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Apocalypse: An Epic Poem
It’s 2067. The Antarctic ice sheets have collapsed. World sea levels have risen several feet and are rising faster still. The climate has changed catastrophically, and meteorological disasters are becoming a daily occurrence. Yet global power structures fail to respond, remaining frozen in political and ideological gridlock. To confront this chaos, billionaire Noah Blazo recruits a team of genius misfits to bypass the political paralysis. With support from a coalition of island and coastal nations that are vulnerable to these catastrophes, his team launches an unsanctioned geo-engineering effort to restore the Earth’s ecological balance—an activity that prompts a global power struggle immediately leading to war. Events in the center of this conflict inadvertently trigger the emergence a quasi-divine being, Kalodendron, who dwells within the Internet. With her arrival comes a further threat to the Earth—the appearance of the dark star Wormwood, which looms within our solar system and is drawing closer. With Kalodendron’s help, can Blazo’s team avert this two-fold threat the Earth’s destruction? Or do the tragedies that quickly follow ensure the planet’s final destruction? Apocalypse features a rich cast of fully realized characters, including the old Texan, Noah Blazo, a beneficent Captain Ahab with his own secret grief; Anneliese Grotius, the internet genius who is also the curator of the Amsterdam Museum’s Flemish collection; big gloomy Ala Ifu-Eshu, who has dealt with her Boko Haram husband and becomes a leader in the art of seawater farming; the mathematicians Chandrasekhar Engineer and his son Gopal; the British naval maverick Peter Frobisher; the two popes, Pius XIII and Francis III; and the troubled narrator, Nemo, who has been commissioned by Noah to compose the poem itself as its events occur. Apocalypse is a major new work on the poetic landscape, an odyssey that addresses the global anxieties, emerging technologies, and spiritual yearnings of our time. Addressing themes of humanity’s capacity for creation, destruction, rebirth, and redemption, Apocalypse is a transformative vision of the deepest and most passionate relationships that define us and give our lives meaning.
- GenresPoetry
352 pages, Paperback
First published September 21, 2016
6 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
About the author
Frederick Turner
19 books4 followersLibrarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Frederick Turner was born in Northamptonshire, England, in 1943. After spending several years in central Africa, where his parents, the anthropologists Victor W. and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research, Frederick Turner was educated at the University of Oxford (1962-67), where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. (equivalent to a PhD) in English Language and Literature. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1977.
He is presently Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. From 1978-82 he was editor of The Kenyon Review.
Frederick Turner was born in Northamptonshire, England, in 1943. After spending several years in central Africa, where his parents, the anthropologists Victor W. and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research, Frederick Turner was educated at the University of Oxford (1962-67), where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. (equivalent to a PhD) in English Language and Literature. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1977.
He is presently Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. From 1978-82 he was editor of The Kenyon Review.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 23, 2025
What is it: an epic poem trying to be many things that are not epic poems.
----
Why 2 stars: six-thousand lines into this ten-thousand-line epic poem, I thought I had a pretty clear idea of what my review of it would entail.
The first six of this poem's ten books are, on the whole, a straightforward piece of eco-science-fiction. Looming climate apocalypse, a rogue team of interdisciplinary experts who choose to rise above their culture and prove humanity capable of saving a dying planet, a lot of pseudo-science to justify extraordinary acts of geo-engineering, and a deus ex machina (very literal, in this case) that provides the ultimate answer to the problem humanity has never solved: our desire to destroy ourselves. My review of those six-thousand lines would have emphasized how ready-at-hand science-fiction's heroes are for Turner, because sci-fi has long foregrounded "the competent man" as its champion. A person (almost always male) whose virtue is proven by their intelligence, calm problem-solving, patience among lesser humans, and independence from faulty authorities. Self-reliant, smart, experienced. Turner's written six-thousand lines about a group of competent men (some women, to be fair), a group of heroes who are all of them defined solely and entirely by their having risen up from among the rabble to prove themselves more capable, more intelligent, more bold than the rest of us. They are all, in a word, perfect. An epic poem about a group of perfect people solving the problems of an imperfect populace.
I have lots that I'd want to say about that. I think there's strong reason to critique that sort of storytelling. Even the ancients, on whom Turner so often directly models his poetry, understood that storytelling required they give their gods flaws and make their heroes' greatest stumbling blocks a fault internal to the hero rather than just another monster or rival. It is in humbling the hero that the audience can learn a lesson alongside that hero. Leaving the hero perfect, unchallenged except by lesser beings who simply aren't intelligent enough to see the truth of what will save the world, leaves the audience kept apart from that hero. The hero remains aloof, untouchable, not just unrelatable but unuseful to the real people reading about them. If I am not perfect, how can I learn from these flawless beings? If I am not perfect, must I simply wait for someone who is to show up and take over the world? There's danger in that kind of storytelling, in the worst ideologies. There's boredom in it, in the best ideologies.
But then there's the other four-thousand lines. Four more books of the epic. And the text at that turning point explodes. What was for its majority a grounded exercise in eco-fiction, imitative of contemporary science fiction novels in its character and tone of dialogue and thematic focus, shifts abruptly. The deus ex machina from that earlier section becomes an inciting incident that kicks off what I can only describe as a manic spill of ideas Turner pulls from every corner of the science-fiction genre (often directly citing the other authors he's drawing from--Kim Stanley Robinson and Liu Cixin get shout-outs). Turner's verse pivots from imitating a novelistic tone to instead a frenzied crush of one idea after another crammed wall-to-wall in every foot of meter. 3D printing solves global poverty. Cloning solves food crises. Light-speed travel solved by imprinting the information of an object-at-scale onto a single proton and then reprinting the object-at-scale after that proton's information has been received at a destination. A space elevator. The nature of time itself, the past being called a blockchain that computational miracle can understand and reproduce in full causal sequence so as to allow virtual reality experience of that past as though present and eventually enable resurrection of that past when combined with the aforementioned cloning. And truly all of what I've just described above not only barely scratches the surface, it also covers a lot of material that's barely relevant to the story told.
Because in the midst of all those overflowing ideas, the story told pivots from the utopic heroism of the previous section to instead a strange and bitter apocalyptic vision, a devil ex machina hanging in the sky over the world and a lapse into apathy from human civilization, the vulgar cultural-suicide of mass media slop, a pope who kills an AI god then hangs himself then is buried in a potter's field in overt reference to Judas, a poet (the narrator of the text) musing on the spiritual need and failing of humanity when isolated from those perfect heroes he had accompanied in the earlier portion of the text. At the center of the final four books is a sermon, a homily delivered by the new pope succeeding Judas, which the poet describes as so meaningful that perhaps the rest of the poem is irrelevant, but the text of which in actuality wanders through a sequence of pseudo-spiritual questions about the nature of Christ's death on the cross and the culpability of man and God in that death only to arrive at a conclusion that it is in the remaking of the material of the world around us that we find a love of matter that could itself be spiritually fulfilling in the absence of something transcendent.
To put it very bluntly, this is all a mess. Both the story structure and the styling of the poetry in these latter books make such tenuous connections among all these ideas that its coherence becomes increasingly fragile the more is crammed in. The whole crumbles in your hands as soon as you apply the slightest pressure to maintain your grip on any part. So my review that would've been a simpler critique of trying to tell a story about perfect people now is a review that's got to grapple with the stranger critique of how that mess fails the reader.
And while I'd like to say that the critique is a matter strictly of craft, I think in this poem, the critique has to account for the worldview that motivates that craft. Because Turner makes it explicitly clear within his poetry that he sees the poetic act as a direct embodiment of the worldview he uses it to articulate. I think to evaluate one is permitted (even required) to evaluate the other by his own invitation.
What I find in Apocalypse is a work that intends to dress itself in Biblical language. The hero saving humanity from eco-catastrophe is unsubtlely named Noah. I've already mentioned Judas. The AI god is called an Angel in several contexts, dressed in a Hebrew name a couple times as well. There are references to Eve, to Eden, to Milton's poetry about Paradise and its loss. There's a Moses and a couple prophets. There's Jonah's whale or Job's leviathan. And there's the homily that very explicitly attempts to frame the narrative of the poem in language directly taken from the Bible's narrative of Christ. But amidst those trappings, the story that this poem actually tells is not a mere retelling of the Biblical narratives it draws upon. It is a rewriting of those narratives, a restructuring of them, not even merely revisionist to a modern perspective but fully rebuilding the component parts of the Christian worldview Turner's taken as raw material for his epic.
In his restructuring of all this, Turner's poem gives us a story that looks at a glance like the Christian narrative, but when examined for more than a second is precisely its opposite. Here it is the self-sacrifice of perfect humans that makes Eden a Paradise in which God is born (the first six books, in which our perfect heroes restore the world to a garden climate and enable the creation of an AI god), and it is the betrayal and murder of God by humans that presses the world into a chaos that threatens all futures (the latter books, in which the titular apocalypse and already mentioned killing of the AI are the loose focus). But this story fundamentally misunderstands, or perhaps willfully chooses to misrepresent, that the structure of the Christian narrative is in fact that it is humanity who ruin the Paradise God made for them and in which God first bore them and it is the self-sacrifice of that perfect God that restores for humanity the Eden they had spoiled. Turner's rewriting of the narrative overturns each side of that narrative. It makes of Adam a Christ and of Christ an Adam, and this is I think a failure of storytelling as much as it is an unsustainable worldview.
The inadequacy of this worldview, the illogic of this storytelling structure, seems most evident to me in precisely that homily that the poet (and I have to assume Turner) claims is so meaningful. That sermon evidences, above all else, to my reading experience, a constant hand-waving full of blithe assertions that the Christian narrative--the narrative of Christ on a cross, specifically--is an ambiguous one, an empty story that allows us to assign the fault of evil to humans or to God equally and to seek the salvation of meaning in whatever we deem a reasonable fit to fill the gap left by the corpse hanging on the hill. These assertions completely ignore that any ambiguity in the Christian narrative that would have been left open by Christ on the cross are made precise and particular in the empty tomb, the absence that answers the absence.
The resurrection is the storytelling solution to the problem posed by the death of God. Leaving Him buried, a corpse whose rot might feed the beauty of nature and an absence whose passion might fuel the beauty of religious belief, makes of all human meaning-making an unguided wilderness in which poetry can only attempt to elevate bodies and time as sufficient replacements in the stead of a lost infinitude and eternity. It makes of an abundant, gracious love a privation and makes of actual privation an abundant, complacent satisfaction. Leaving Him buried, of course the poet's left scrambling desperately to reassemble and rearrange the pieces of life littered across the floors of hollow temples and the tables of proud laboratories. Leaving Him buried, of course the poet must manically try to order the lines of verse as a substitute solution to the disorder of the world in which those words will live.
To my reading experience, the chaos on the page proves the insufficiency of the poet's attempt to answer the chaos outside my door.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that rewriting the Bible into a spiritual-humanist narrative makes for truly bad poetry.
Turner does, remarkably, include a resurrection at the end of Apocalypse. Many resurrections, in fact. God no longer dead. Those perfect heroes whose sacrifice enabled the salvation of the world permitted life again so that the cost of their sacrifice may be disregarded after all. But these resurrections are enabled by such a convoluted and irrelevant sequence of misaligned plot points and thematic allegories that it becomes for the reader neither a useful metaphor to wrap up the argument of the poem nor a satisfying narrative to resolve the plots begun in the earlier books. Characters return, but the disorder of the text's past few-thousand lines makes their return irrelevant. Themes recur, but that same disorder defeats the point of the recurrence. The revision of the narrative of sacrifice and resurrection finds a version of both sacrifice and resurrection that is emptied of any of the meaning it held in its original structure.
----
Try this instead: if you just came to this book for some neat sci-fi stuff and don't really want to dig into any of the worldviews above, you've got plenty of other options; Turner and Kim Stanley Robinson have a clear relationship between their writing, where Turner's Genesis informed Robinson's Mars and Robinson's Mars informed Turner's Apocalypse and most recently aspects of Turner's Apocalypse seem related to Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (my review of it here). The latter books of this epic verge at times into territory not far from films like Contact, Interstellar, and Ad Astra, so those might scratch the same itch (my review of the latter two films here and here). And if you like the imaginativeness of Turner's ideas here but want them in a more orderly package, Turner's earlier epics are, I think, by far better examples of his skill, particularly The New World (my review of it here).
----
Why 2 stars: six-thousand lines into this ten-thousand-line epic poem, I thought I had a pretty clear idea of what my review of it would entail.
The first six of this poem's ten books are, on the whole, a straightforward piece of eco-science-fiction. Looming climate apocalypse, a rogue team of interdisciplinary experts who choose to rise above their culture and prove humanity capable of saving a dying planet, a lot of pseudo-science to justify extraordinary acts of geo-engineering, and a deus ex machina (very literal, in this case) that provides the ultimate answer to the problem humanity has never solved: our desire to destroy ourselves. My review of those six-thousand lines would have emphasized how ready-at-hand science-fiction's heroes are for Turner, because sci-fi has long foregrounded "the competent man" as its champion. A person (almost always male) whose virtue is proven by their intelligence, calm problem-solving, patience among lesser humans, and independence from faulty authorities. Self-reliant, smart, experienced. Turner's written six-thousand lines about a group of competent men (some women, to be fair), a group of heroes who are all of them defined solely and entirely by their having risen up from among the rabble to prove themselves more capable, more intelligent, more bold than the rest of us. They are all, in a word, perfect. An epic poem about a group of perfect people solving the problems of an imperfect populace.
I have lots that I'd want to say about that. I think there's strong reason to critique that sort of storytelling. Even the ancients, on whom Turner so often directly models his poetry, understood that storytelling required they give their gods flaws and make their heroes' greatest stumbling blocks a fault internal to the hero rather than just another monster or rival. It is in humbling the hero that the audience can learn a lesson alongside that hero. Leaving the hero perfect, unchallenged except by lesser beings who simply aren't intelligent enough to see the truth of what will save the world, leaves the audience kept apart from that hero. The hero remains aloof, untouchable, not just unrelatable but unuseful to the real people reading about them. If I am not perfect, how can I learn from these flawless beings? If I am not perfect, must I simply wait for someone who is to show up and take over the world? There's danger in that kind of storytelling, in the worst ideologies. There's boredom in it, in the best ideologies.
But then there's the other four-thousand lines. Four more books of the epic. And the text at that turning point explodes. What was for its majority a grounded exercise in eco-fiction, imitative of contemporary science fiction novels in its character and tone of dialogue and thematic focus, shifts abruptly. The deus ex machina from that earlier section becomes an inciting incident that kicks off what I can only describe as a manic spill of ideas Turner pulls from every corner of the science-fiction genre (often directly citing the other authors he's drawing from--Kim Stanley Robinson and Liu Cixin get shout-outs). Turner's verse pivots from imitating a novelistic tone to instead a frenzied crush of one idea after another crammed wall-to-wall in every foot of meter. 3D printing solves global poverty. Cloning solves food crises. Light-speed travel solved by imprinting the information of an object-at-scale onto a single proton and then reprinting the object-at-scale after that proton's information has been received at a destination. A space elevator. The nature of time itself, the past being called a blockchain that computational miracle can understand and reproduce in full causal sequence so as to allow virtual reality experience of that past as though present and eventually enable resurrection of that past when combined with the aforementioned cloning. And truly all of what I've just described above not only barely scratches the surface, it also covers a lot of material that's barely relevant to the story told.
Because in the midst of all those overflowing ideas, the story told pivots from the utopic heroism of the previous section to instead a strange and bitter apocalyptic vision, a devil ex machina hanging in the sky over the world and a lapse into apathy from human civilization, the vulgar cultural-suicide of mass media slop, a pope who kills an AI god then hangs himself then is buried in a potter's field in overt reference to Judas, a poet (the narrator of the text) musing on the spiritual need and failing of humanity when isolated from those perfect heroes he had accompanied in the earlier portion of the text. At the center of the final four books is a sermon, a homily delivered by the new pope succeeding Judas, which the poet describes as so meaningful that perhaps the rest of the poem is irrelevant, but the text of which in actuality wanders through a sequence of pseudo-spiritual questions about the nature of Christ's death on the cross and the culpability of man and God in that death only to arrive at a conclusion that it is in the remaking of the material of the world around us that we find a love of matter that could itself be spiritually fulfilling in the absence of something transcendent.
To put it very bluntly, this is all a mess. Both the story structure and the styling of the poetry in these latter books make such tenuous connections among all these ideas that its coherence becomes increasingly fragile the more is crammed in. The whole crumbles in your hands as soon as you apply the slightest pressure to maintain your grip on any part. So my review that would've been a simpler critique of trying to tell a story about perfect people now is a review that's got to grapple with the stranger critique of how that mess fails the reader.
And while I'd like to say that the critique is a matter strictly of craft, I think in this poem, the critique has to account for the worldview that motivates that craft. Because Turner makes it explicitly clear within his poetry that he sees the poetic act as a direct embodiment of the worldview he uses it to articulate. I think to evaluate one is permitted (even required) to evaluate the other by his own invitation.
What I find in Apocalypse is a work that intends to dress itself in Biblical language. The hero saving humanity from eco-catastrophe is unsubtlely named Noah. I've already mentioned Judas. The AI god is called an Angel in several contexts, dressed in a Hebrew name a couple times as well. There are references to Eve, to Eden, to Milton's poetry about Paradise and its loss. There's a Moses and a couple prophets. There's Jonah's whale or Job's leviathan. And there's the homily that very explicitly attempts to frame the narrative of the poem in language directly taken from the Bible's narrative of Christ. But amidst those trappings, the story that this poem actually tells is not a mere retelling of the Biblical narratives it draws upon. It is a rewriting of those narratives, a restructuring of them, not even merely revisionist to a modern perspective but fully rebuilding the component parts of the Christian worldview Turner's taken as raw material for his epic.
In his restructuring of all this, Turner's poem gives us a story that looks at a glance like the Christian narrative, but when examined for more than a second is precisely its opposite. Here it is the self-sacrifice of perfect humans that makes Eden a Paradise in which God is born (the first six books, in which our perfect heroes restore the world to a garden climate and enable the creation of an AI god), and it is the betrayal and murder of God by humans that presses the world into a chaos that threatens all futures (the latter books, in which the titular apocalypse and already mentioned killing of the AI are the loose focus). But this story fundamentally misunderstands, or perhaps willfully chooses to misrepresent, that the structure of the Christian narrative is in fact that it is humanity who ruin the Paradise God made for them and in which God first bore them and it is the self-sacrifice of that perfect God that restores for humanity the Eden they had spoiled. Turner's rewriting of the narrative overturns each side of that narrative. It makes of Adam a Christ and of Christ an Adam, and this is I think a failure of storytelling as much as it is an unsustainable worldview.
The inadequacy of this worldview, the illogic of this storytelling structure, seems most evident to me in precisely that homily that the poet (and I have to assume Turner) claims is so meaningful. That sermon evidences, above all else, to my reading experience, a constant hand-waving full of blithe assertions that the Christian narrative--the narrative of Christ on a cross, specifically--is an ambiguous one, an empty story that allows us to assign the fault of evil to humans or to God equally and to seek the salvation of meaning in whatever we deem a reasonable fit to fill the gap left by the corpse hanging on the hill. These assertions completely ignore that any ambiguity in the Christian narrative that would have been left open by Christ on the cross are made precise and particular in the empty tomb, the absence that answers the absence.
The resurrection is the storytelling solution to the problem posed by the death of God. Leaving Him buried, a corpse whose rot might feed the beauty of nature and an absence whose passion might fuel the beauty of religious belief, makes of all human meaning-making an unguided wilderness in which poetry can only attempt to elevate bodies and time as sufficient replacements in the stead of a lost infinitude and eternity. It makes of an abundant, gracious love a privation and makes of actual privation an abundant, complacent satisfaction. Leaving Him buried, of course the poet's left scrambling desperately to reassemble and rearrange the pieces of life littered across the floors of hollow temples and the tables of proud laboratories. Leaving Him buried, of course the poet must manically try to order the lines of verse as a substitute solution to the disorder of the world in which those words will live.
To my reading experience, the chaos on the page proves the insufficiency of the poet's attempt to answer the chaos outside my door.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that rewriting the Bible into a spiritual-humanist narrative makes for truly bad poetry.
Turner does, remarkably, include a resurrection at the end of Apocalypse. Many resurrections, in fact. God no longer dead. Those perfect heroes whose sacrifice enabled the salvation of the world permitted life again so that the cost of their sacrifice may be disregarded after all. But these resurrections are enabled by such a convoluted and irrelevant sequence of misaligned plot points and thematic allegories that it becomes for the reader neither a useful metaphor to wrap up the argument of the poem nor a satisfying narrative to resolve the plots begun in the earlier books. Characters return, but the disorder of the text's past few-thousand lines makes their return irrelevant. Themes recur, but that same disorder defeats the point of the recurrence. The revision of the narrative of sacrifice and resurrection finds a version of both sacrifice and resurrection that is emptied of any of the meaning it held in its original structure.
----
Try this instead: if you just came to this book for some neat sci-fi stuff and don't really want to dig into any of the worldviews above, you've got plenty of other options; Turner and Kim Stanley Robinson have a clear relationship between their writing, where Turner's Genesis informed Robinson's Mars and Robinson's Mars informed Turner's Apocalypse and most recently aspects of Turner's Apocalypse seem related to Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (my review of it here). The latter books of this epic verge at times into territory not far from films like Contact, Interstellar, and Ad Astra, so those might scratch the same itch (my review of the latter two films here and here). And if you like the imaginativeness of Turner's ideas here but want them in a more orderly package, Turner's earlier epics are, I think, by far better examples of his skill, particularly The New World (my review of it here).
June 18, 2017
An exclusive and innovative book. Brave in every way. It is easily admired, and more quickly unappreciated. The blank verse resembles the novel in flow, but faithful still to stress and meter. I enjoyed the points of the work that are most reflective rather than narrative, I believe that "Nemo" the poet narrator is strength is in his reflection of Turners world from his wide seeing eyes. The content is noble in the fact that it's adventure theme is faithfully epic. For its execution I would given it four stars, only by the fact that I don't enjoy blank verse nor science fiction. But it's ingenuity alone merits a star. So five stars for a contemporary work, from a noble living poet, a rogue with all the talent and mind to admire. Great work!
July 13, 2017
GORGEOUS, SOARING, PROVOCATIVE, POIGNANT
In just 10,000 lines Turner treats us to beautiful, compressed blank verse, characters to care about in a desperate plot to save our precious earth, and an emerging super-consciousness - but also a lesson in what "epic" really means. I am reading it for the third time now, out loud, with my spouse. It reads beautifully.
In just 10,000 lines Turner treats us to beautiful, compressed blank verse, characters to care about in a desperate plot to save our precious earth, and an emerging super-consciousness - but also a lesson in what "epic" really means. I am reading it for the third time now, out loud, with my spouse. It reads beautifully.
July 9, 2023
apocalypse (n.)
.
late 14c., "revelation, disclosure," from Church Latin apocalypsis "revelation," from Greek apokalyptein "uncover, disclose, reveal," from apo "off, away from" (see apo-) + kalyptein "to cover, conceal" (from PIE root *kel- (1) "to cover, conceal, save"). The Christian end-of-the-world story is part of the revelation in John of Patmos' book "Apokalypsis" (a title rendered into English as pocalipsis c. 1050, "Apocalypse" c. 1230, and "Revelation" by Wycliffe c. 1380).
Its general sense in Middle English was "insight, vision; hallucination." The general meaning "a cataclysmic event" is modern (not in OED 2nd ed., 1989); apocalypticism "belief in an imminent end of the present world" is from 1858. As agent nouns, "author or interpreter of the 'Apocalypse,'" apocalypst (1829), apocalypt (1834), and apocalyptist (1824) have been tried.
.
I’ve got limited space here, but I think the trueness of the meaning of the word in this book demonstrates the depth and consideration of the author. I expected a bit more Homeric language and, pleasantly, it is written in our contemporary language. Never chose an epic poem deliberately, but was pleasantly surprised by the efficiency and meter of the blank verse. While most of the words support the plot, there are stretches of the narrator’s musings which were fantastic. Illium Press is dedicated to modern epic poetry. Plan on checking out some more of their offerings in the future.
.
late 14c., "revelation, disclosure," from Church Latin apocalypsis "revelation," from Greek apokalyptein "uncover, disclose, reveal," from apo "off, away from" (see apo-) + kalyptein "to cover, conceal" (from PIE root *kel- (1) "to cover, conceal, save"). The Christian end-of-the-world story is part of the revelation in John of Patmos' book "Apokalypsis" (a title rendered into English as pocalipsis c. 1050, "Apocalypse" c. 1230, and "Revelation" by Wycliffe c. 1380).
Its general sense in Middle English was "insight, vision; hallucination." The general meaning "a cataclysmic event" is modern (not in OED 2nd ed., 1989); apocalypticism "belief in an imminent end of the present world" is from 1858. As agent nouns, "author or interpreter of the 'Apocalypse,'" apocalypst (1829), apocalypt (1834), and apocalyptist (1824) have been tried.
.
I’ve got limited space here, but I think the trueness of the meaning of the word in this book demonstrates the depth and consideration of the author. I expected a bit more Homeric language and, pleasantly, it is written in our contemporary language. Never chose an epic poem deliberately, but was pleasantly surprised by the efficiency and meter of the blank verse. While most of the words support the plot, there are stretches of the narrator’s musings which were fantastic. Illium Press is dedicated to modern epic poetry. Plan on checking out some more of their offerings in the future.
April 20, 2021
This massive undertaking of this book is clearly something to be praised, but to be honest, I didn't really enjoy it. While I appreciate the idea of a futuristic epic, I don't see why it was necessary in this case. I think it would have been much better and clearer in prose, although I think that then there would be nothing to set it apart from other futuristic novels.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews