eschatology (the multi-million-selling biblical prophecy market typified by Hal Lindsey) and secular eschatology (the scientific, ecological, and geopolitical warnings of nuclear war or planetary collapse). The author introduces speculative fiction as a profound creative act of the secular imagination rather than simple pulp entertainment. He establishes the book's core premise: unlike ancient religious doomsday myths, modern secular doomsday fiction is distinctly upbeat and future-oriented, functioning primarily as a myth of transformation where the end of an old world order marks the beginning of a new one.
2. A Short History of Doomsday
Wagar traces the chronological evolution of secular doomsday literature over a 175-year period. He highlights Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) as the seminal breaking point where the traditional, divinely ordained apocalypse was replaced by a purposeless, naturalistic extinction event. The chapter tracks how historical awareness (historicism) shifted utopian and dystopian settings into the literal future. It covers the late-Victorian explosion of disaster literature driven by H.G. Wells and his contemporaries, and details how the real-world trauma of World War I permanently shifted the genre's ratio from natural catastrophes to man-made, technological, and militaristic apocalypses. Wagar brings this history up to the post-WWII era, noting how contemporary authors use macrocosmic disaster as a canvas for deep psychological and ontological exploration.
Part Two / Archetypes
3. Circles and Lines
This chapter examines the two opposing foundational structures of world history that modern secular writers inherit from pre-modern tradition: the cyclical model and the linear model.
The Cyclical Model: Derived from pagan, Greek, and Mesopotamian antiquity, it aligns time with the recurring rhythms of nature (seasons, astronomy), viewing world destruction as a necessary cosmic "frost" that cleanses and regenerates an exhausted earth.
The Linear Model: Formulated by Judeo-Christian tradition, it visualizes time as a straight arrow moving from Creation to a singular, definitive Last Judgment.
Wagar notes that both models are fundamentally optimistic because they treat the end not as a dead-end nightmare, but as a gateway to meaning and renewal.
4. The Wheel of Time
Wagar explores the cyclical archetypes of antiquity in deeper detail. He analyzes classical Roman Stoicism (Seneca's view of an earth periodically cleansed of vice by fire or flood), Epicurean naturalism (Lucretius's un-sacred view of an inherently mortal, decaying cosmos), and the intricate cosmic mathematics of the Hindu Mahāyuga (the Great Year ending in the highly degenerate current age of Kali Yuga). The chapter demonstrates that ancient Greek, Babylonian, and Chinese philosophies independently arrived at a similar "primitivist" framework: history is a story of progressive moral and physical degeneration from a past Golden Age, making an eventual catastrophic reset inevitable.
5. The Day of the Lord
This chapter details the development of the linear, historical archetype born out of ancient Israel and cemented by Christianity. Wagar traces how the volatile, oppressed history of the Jewish people fused national chronicle with divine myth, transforming the endtime into "The Day of the Lord"—a historical moment of literal, geopolitical vindication for a chosen remnant. Following prolonged exposure to Persian Zoroastrianism, this national dream adopted cosmic dimensions (resurrection, literal hellfire, and global battle). Christianity inherited this framework, turning it into a tool for the oppressed Roman lower classes by promising a literal terrestrial Millennium followed by a final, complete wrapping up of cosmic time, famously cataloged in the hyper-violent, symbol-rich Revelation of John.
6. From Sacred to Secular
Wagar analyzes how the early Church under Saint Augustine deliberately defused radical, politically volatile millennialism by spiritualizing the "thousand-year reign" into the current era of the Church, pushing the literal end into an unknowable, distant future. This established a persistent historical tension: the official church maintained social stability, while an underground current of radical, apocalyptic medieval and Reformation sects repeatedly weaponized the literal Endtimes against ruling elites. The chapter concludes by explaining how the "Secular Age" (1750–1850) ultimately fully expropriated, romanticized, and translated these sacred paradigms into modern worldly substitutes like the "belief in progress" or secular anxieties of terminal cultural decay.
Part Three / The Etiology of Doomsaying
7. Fears
Wagar establishes a structural "stratigraphy of fear" to diagnose why secular doomsday stories persist. Using Alfred Bester's short story "Adam and No Eve" as a microcosm, he isolates three distinct layers of anxiety that fuel the genre:
The Lowest Layer: Private, universal psychological fears (loneliness, separation, dying, powerlessness).
The Middle Layer: The dread of an unstable, indifferent, or predatory nature.
The Highest Layer: Public, conscious fears of human destructiveness (runaway technology, nuclear warfare, eco-collapse).
8. The Excluded Self
This chapter drills into the deep psychological and psychoanalytic mechanisms of doomsaying. Wagar contrasts how stable communities react to real disasters with how neurotic individuals project their own internal destructive impulses, sadism, or unresolved guilt onto the external world through apocalyptic fantasies. The chapter highlights how doomsday fiction acts as an arena for Eros (the life-and-love impulse) by generating "post-disaster utopias"—shabby Edens where survivors escape modern alienation, achieve immense personal power as new "Adams," and build intimate, simplified communities. Conversely, it explores the dark allure of Thanatos (the death drive), tracking the moral disintegration of the self through the homicidal lunacy of Thomas Hood's executioner, the pyromaniac megalomania of M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud, and J.G. Ballard’s surrealist, amniotic regressions where characters willingly surrender to their own self-destruction.
9. The Universe as the Jaws of Hell
Focusing on the dread of nature, this chapter marks the terrifying realization of a godless universe popularized by the Marquis de Sade and Thomas Malthus: that nature is completely blind, non-anthropomorphic, and entirely indifferent to human survival. Wagar details how 19th-century scientific breakthroughs—catastrophist geology, the discovery of ice ages, Pasteur’s microbiological realities, and Clausius’s Law of Entropy (the heat-death of the sun)—shattered the Enlightenment's illusion of a harmonious cosmos. The chapter catalogs these fears across three literary manifestations: entropic romances of an incredibly slow, cold cosmic fading (Wells’s The Time Machine or Hodgson’s The Night Land); geological and cosmic accidents that smash civilization overnight (John Christopher’s sudden ice ages and earthquakes); and biological overthrows where humanity is callously systematically reaped by hyper-virulent plagues, mutated blights, or hyper-advanced alien farmers (Thomas M. Disch's The Genocides).
10. Report from Cainsmarsh
Using the metaphor of H.G. Wells’s The Croquet Player, where a fictional marsh represents a world haunted by its own evolutionary animal brutishness, Wagar examines the bad conscience of modern man. He analyzes how cultural shifts and scientific concepts—such as Marxist class warfare, the technological marvels of applied science, and Social Darwinist Rassenkampf (race war)—provided the theoretical scaffolding for writers to imagine humanity self-destructing. The chapter tracks shifting historical trends in these man-made doomsdays: from turn-of-the-century anxieties regarding anarchist terror and massive racial massacres (M.P. Shiel's virulent "Yellow Peril" epics) to the interwar and Cold War obsessions with devastating aerial poison-gas or nuclear obliteration. It contrasts the enduring, resilient optimism of writers who view nuclear radiation as an evolutionary stepping-stone to a higher human race against the stark, emotionally flat, anti-heroic void of post-holocaust narratives like Sven Holm’s Termush.
Part Four / The War of the World Views
11. Paradigms of Doom
The Historicist Tether: Wagar asserts that all ideas are organically bound to the collective mentality (Weltanschauung or world view) of the era in which they are conceived. A doomsday story is never a mere thriller; it functions as ideological propaganda designed to validate specific systems of value by dramatizing the end of the world.
The Secular Battleground: Following the collapse of the Enlightenment, the Western imagination polarized into three primary world views:
Romanticism: An anthropomorphic view holding that reality is mindlike, organic, and evolving through time.
Positivism: The baseline of "hard-core" science fiction, prioritizing empirical sensory data, scientific methodology, and progress through technology.
Irrationalism: A modern framework arguing that both humanity and the cosmos are fundamentally governed by unreason, leaving a deep gap between reality and conscious thought.
12. Lest Ye Die
The Anti-Intellectual Eden: Wagar defines the Romantic approach to doomsday through the concept of "Edenism"—a profound nostalgia for lost innocence coupled with deep scriptural suspicions of science, human pride, and forbidden knowledge.
The Arcadian Escape: In works like Cicely Hamilton's Lest Ye Die and J. Leslie Mitchell's Gay Hunter, human progress inevitably constructs a hubristic "Tower of Babel" that collapses into catastrophic global war or plague. The true Romantic "happy ending" features the total elimination of machines and technocracy, allowing a noble, neo-primitive remnant to live a pure life in harmony with natural elements.
13. Prometheus Unbound
The Positivist Triumph: This chapter highlights the positivist approach to eschatology. For the positivist writer, scientific knowledge and human reason are the ultimate tools of survival.
The Rational Reclamation: While catastrophes occur, they are typically blamed on human errors that can be practically fixed, or on irrational social forces abusing technology. Unlike the Romantics who flee to a primitive past, the positivist protagonist uses scientific engineering to aggressively rebuild, conquer nature, and advance humanity into a higher utopian state.
14. Follies and Mysteries
The Absurdist Void: This chapter examines the irrationalist paradigm, where doomsday acts as a mirror for a pointless, fragmented reality.
Psychic and Social Dissolution: In these stories, technology and civilization collapse not because of an explicit "sin" or predictable physical law, but due to the inherent absurdity of existence. Characters often experience an internal, psychological dissolution that matches the external macrocosmic decay, trading material realism for surrealism and existential emptiness.
Part Five / Aftermaths
15. Blind Alleys and Return Trips
The Cyclical Escape Hatch: Wagar reviews the narrative structures utilized by authors to avoid finality. Many turn directly to cyclical models of time, showing the end of the universe as a temporary phase of entropy preceding a grand cosmic resurrection.
The Eternal Return: Rather than terminating human significance, these plots send humanity or reality on a "return trip" where life restarts in the next macro-cycle, ensuring that cosmic death is merely a transformative passage.
16. The End of First Things
Optimism Over Despair: Wagar delivers his final thesis regarding secular eschatology, noting that only about one story in six views the apocalypse as a complete dead end without future hope.
The Dawn of History: The overarching momentum of the genre is future-oriented. Just as in traditional religious apocalypses, the secular end remains structurally linked to a beginning; what is destroyed are merely outworn ways of life, leaving humanity itself at the true threshold of its "First Things".
1. The End
This chapter highlights the massive mid-to-late 20th-century resurgence of public interest in doomsday scenarios, eschatology, and "disastermania". It outlines the dual nature of modern doomsaying: religious eschatology (the multi-million-selling biblical prophecy market typified by Hal Lindsey) and secular eschatology (the scientific, ecological, and geopolitical warnings of nuclear war or planetary collapse). The author introduces speculative fiction as a profound creative act of the secular imagination rather than simple pulp entertainment. He establishes the book's core premise: unlike ancient religious doomsday myths, modern secular doomsday fiction is distinctly upbeat and future-oriented, functioning primarily as a myth of transformation where the end of an old world order marks the beginning of a new one.
2. A Short History of Doomsday
Wagar traces the chronological evolution of secular doomsday literature over a 175-year period. He highlights Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) as the seminal breaking point where the traditional, divinely ordained apocalypse was replaced by a purposeless, naturalistic extinction event. The chapter tracks how historical awareness (historicism) shifted utopian and dystopian settings into the literal future. It covers the late-Victorian explosion of disaster literature driven by H.G. Wells and his contemporaries, and details how the real-world trauma of World War I permanently shifted the genre's ratio from natural catastrophes to man-made, technological, and militaristic apocalypses. Wagar brings this history up to the post-WWII era, noting how contemporary authors use macrocosmic disaster as a canvas for deep psychological and ontological exploration.
Part Two / Archetypes
3. Circles and Lines
This chapter examines the two opposing foundational structures of world history that modern secular writers inherit from pre-modern tradition: the cyclical model and the linear model.
The Cyclical Model: Derived from pagan, Greek, and Mesopotamian antiquity, it aligns time with the recurring rhythms of nature (seasons, astronomy), viewing world destruction as a necessary cosmic "frost" that cleanses and regenerates an exhausted earth.
The Linear Model: Formulated by Judeo-Christian tradition, it visualizes time as a straight arrow moving from Creation to a singular, definitive Last Judgment.
Wagar notes that both models are fundamentally optimistic because they treat the end not as a dead-end nightmare, but as a gateway to meaning and renewal.
4. The Wheel of Time
Wagar explores the cyclical archetypes of antiquity in deeper detail. He analyzes classical Roman Stoicism (Seneca's view of an earth periodically cleansed of vice by fire or flood), Epicurean naturalism (Lucretius's un-sacred view of an inherently mortal, decaying cosmos), and the intricate cosmic mathematics of the Hindu Mahāyuga (the Great Year ending in the highly degenerate current age of Kali Yuga). The chapter demonstrates that ancient Greek, Babylonian, and Chinese philosophies independently arrived at a similar "primitivist" framework: history is a story of progressive moral and physical degeneration from a past Golden Age, making an eventual catastrophic reset inevitable.
5. The Day of the Lord
This chapter details the development of the linear, historical archetype born out of ancient Israel and cemented by Christianity. Wagar traces how the volatile, oppressed history of the Jewish people fused national chronicle with divine myth, transforming the endtime into "The Day of the Lord"—a historical moment of literal, geopolitical vindication for a chosen remnant. Following prolonged exposure to Persian Zoroastrianism, this national dream adopted cosmic dimensions (resurrection, literal hellfire, and global battle). Christianity inherited this framework, turning it into a tool for the oppressed Roman lower classes by promising a literal terrestrial Millennium followed by a final, complete wrapping up of cosmic time, famously cataloged in the hyper-violent, symbol-rich Revelation of John.
6. From Sacred to Secular
Wagar analyzes how the early Church under Saint Augustine deliberately defused radical, politically volatile millennialism by spiritualizing the "thousand-year reign" into the current era of the Church, pushing the literal end into an unknowable, distant future. This established a persistent historical tension: the official church maintained social stability, while an underground current of radical, apocalyptic medieval and Reformation sects repeatedly weaponized the literal Endtimes against ruling elites. The chapter concludes by explaining how the "Secular Age" (1750–1850) ultimately fully expropriated, romanticized, and translated these sacred paradigms into modern worldly substitutes like the "belief in progress" or secular anxieties of terminal cultural decay.
Part Three / The Etiology of Doomsaying
7. Fears
Wagar establishes a structural "stratigraphy of fear" to diagnose why secular doomsday stories persist. Using Alfred Bester's short story "Adam and No Eve" as a microcosm, he isolates three distinct layers of anxiety that fuel the genre:
The Lowest Layer: Private, universal psychological fears (loneliness, separation, dying, powerlessness).
The Middle Layer: The dread of an unstable, indifferent, or predatory nature.
The Highest Layer: Public, conscious fears of human destructiveness (runaway technology, nuclear warfare, eco-collapse).
8. The Excluded Self
This chapter drills into the deep psychological and psychoanalytic mechanisms of doomsaying. Wagar contrasts how stable communities react to real disasters with how neurotic individuals project their own internal destructive impulses, sadism, or unresolved guilt onto the external world through apocalyptic fantasies. The chapter highlights how doomsday fiction acts as an arena for Eros (the life-and-love impulse) by generating "post-disaster utopias"—shabby Edens where survivors escape modern alienation, achieve immense personal power as new "Adams," and build intimate, simplified communities. Conversely, it explores the dark allure of Thanatos (the death drive), tracking the moral disintegration of the self through the homicidal lunacy of Thomas Hood's executioner, the pyromaniac megalomania of M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud, and J.G. Ballard’s surrealist, amniotic regressions where characters willingly surrender to their own self-destruction.
9. The Universe as the Jaws of Hell
Focusing on the dread of nature, this chapter marks the terrifying realization of a godless universe popularized by the Marquis de Sade and Thomas Malthus: that nature is completely blind, non-anthropomorphic, and entirely indifferent to human survival. Wagar details how 19th-century scientific breakthroughs—catastrophist geology, the discovery of ice ages, Pasteur’s microbiological realities, and Clausius’s Law of Entropy (the heat-death of the sun)—shattered the Enlightenment's illusion of a harmonious cosmos. The chapter catalogs these fears across three literary manifestations: entropic romances of an incredibly slow, cold cosmic fading (Wells’s The Time Machine or Hodgson’s The Night Land); geological and cosmic accidents that smash civilization overnight (John Christopher’s sudden ice ages and earthquakes); and biological overthrows where humanity is callously systematically reaped by hyper-virulent plagues, mutated blights, or hyper-advanced alien farmers (Thomas M. Disch's The Genocides).
10. Report from Cainsmarsh
Using the metaphor of H.G. Wells’s The Croquet Player, where a fictional marsh represents a world haunted by its own evolutionary animal brutishness, Wagar examines the bad conscience of modern man. He analyzes how cultural shifts and scientific concepts—such as Marxist class warfare, the technological marvels of applied science, and Social Darwinist Rassenkampf (race war)—provided the theoretical scaffolding for writers to imagine humanity self-destructing. The chapter tracks shifting historical trends in these man-made doomsdays: from turn-of-the-century anxieties regarding anarchist terror and massive racial massacres (M.P. Shiel's virulent "Yellow Peril" epics) to the interwar and Cold War obsessions with devastating aerial poison-gas or nuclear obliteration. It contrasts the enduring, resilient optimism of writers who view nuclear radiation as an evolutionary stepping-stone to a higher human race against the stark, emotionally flat, anti-heroic void of post-holocaust narratives like Sven Holm’s Termush.
Part Four / The War of the World Views
11. Paradigms of Doom
The Historicist Tether: Wagar asserts that all ideas are organically bound to the collective mentality (Weltanschauung or world view) of the era in which they are conceived. A doomsday story is never a mere thriller; it functions as ideological propaganda designed to validate specific systems of value by dramatizing the end of the world.
The Secular Battleground: Following the collapse of the Enlightenment, the Western imagination polarized into three primary world views:
Romanticism: An anthropomorphic view holding that reality is mindlike, organic, and evolving through time.
Positivism: The baseline of "hard-core" science fiction, prioritizing empirical sensory data, scientific methodology, and progress through technology.
Irrationalism: A modern framework arguing that both humanity and the cosmos are fundamentally governed by unreason, leaving a deep gap between reality and conscious thought.
12. Lest Ye Die
The Anti-Intellectual Eden: Wagar defines the Romantic approach to doomsday through the concept of "Edenism"—a profound nostalgia for lost innocence coupled with deep scriptural suspicions of science, human pride, and forbidden knowledge.
The Arcadian Escape: In works like Cicely Hamilton's Lest Ye Die and J. Leslie Mitchell's Gay Hunter, human progress inevitably constructs a hubristic "Tower of Babel" that collapses into catastrophic global war or plague. The true Romantic "happy ending" features the total elimination of machines and technocracy, allowing a noble, neo-primitive remnant to live a pure life in harmony with natural elements.
13. Prometheus Unbound
The Positivist Triumph: This chapter highlights the positivist approach to eschatology. For the positivist writer, scientific knowledge and human reason are the ultimate tools of survival.
The Rational Reclamation: While catastrophes occur, they are typically blamed on human errors that can be practically fixed, or on irrational social forces abusing technology. Unlike the Romantics who flee to a primitive past, the positivist protagonist uses scientific engineering to aggressively rebuild, conquer nature, and advance humanity into a higher utopian state.
14. Follies and Mysteries
The Absurdist Void: This chapter examines the irrationalist paradigm, where doomsday acts as a mirror for a pointless, fragmented reality.
Psychic and Social Dissolution: In these stories, technology and civilization collapse not because of an explicit "sin" or predictable physical law, but due to the inherent absurdity of existence. Characters often experience an internal, psychological dissolution that matches the external macrocosmic decay, trading material realism for surrealism and existential emptiness.
Part Five / Aftermaths
15. Blind Alleys and Return Trips
The Cyclical Escape Hatch: Wagar reviews the narrative structures utilized by authors to avoid finality. Many turn directly to cyclical models of time, showing the end of the universe as a temporary phase of entropy preceding a grand cosmic resurrection.
The Eternal Return: Rather than terminating human significance, these plots send humanity or reality on a "return trip" where life restarts in the next macro-cycle, ensuring that cosmic death is merely a transformative passage.
16. The End of First Things
Optimism Over Despair: Wagar delivers his final thesis regarding secular eschatology, noting that only about one story in six views the apocalypse as a complete dead end without future hope.
The Dawn of History: The overarching momentum of the genre is future-oriented. Just as in traditional religious apocalypses, the secular end remains structurally linked to a beginning; what is destroyed are merely outworn ways of life, leaving humanity itself at the true threshold of its "First Things".
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 4, 2010
Wagar covers about 300 apocalyptic visionary fictions in this study. A handsome book.
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