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The End of the World as We Know It

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This is what will happen if the heroes don't stop the Big Bad or the Omnicidal Maniac from doing its nasty work. It can be either supernatural or superscience, depending on the villain, but in either case the bad guy must be beaten down and his toys broken in order to save the planet, or the universe, depending on the focus of the story.

Usually it's figurative—expressed as "merely" the death of humankind, the obliteration of Civilization, or its subjugation to aliens, for example—rather than the literal rendering of the planet down to gravel.

This is a common trope in Speculative Fiction, horror and over-the-top espionage shows, as well as many Anime series. It may serve as a prequel to an After the End series, or the culmination of a Just Before the End story. May also include Cosy Catastrophe and/or Scavenger World elements. It's also very common in video games, where it's occasionally unavoidable, sometimes occurring halfway through the game; in other cases, poor play may result in the world coming to a bad end.

If the heroes are slated to succeed in preventing the End, they (and the audience) may be treated to a detailed preview of what's coming.

Inevitably draws the suitably heroic into a Saving the World plot. See Apocalypse How for various types of End Of the World. For when Take Our Word for It simply won't do, Apocalypse Wow is this trope given dramatic form. When asked just why they want to destroy the world as we know it, villains usually say something from the "Why You Should Destroy the Planet Earth" list. That is, if they even have one. May be preceded by Signs of the End Times.

It is a common source of Enemy Mine if another villain wants to Take Over the World, because after The End of the World as We Know It, there's nothing left to take over.

Examples of The End of the World as We Know It include:

Advertising[edit | hide | hide all]

  • In many political ads, this is the implied consequence of voting for anyone other than the person who paid for the commercial. The most famous example, and perhaps the trend setter, is the 1964 presidential election "Daisy" commercial, which essentially said that not voting for Lyndon Johnson would cause The End of the World as We Know It. See it for yourself here.

Anime & Manga[edit | hide]

  • Society collapsing in bizarre ways seems to be a running theme in the works of Junji Ito. The most extreme example of this can be seen in Hellstar Remina, in which all of earth is attacked by a giant living planet.
  • The Digimon multiverse, which shares similarities with the Pretty Cure worlds except for the whole shounen mon series thing, has the exact same looming threat every time.
  • Magic Knight Rayearth's plot begins with trying to prevent this from happening to Cephiro.
  • Mai-HiME threatens the end of the world with the approaching of the HiME Star precipitating natural disasters and the last surviving HiME gaining the power to remake the world as she sees fit.
  • Is what threatens to happen in Kannazuki no Miko.
  • Johan Liebert of Monster tries to become last standing at the end of the world by having insane supporters cause destruction until he has them kill each other.
  • While Elfen Lied starts as a story about two cousins hiding an abused and escaped mutant from an evil covernment agency, it is later revealed that said mutants may very well destroy all human life on earth and it becomes a very close call near the end. It is absent in the Anime.
  • Michio Yuki of MW tries to take the world with him by using the titular chemical warfare.
  • The first two seasons of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha involved unstable Lost Logia and the heroes trying to prevent the destruction of a few worlds, including the one they call home. The third season, however, had a Big Bad who knew how to handle Lost Logia, and thus would have only ended with The Federation obliterated and the entire multiverse effectively taken hostage should the heroes fail. Jail's an Evilutionary Biologist, not an Omnicidal Maniac, after all.
  • All of the Slayers continuities, especially the anime, dealt with this trope in some way.
  • The final Story Arc in Magical Project S revolves around saving Earth.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion seems to be about preventing The End of the World as We Know It at first, but apparently this outcome had been clear from the very beginning. The attempts to stop the Angels from reaching Terminal Dogma under Tokyo-3 are only meant to buy more time to arrange that the event happens in a way most favorable to the various factions. That the 18th Angel (humanity itself) will succeed in ending the world had always been a foregone conclusion.
  • While the main cast of Prétear eventually succeeds in preventing The End of the World as We Know It (the standard Big Bad's goal), the manga gives a nice description of the world drained of Life Energy—not only without living beings, but without wind, sounds, temperature, light. The anime version further illustrates the possible outcome by having the Big Bad destroy the local Magical Land.
  • Anyone living in the world of any Pretty Cure series should try not to get too attached to the universe. It was already one lost fight away from total destruction in the very first episode, with multiple near-misses along the way; in particular, almost all life was wiped out near the end of Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash Star, though the heroines managed to reverse it by defeating the bad guy.
  • The main goal of the Ancient Conspiracy from RahXephon is to both cause and reverse this. Unusual in that the world already ended once and is slowly decaying away into nothing, and this world has to be purged and rebuilt again to stop it. The conflict is over who gets to be in charge of the rebuilding: the humans or the Mu.
  • Sailor Moon comes close to this here and there. The Moon Kingdom was completely destroyed in the past; the Earth is constantly in danger, as one villainous group invades it after another. In the manga, the world (along with the Big Bad) is destroyed at the end of the third story arc by Sailor Saturn... only to be immediately restored by Princess Serenity. The last season's Big Bad has already rendered most of the Galaxy dead before attacking the Earth.
    • The Earth too, during the Grand Finale, at least in the anime. In fact, only five beings in the entire Milky Way are still alive by the time the Big Bad is stopped. Don't worry, the galaxy got better.
    • In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, in addition to the destruction of the Moon Kingdom in the past, Princess Serenity does the same with the Earth at the end of the series.
  • The Haruhi Suzumiya franchise has a rather unusual condition for The End Of The World as We Know It to happen: if the title character becomes too bored with her life, she could inadvertently destroy the universe in a subconscious attempt to create one more to her liking. Not only that, the rest of the SOS-dan suspects that she has already done it at least once before—but obviously no-one can tell.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is set After the End, when most of humanity was wiped out by the machinations of the Anti-Spiral. When they start making a comeback thanks to the protagonists, a failsafe kicks in to drop the moon on the planet and finish humanity off. And on top of that, Spiral Energy's ability to generate energy and matter from nothing but HeroicResolve risks destroying the entire universe if overused, and the Anti-Spirals are trying to prevent that from happening.
  • In Tokyo Mew Mew, the aliens want to cause this by accelerating humans' destruction of the environment, just so the Muggles can see what they've done to the Earth and actually care about it.
  • In the anime X 1999, both sides actually believe they are fighting to prevent the end of the world. The Dragons of Earth are attempting to destroy all humans to prevent humans from destroying the Earth, while the Dragons of Heaven are trying to save humanity from the Dragons of Earth. It was revealed near the end that Kanoe main supporter of the Dragons of the Earth knew that the Dragons of the Earth would lead to the complete ruination of the world (humans, plants everything), she just didn't tell anyone.
  • The second and third season of Yu-Gi-Oh! (dub version only), emphasized with a mantra frequently repeated by Yugi to the point of exasperation: "The fate of the world depends on it!"
    • Season 4 plays this completely straight. Dartz believes that killing everybody and feeding their souls to The Great Leviathan would save the world.
    • This is also the goal of the Big Bad in The Movie. This motive is questioned (and lampshaded) by Yami in Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Movie, where he asks the Big Bad what he hopes to gain from the destruction of the world. Receiving an unsatisfactory answer, he dismisses the Big Bad as "the most disappointing movie villain since General Grievous."
  • Carried over in the second season of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX but with the pressure upped even more, when Jaden is told, "The fate of the universe now rests with you."
  • The Pokémon films typically leave preventing The End of the World as We Know It to Ash Ketchum and his friends.
  • Standard thing the heroes of Dragonball Z are trying to prevent, although the ante was upped in the Buu saga, where the Big Bad could easily have wiped out the entire universe had he not been stopped.
  • Bokurano takes this trope to a whole new level of cruelty by adding a twist: to save the world from ending the kids must cause the destruction of other worlds. The pilots die regardless of the outcome of the battle.
  • In the end of Saikano the world does come to an end. Chise loses her body in a climactic final battle and becomes a ball of light and Shuuiji is the sole survivor in the entire planet.Few things could be sadder.
  • Parodied in the Clannad game with this quote:

Misae: For Sunohara to have such a cute sister, and for Okazaki to have such a cute girlfriend... If it were the end of the world, it'd be bad for the sister and Furukawa-san, but... I'll say it. It's the end of the world.

  • In Super Dimension Fortress Macross, the SDF-1, after a year of fighting, returns to Earth only to witness the nuclear bombardment of the planet by Boddolza's main Zentradi fleet of over 4,000,000 warships (killing "most" of the population and destroying 95% of the environment), however, with a little help from a wave motion cannon back on Earth, and Lynn Minmei, the Macross nukes Boddolza's remaining flagship. The remnants of humanity and the Zentradi are then shown to be co-existing on what remains of the planet, but because of some of the bored Zentradi, their alliance quickly turns to crap.
  • This is Friend's ultimate goal in Twentieth Century Boys. He comes dangerously close to succeeding, too.
  • It is feared that this is what will happen if there should ever be a "Second Summer Of Love" in Eureka Seven.
  • In The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer this is the goal of the Big Bad, and also the main characters, Sami and Yuuhi. (The aim is to smash the planet to rubble, too.)
  • Fullmetal Alchemist, Father opens the gate sacrificing the Earth itself so he can defeat God, and rips the souls of nearly every living thing in the country of Amestris with only a select few remaining humans and homunculi remaining. A true Wham! Episode.
    • In the Manga, Father does not try to defeat god, but rather tries to become one with god and makes a transmutation circle out of Amestris to do so, thus following the "Equivalent exchange" rule. Many people the brothers have met are seen passing out. Ed proceeds to beat Father to a pulp, and so Father enters the gates and the humanoid shape shown in earlier chapters to be 'wearing' Ed's arm and leg is hinted to be god, due to their similar colouring and grin. Father dies and they all live happily ever after.
  • The intent of King and Lucia in Rave Master
  • Fitting its bleak overall tone, Texhnolyze ends with Ichise as the only sane person in the dying Lux who hasn't been turned into a cyber-tree. Oh, the people on the surface are still alive, but lacking any will or initiative they are already counted as living dead.
  • In Mirai Nikki, this is Deus' reason for holding the survival game. He is dying, which is bringing about the end of the world.
  • At the end of the Tokko manga's main storyline, Ranmaru has a monologue where he reveals that the world ends two years after the end of the story.
  • Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo has the majority of the plot focusing on how Cruje will erase Wonderland and recreate it when she inherits the Manager position from Ureshiko. When she finally does inherit the position and recreates the world, she recreates it almost exactly as it was before, with the only difference being that the school didn't burn down, even if the baseball victory flag still has burn marks.

Comic Books[edit | hide]

  • This happens in the DCU every other week. It's amazing they even send journalists to cover it any more. "Oh look, it's Darkseid again. Wanna get some coffee while we wait for the superheroes to turn up?"
  • The Lucifer comic books, somewhat ironically, involved the Devil's efforts to prevent this. He was leaving the Creation before the world was starting to end. When the ending did start it threatened his second Creation as well as Yahweh's, so he pretty much had to help, or be destroyed. Though his principles kept him from saving the world the easiest way, by taking God's place, instead going through a Xanatos Roulette to put someone else in the role.
  • Many a comic book Crisis Crossover has this as its premise, the archetype being Crisis on Infinite Earths (see below).
  • Parodied in a Gahan Wilson comic showing a prophet of doom, his sign about the imminent end of the world under one arm, about to push down a dynamite plunger with its attached wires running off-panel. Apparently, the end of somebody's world is imminent!
  • Is a favorite ending to many What-If? stories from Marvel.
    • Korvac uses the ultimate nullifier to destroy reality in issue #32 (vol.1)
    • Jean Grey goes nuts as the Dark Phoenix and destroys many many galaxies in issue #27 (vol.1)
    • The Serpent God Set's children were successfully born in issue #25 (vol.2), they then in turn wipe out all life on Earth before moving on to conquer other planets and other dimensions.
  • The R.E.M. song is referenced in Final Night.

Wonder Woman: "They're saying that it's the end of the world as we know it, but they feel fine... It's a song? If you say so..."

Film[edit | hide]

Kevin: "Evil's got the Map!"
Randall: "Too right, and the last thing we want to do is see Him again...Come on"
(The Bandits start to walk off)
Kevin: "But don't you understand?...If we don't stop Him, He'll destroy the World!"

  • Happens at the end of Dr. Strangelove. After the US recalls all other nuclear bombers, and the Russians damage (but don't destroy) the last one, the final bomber drops a bomb, which triggers Russia's Doomsday Device to end the world. Since it is a Dark Comedy, we see a large number of nuclear explosions with "Until We Meet Again" as the background music.
  • In Armageddon, a large asteroid is coming with enough force to blow every last bit of life into oblivion, and two teams are sent with a very large amount of explosives to split the asteroid in half just at the right moment before it's too late, so the two halves fly over and under the earth.
  • The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961). Massive nuclear testing at the poles throw the Earth out of orbit towards the Sun, but a series of massive nuclear detonations in Siberia may avert the catastrophe. The last scene shows the sweating journalists waiting in the print room with two next editions ready for printing; the camera pans to one that says "WORLD SAVED", but just as it seems that everything is going to be okay the camera continues panning, and we see the alternative cover, "WORLD DOOMED."
  • In Kevin Smith's Dogma, the continued correct functioning of the laws that govern the universe are all dependent on/derived from one truth: that God is infallible. The heroes have to stop the "villains," angels cast out of Heaven, from exploiting a loophole in some obscure Catholic canon to get themselves re-admitted to Heaven, thereby contradicting God and unmaking the whole of Creation.
  • Fallen (1998), with Denzel Washington. The demons of the film are said to desire the destruction of human civilization, which they call "the fall of Babylon" and pursue this by possessing people. Though not said, this would presumably account for much of the evil in the world. Also not said but speculated is that true believer Christians will be immune to demonic possession.
  • The film (and book) of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy puts a comedic twist on this—the world is destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass. The joke is that the protagonist was trying to stop his house from being demolished for much the same reason... This becomes even more of a Shoot the Shaggy Dog moment when it is revealed that the destruction of Earth took place mere moments before the unveiling of the Heart of Gold and Infinite Improbability Drive, which render hyperspace bypasses completely obsolete. And that five minutes later the job the Earth was created for would have been done and (presumably) everyone could've left.
  • Playfully subverted in Men in Black—the universe is inches away from Armageddon due to alien interference all the time. The Men in Black casually erase the memories of anyone who catches wind of these impending disasters to prevent a general panic. Very similar to The World Is Always Doomed.
  • Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow (2004). The distant-planet-colonizing rocket seems benign, until it's revealed that the rocket's afterburners will ignite the Earth's atmosphere.
  • The sun is dying in the sci-fi movie Sunshine and has to be reignited with a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan Island.
    • The B-movie Solar Crisis features a similar premise, but the earth is directly threatened by a massive solar flare that Our Heroes must trigger prematurely.
  • Godzilla Final Wars not only has the titular monster saving the world from an asteroid, but also dozens of other monsters as well.
  • The British film Threads and its American counterpart The Day After both deal with this trope in a very grim and realistic way. In both, nuclear war breaks out between The U.S. and the Soviet Union, resulting in a dark Scavenger World inhabited by the hapless victims of the catastrophe. Both were Anvilicious in the sense that they resorted to scare tactics to show people what the world would be like if they allowed political tensions to get the better of them, but at a time when some people thought nuclear war was survivable and a handful even cried out for war, this may have been a good thing.
  • Cthulhu (2007). Although loosely based on "A Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft, the movie also works in elements of "The Call of Cthulhu" in that humanity is beginning to descend into chaos as a prelude to the return of the Old Ones from the sea, with scenes of rioting, madness and murder.
  • Remember how in the Transformers cartoons and the first movie the Decepticons were merely after energy sources and planned to use them to power their armies? Well, Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen tops it all. In that film, they plan to use a Weaponized Landmark to blow up the sun, thus blowing up the Earth and harvesting the raw energy output created by it. Thankfully Optimus Prime blew up the machine, so it's all good.
  • An independent movie called Last Night deals with this. It takes place on the very last day before the end of existence and it focuses on how different people are dealing with their impending demise. What's strange is that everyone knows that the world is ending at midnight, but what it is that's causing the world to end is never explained or mentioned.
  • In Independence Day, the world is about to be blown up, settlement by settlement, by aliens in giant spaceships. But, as always, America saves the day. Which was pretty much predictable from the moment you found out the film was about hostile alien attack. Funnily enough, the Trope Namer song by R.E.M was playing in the background of one of the first scenes, where the UFO on the moon is detected by the radar.
  • Lori Petty's opening narration for Tank Girl uses the trope name exactly—hear it here, at about 2:48—to describe the cause of the film's After the End setting.
  • In The Golden Child, the titular child is a Cosmic Keystone keeping the forces of evil at bay by his very existence. Should he be killed, which is only possible if he succumbs to evil, The Legions of Hell would be free to conquer Earth. The heroes' mission is to rescue him before that happens.

Literature[edit | hide]

  • Spider Robinson's novel Callahan's Key is based on the notion that if the heroes do not accomplish the save-the-day task, the entire universe not only will cease to exist, but will retroactively cease ever to have existed.
  • Every couple of books, the Discworld is threatened with The End of the World as We Know It. In The Light Fantastic, it nearly collided with a red star; in Sourcery, the birth of a sourcerer nearly brings about a second Mage War and the Apocralypse [sic]; in The Last Hero, Cohen the Barbarian's scheme to get revenge on the gods threatens to destroy the magic that holds the Discworld together; and in Thief of Time, the Auditors trick a human with unusual abilities into building a clock that will leave the Discworld, and possibly the universe, frozen in time forever.
  • Double Subversion in Weis and Hickman's novel series The Sword of Joram, in which Joram succeeds in stopping the destruction of Thimhallan by the attackers from the Earth, only to end up destroying the magic that made it habitable
  • Weiss' and Hickman's Dragonlance series has had quite a few of these. There's the main Cataclysm, in which a "mountain of fire" (Word of God says it was a meteor) which annihilated the Kingdom of Istar and killed millions outside of it with fire, earthquakes, etc. On the same day, Taladas, the continent to the northeast of Ansalon, suffered the "Great Destruction," in which an earthquake wiped out the mighty Aurim empire and filled the interior of the continent with molten lava. In Adlatum, the third continent the Cataclysm came in the form of the Great Drowning in which massive tidal waves flooded large parts of the land and never receded. And then, in more recent times Chaos showed up...
  • An angel and a demon team up to prevent the scheduled Biblical Apocalypse in Good Omens. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Subverted in an old Ray Bradbury short story titled The End of the Beginning. The narrator describes people all over the world staring at the sky waiting for the world to end because they know the exact date, time and place that it will begin. Eventually a searing white light appears in the sky and ends the world. The twist is... I'll give you a second to guess... The bright light is a spaceship that has visited the first intelligent life humanity discovered. Naturally this marks the "end" of the world and the "beginning" of the universe.
  • Victorian-set fantasy Darkness Visible is all about the protagonists' attempts to prevent the End Of The World, though this does not become clear until quite a long way through (because Lewis, the narrator, hasn't realised how serious things are). At first, we think it's only London which is at risk. It isn't.
  • Many of the Dragonriders of Pern novels concern the heroes' struggle to avert the End Of The World As The Pernese Know It, by defending human civilization against Threadfall. Granted, it's not the same world as this trope normally concerns itself with, but it still ought to count...
  • The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, where Richard and Kahlan save the World as we Know it... again... and again... and again. One can only assume that, since the world was just fine before they met, it's them knowing each other that's the ultimate cause for all the trouble they have to go through.
  • Some time before the beginning of Hyperion, the Earth is destroyed by an experiment with black holes conducted in Kiev. It's then revealed that the Earth was not destroyed, but instead whisked away to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, implying that the Kiev Experiment was the Techno Core's first attempt at the creation of a Farcaster.
  • S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire and its various sequels are set in a world where every kind of "energy-dense" technology stops working, plunging the human race back in The Dung Ages... forever. Not the end of the world, but certainly the end of the world we know. (And, for the overwhelming majority of people, the end of them: try feeding seven billion people with twelfth-century technology.)
  • In Fragment, scientists and the military must act fast to eradicate the hyper-lethal, hyper-invasive wildlife of Henders Island, before it can spread to other landmasses and spell The End Of The Biosphere As We Know It.
  • A recurrent theme in China Mieville's Kraken. London's supernatural community runs betting pools and street parties in honour of various cults' prophesied apocalypses.
  • Early in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Earth gets destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
  • The Nightside novels feature one possible end of the world in a Timeslip that the main character supposedly brings about.
  • Most of the Skulduggery Pleasant novels have this theme. For the first three books, Skulduggery and Valkyrie must prevent religious fanatics from releasing a race of Eldritch Abominations called the Faceless Ones who used to rule the world until they were banished into another dimension. If they return, they will inhabit human bodies, tear down man's cities, destroy the countryside, destroy half the human race, enslave the rest and work them until they die before moving onto another world. In the fourth book, a madman named Dreylan Scarab tries to provoke a war between the "mortal" and magical communities that will almost certainly result in the end of civilisation. In the fifth, a race of evil spirits are released who are looking for an evil sorceress named Darquesse who will raze the world.
  • This ironic and somewhat disturbing poem by Archibald Mac Leish, titled—appropriately enough -- "The End of the World" (which, come to think of it, might also work as an example of the Nothing Is Scarier trope):

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb---
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing --- nothing at all.

  • Orson Scott Card's novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus takes place in an After the End world, where humanity (now numbering less than a billion) struggles to restore the ecology and reverse the effects of global warming. By all accounts, the results are promising. Except, as it turns out, the politicians are lying. The Amazon rainforest replanting project is failing due to the top-soil erosion, as is the Sahara restoration project. The Carolina dykes fail, allowing the rising ocean to sweep through the farmland. Humans around the world are using 100% of the arable land in all the world with less and less crops each year due to the increasing cloud cover (a result of the rising ocean levels). Without public knowledge, the politicians are keeping people ignorant of this, while dipping into the grain reserves to maintain the illusion. The weather satellites will eventually malfunction, but with more people being reassigned from factories to farms, they will not be replaced. The person who tells (and shows) all this to the protagonists sounds hopeful (although ironic) that Earth will, eventually, restore itself naturally. It's just that we, as a civilization, won't be around to appreciate it. Humanity is predicted to be thrown back to the Stone Age without the hope of recovery. Which is why the project meant to alter history has received every political support it can. Changing history means that this is still the case. The previous world is indeed gone.
  • The goal of Lord of the Rings is to prevent the One Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord Sauron who will use it to restore himself to full power, conquer the world and turn it into a living Hell.
    • In The Silmarillion, Sauron's master, Morgoth takes this to the next level, seeking to completely destroy the entire universe because he's jealous that God created it and not him. Tolkien says that if Morgoth could, he would smash all of creation into dust and then hate the dust.
  • In Harry Potter', the plot of the first three books is to prevent Voldemort from returning to Take Over the World. He eventually does return in book four and the rest of the books are dedicated to stopping his plans and finding a way to destroy him for good.
  • In Ishmael, this is stated to be the ultimate consequence of the story the Takers are acting out.

Live Action TV[edit | hide]

  • In Tin Man, a Steampunk adaptation of the Wizard of Oz, the evil queen of the OZ Azkadellia seeks the Emerald of the Eclipse so that she can use it to power a device called the Anti-Sun Seeder that will fix the two moons of the OZ in a permanent eclipse, plunging the land into eternal darkness which removing photo-synthesis will result in as the Mystic Man aptly predicts, the complete destruction of the OZ. It's not entirely clear what Azkadellia hopes to achieve by this but she is after all insane as a result of being possessed by the Evil Witch of the Dark. It's implied that this is the Wicked Witch from the original story, coming back to take revenge on Dorothy's descendants.
  • Jack Bauer and his allies have 24 hours to stop the End of the World As We Know It.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer built each season around a Big Bad whose plans usually threatened the End of Everything if he wasn't stopped by late Spring. At one point, when Giles proclaimed the Big Bad was about to cause the end of the world, everyone present groaned, "Again?" One of Buffy's boyfriends once lamented that hanging around her had caused him to need to know "the plural of apocalypse." In one episode, averting the apocalypse was the B-plot.
    • When Angel spun-off, the world was often facing two ends at once, one L.A.-based in the form of Wolfram & Hart's ongoing plans for Armageddon, the other Sunnydale-based with a different villain threatening the world each season. It even reached the point where, in the Buffy Grand Finale, Wolfram & Hart helped stop Sunnydale's apocalypse, partly because it interfered with their own apocalyptic plans. With the alarmingly frequent amounts of Apocalypses going on, it's pretty safe to assume there are several happening all at the same time. Wolfram and Hart has an archive specifically devoted to upcoming Apocalypses for Christ's sake!
    • There's no secret made of the fact that The World Is Always Doomed, in the Buffyverse.
  • The aliens in the 1980s miniseries V intended to harvest the human race for use as snack food and were turning the planet into a thinly disguised version of Nazi Germany to make it easier.
  • The destruction of all life on Earth happened, then un-happened, at least once a season on Seven Days.
  • The series The Dead Zone has a recurring Arc about Greg Stillson somehow being responsible for The End of the World as We Know It in the near future, and Johnny Smith has to find a way to stop him. He screws up in the series finale and ends up causing it instead. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero
  • Star Trek, repeatedly and in many different ways. Most notably, the third season of Star Trek: Enterprise features the ship in a race against time to save not only the World, but the Universe As We Know It. If a group of genocidal aliens succeed in destroying the Earth, it will alter history and the Federation will never exist. An episode called Twilight showed what might happen if they succeeded.
  • Supernatural has a demon apocalypse progress through Signs of the End Times to a truncated Apocalypse.
  • Subverted in the Doctor Who episode 'The End of the World'. The Doctor takes Rose to see planet Earth finally bite the dust billions of years in the future, but it's a natural event that's supposed to happen. When asked if he's going to swoop in at the last moment and save the planet, he replies that there's no point because everyone has moved to greener pastures already.
    • Played straight several other times, though. Menaces such as the Slitheen, the Daleks, the Cybermen, or the Master are all the time trying to cause The End of the World as We Know It.
      • The Master actually succeeds towards the end of "The Sound of Drums," but then the Doctor reverses time, saving the day, er, year, and only a select few people remember 'the year that never was'.
      • And then, of course, we can't skip over a mention of Davros and the Daleks attempting to destroy the entire universe across all possible realities in the season 4
      • Or, in "The End of Time", the Time Lords trying to achieve the eponymous "end of time", which would allow the Time Lords to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence while the rest of the universe rips apart.
      • And then there's "The Big Bang", where something (possibly being revealed in the next season) causes the T.A.R.D.I.S. to blow up, causing every atom of the universe to explode at every instant. The Doctor manages to reverse it only because of a rather complex, self-fulfilling Time Paradox.
  • The premise of Battlestar Galactica is that this has already happened, and now the Colonials are on the run in search of a new home. When they get there it had already been obliterated in a nuclear attack 2000 years in the past. They find another one though.
  • In the sci-fi series Lexx, the main characters go through much of the second season unaware that an enemy they defeated earlier is still alive. The villain, Mantrid, rebuilds himself, takes an army of simple-minded floating robot drones, and destroys much of the "Light Zone," one of two parallel universes. The heroes eventually stop him, but soon afterwards, the entire universe collapses in on itself. The main characters (and their ship, the Lexx) are spit out as interstellar debris into the "Dark Zone," the second universe.
  • One episode of Big Wolf on Campus has hero Tommy Dawkins prevent the end of the world by winning a wrestling match against a demon.
  • Occurs during the Time Skip between seasons 16 and 17 of Power Rangers. The entire biosphere has been destroyed globally, except for a single city fighting for survival.
  • The History Channel ran the "documentary," Life After People, which speculates on what would happen to the Earth if humans suddenly disappeared...
  • A series of sketches in That Mitchell and Webb Look featured "The Quiz Broadcast" (Remain Indoors!), filmed by and starring the last huddling remnants of humanity after "the Event" destroyed civilization. The Event was apparently so horrible that it seems to have imposed a near-universal amnesia about life before it, and anyone who tries to think about it is reduced to hysterics. There's also the live broadcast of the Invasion of the Earth by an unknown but vastly powerful extraterrestrial aggressor.
  • Odyssey 5 begins with the destruction of Earth; our heroes are then sent back in time to try and stop it.
  • In Stargate SG-1, The World Is Always Doomed. A few notable examples follow.
    • If the Goa'uld had ever attacked Earth with ships in orbit, at least before Season Five or so, they could have used orbital bombardment to conquer or destroy Earth civilization with impunity. The SGC prevented that with guerrilla tactics, alliances with other enemies of the Goa'uld, and sheer luck.
    • The Replicators, a Grey Goo made up of Lego-sized pieces that acted like a Horde of Alien Locusts, could have consumed and overrun Earth if they ever got a foothold on it, but they never did.
    • Throughout the series, numerous Goa'uld plots or other misused alien technology could have caused Earth Shattering Kabooms all by themselves. The SGC generally prevented those by Reversing The Polarity, digging up the right Applied Phlebotinum, or, again, guerrilla tactics and luck.
  • The Top Gear special, Top Gear Apocalypse showed what would happen to motoring after the end of the world via a nuclear holocaust.

Music[edit | hide]

There was thunder
There was lightning
Then the stars went out
And the moon fell from the sky
It rained mackerel
It rained trout
And the great day of wrath has come
And here's mud in your big red eye
The poker's in the fire
And the locusts take the sky
And the earth died screaming

When they went to bed that night no one would have believed
That in the morning, light would not be there
The dark hung heavy on the air like the grip of a jealous man
No place was there known to have been spared
Then panic took control of minds and fear hit everyone
The day the light went out of the daytime sky.

Giant projectiles surging through the air
Clouds of radiation, no time to spare
A new sense of terror attacks our creation
Final destination, Western civilization
Eins zwei drei, wir marchen forbei
Heads held high as they stare at the sky
A new sort of power won us over
Another country testing its nuclear power
Severe penetration
Face of human transformation
Severe penetration
Faced with human annihilation

  • Matchbox 20 - How Far We've Come:

I believe the world is burnin' to the ground
Oh well, I guess we're gonna find out
Let's see how far we've come
Let's see how far we've come

Do unto others as they've done to you
But what all hell is this world coming to?
Turn the universe into nothingness
Nuclear warfare shall lay us to rest
Fight fire with fire
Ending is near
Fight fire with fire
Bursting with fear
All shall die

It's the end of the world as we know it
and it's only just begun
the eyes of the world are closin' forever
when the day of the judgement will come

  • Outkast's song "Da Art of Da Storytellin' Part 2" is this in spades, although it has one of the strangest plots of an End of the World as We Know It that I'm currently aware of.

Mythology and Religion[edit | hide]

  • The Book of Revelation from The Bible, which serves as the inspiration for the Left Behind books and pretty much any Christian end-times related fiction.
  • The Ragnarök from Norse Mythology.
  • The infamous 2012 phenomenon (which inspired the film of the same name), in which according to some, the world will actually end on December 21, 2012, as that's when the Mayan calendar's supposed to end, even though the Mayans themselves actually didn't.

Play-by-Post Games[edit | hide]

Tabletop Games[edit | hide]

  • From Bliss Stage: "The effects of the Bliss were sinister and immediate: every human above the age of 18 were struck with a sudden weariness, and when they fell asleep, they did not awaken... ...Society, particularly industrialized society, begins to collapse one month later, as food production and utilities break down."
  • Dominaria, the central world of Magic: The Gathering, has suffered no less than several apocalypses:
    • The Brothers' War (the entire face of the planet shattered, two thousand years of ice and snow).
    • The Phyrexian Invasion (the greater part of the world's population slaughtered by demonic invaders).
    • Karona's apocalypse (all magic in the world briefly extinguished).
    • The "Time Spiral" crisis was an attempt to keep the entire plane from folding in on itself in the wake of these and various other huge magical events- an apocalypse caused by having too many apocalypses, and this doesn't count near-apocalypses like the end of the Thran War. It's a wonder the old rock's still holding together.
    • The Melting of the Iceage was its own apocalypse, and the world exploded at least three times during the Invasion Cycle. And that's to say nothing of the other planes we've visited since Invasion, where each one has had at the very least one world-ending event, if not two or three, in addition to the general world-wide-war situation most of them are in.
    • Mirrodin features a Zombie Apocalypse in the Scars of Mirrodin block wherein all the people of Mirrodin are slowly infected with The Virus and become the aforementioned demonic invaders' descendants.
    • Rise of the Eldrazi.
    • In artificial planes, the lack of someone to focus on keeping the plane stable causes the plane to collapse. This happened to Serra's Realm, when coupled with the presence of a Phyrexian in a white-mana realm.
    • There are actually cards that let you "destroy all X". These cards tend to have names like Armageddon, Wrath of God, Global Ruin, Catastrophe, Planar Collapse...
  • Quite a few Dungeons and Dragons game-settings have a World-Shattering Kaboom in their backstory, such as Krynn's Cataclysm or Mystara's Great Rain of Fire. When you get to a high enough level, you can kill gods and wipe out entire planes of existence....
  • Warhammer 40000's universe is entering the eleventh millennium of the ongoing end of the Universe. The only reason its lasted this long is because most of the bringers of the end are as happy to fight each other as humanity. The End of a World As We Know It happens all the time. But what's the loss of one planet when there are billions more out there?
  • This what mostly likely will happen if the Titans win in Scion
  • The Crapsack World of BattleTech ends and restarts (just to meet another horrible end) several times, including the fall of the Terran Alliance, the fall of the Star League (the closest thing to a golden age Battletech has ever had), the Word of Blake Jihad, and the destruction of the HPG communications network and subsequent "Dark Age." This is because the universe of Battletech is a horrible place populated by horrible people that do horrible things on a daily basis.
  • Which End of the World as We Know It are we talking about when we talk about the Old World of Darkness?
    • Well, there's Gehenna from Vampire: The Masquerade, when the Antediluvians rise from their slumber, run roughshod over the earth and devour their vampiric children.
    • And then there's the Ba'ali, who believe a different set of Eldritch Abominations will rise, the so-called 'Children' who existed before God created light and who will surely destroy all of mankind should they ever wake up. To prevent this, the Ba'ali commit as many utterly depraved acts as possible in the name of the Children, in an attempt to ensure they don't realise how relatively nice the World of Darkness is and come to remake things in their image.
    • And then there's the Apocalypse from (duh) Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the final battle against the Wyrm and his corruptive forces.
    • Mage: The Ascension featured a somewhat optimistic end of the world in its endgame, where all of mankind Awakens at once and the constraints on reality are lifted as everyone becomes a god unto themselves.
      • Unless the fourth apocalyptic scenario is used, where the Nephandi win and bring hell on earth.
    • Changeling: The Dreaming has the overhanging threat of Endless Winter, a time when imagination, belief and hope are all but gone and the world of the fae slowly withers and dies.
    • Wraith: The Oblivion ended the line with the Sixth Great Maelstrom, where a harrowing wind tore through the Shadowlands as Oblivion ran roughshod and Stygia fell. Orpheus let the players explore the aftermath... while, incidentally, dealing with Grandmother, the thing that spawned Wraith's big horrors and threatens to devour the worlds of both the living and dead.
  • Exalted has several factions planning their own, most notably The Fair Folk (who don't like order very much) and the Neverborn (who don't like anything very much).
    • The "Return Of The Scarlett Empress" book details the actual bringing about of The End of the World as We Know It at the hands of the Yozi, (who actually like lots of things, but prefer them crushed under their rule), particularly the Ebon Dragon (who deeply hates absolutely everything on a personal basis).
  • Unknown Armies has an interesting take on this. The world will end when the number of the Invisible Clergy hits 333; once it ends, the 333 Clergy members and the Archetypes they embody get to have their say in how the next world is shaped, the Clergy is emptied, and the whole process starts again. In other words, the current incarnation of the world shapes the next, for good or ill. It's insinuated that this has happened several times before; the Comte de Saint-Germain is always present because he embodies The First and Last Man -- the first human born in the new world and the final person to ascend to the Clergy.
  • The Shadowrun setting may or may not be wiped out by the Horrors, depending on how soon they break through into reality and whether technology gives more of an advantage to them or us. Oh, and whether or not your game master acknowledges that Earthdawn ever happened.
  • In the backstory of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle a legend is told of a temple with 64 golden disks; when the priests manage to relocate the tower in accordance with the rules of the puzzle, the world will cease to exist. (Even if it took a single second to make one move, this will take 2^64-1 moves, or about 585 billion years.)
    • As for the authenticity of the legend, The Other Wiki cautiously states that "it is not clear whether Lucas invented this legend or was inspired by it."
  • The angels and demons of In Nomine face this possibility in The Final Trumpet, when it appears that the prophesied signs of Armageddon are beginning to arrive. What's not known until later is that it's actually a practical joke by the Demon Prince of Dark Humor, who's hoping to get Heaven and Hell to devastate the Earth over a FAKE Armageddon.

Video Games[edit | hide]

  • Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun was unique in that its last missions were essentially a race against time before everything changed. Kane has completed his World Altering Missile, which will turn all life into Tiberium based life, and there is only three hours left till it is fired. As Nod, you have to set up the ICBM launchers in Hammerfest which will destroy the Philadelphia as it passes overhead, thus assuring the WAM goes off. As GDI, you have to prevent the launch of the missile and the ICBMs.
  • The Super Robot Wars Alpha sub-series's finale had several endings that involved trying to stop the death of all sentient life in the universe. The worst one involved the embodiment of life and rebirth going nuts and using its Wave Motion Gun at the party... which kills everyone in the quadrant.
  • City of Heroes... if there were a time when the world isn't imperilled by callous villains, giant robots, aliens from Another Dimension, Experiments Gone Horribly Wrong and so forth, it was probably removed in beta. Even the villains get a few cracks at saving the world in a bit of Destiny subversion a certain arc shows you what would happen if you fulfill your potential as a Destined One and take over the world -- there'll be no world left to take over. You then have to thwart Big Bad Lord Recluse in the future to convince the present Recluse not to go through with the plan... which really does mess with the whole ball of Timey Wimey Stuff, and player's heads.
  • Treasure of the Rudras pretty much followed this pattern of extinction of races about 5 times before the game actually begins; Every 4,000 years, a being called Rudra kills off the current race and creates a new one. This turns out to be a plan established by Mitra: Creator of the world in order to create a race that can defeat invaders from destroying the world in the first place when she is defeated or unable to do her duty.
  • In Star Ocean the Second Story the main antagonist plans on erasing the universe by causing the Big Crunch. His plan goes through anyway even after you defeat him.
  • In Novalogic's F-22 Lightning II, the last campaign has a collection of military and political extremist groups contesting the last Ukrainian election, with the intended result of re-creating the USSR. In the second to last mission US, Russian, Israeli, British and such intelligence have assured that even if they take a nuclear silo, they cannot reconfigure a new launch code. Now, not only have they taken one, but they have reconfigured the launch codes. Russian attempts to initiate self-destruct have failed. Their KGB sources no longer answer their phones. The world is only minutes from a nuclear holocaust.
  • The Halos in the Halo video game series are weapons designed to wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy, i.e. The End Of The Galaxy As We Know It, to prevent the Flood from spreading; naturally enough, when such an outbreak occurs in the first game, the Player Character has to stop the weapon from firing.
  • Commander Keen had to prevent this a couple of times in the classic platform-game series by Apogee. His first game-series was titled The Earth Explodes, and he had to prevent the mind controlled Vorticons—who were being manipulated by his Evil Counterpart—from doing just that. The sequel, 'Goodbye Galaxy', upped the ante as suggested. The next series was supposed to be about him preventing the end of the entire universe, but at that point, Apogee was running out of money, and he only got enough funding to save his babysitter.
    • In the second game it is in fact possible to blow up the earth by 'accident' by flipping the switch on one of the Death Rays before disabling it, leading to a Nonstandard Game Over.
  • This is the main goal of the Big Bad in the Chains of Promathia expansion in Final Fantasy XI. It really doesn't help that the avatar Bahamut thinks that the best way to prevent this is to wipe out all sentient life on Vana'diel.
  • In The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask, a falling moon threatens to wipe out the world of Termina. In most other games in the series, the villain's only trying to rule the world.
  • A Similar event occurs in Dark Cloud 2: The being who is the true identity of the assumed Big Bad is the one who has invoked and is responsible for stopping the Star of Oblivion from falling.
  • Would have been the fate of the world in three of Drakengard's Multiple Endings if not for the intervention of the protagonists.
  • In Kingdom Hearts, The Darkness is attempting to extinguish the Heart of reality itself. The protagonists get a glimpse what will happen to the multiverse if they fail when they visit a place literally called "The End of the World." It's the center of all Darkness—a bleak, mostly formless mess made up of the stuff of worlds devoured by The Heartless, who themselves are made up of the stuff of people devoured by The Heartless or devolved by their own descent into evil.
  • In Super Paper Mario, Count Bleck and Dimentio wish to destroy ALL worlds via the Dark Prognosticus. They actually succeed in destroying the Sammer Guys' Kingdom -- almost while the heroes are still in it.
  • In Live a Live You are actually given the option to end all of existence by your own hands just by selecting the Armageddon option!
  • Every Shin Megami Tensei game (including the spinoffs) deals with this in some fashion or another.
    • In one of those spinoffs, Persona 3, the Main Character is explicitly told pretty much from the start that "the End" is coming soon. If he chooses, he can delay it a couple of months and have it come without knowing it's coming. Or, he can go out fighting, but it's ultimately portrayed as futile. And then you win. Kind of.
    • In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (or Lucifer's Call), the world ends after the first hour of gameplay and you spend the rest of the game rebuilding it while not getting ganked by the Demons who roam freely now. And the "true" ending involves ending everything in order to destroy Heaven.
    • In Digital Devil Saga, another spinoff, not only does the world of the Junkyard end at the end of the game, but the real world that you end up in was half destroyed five years ago, and starts disintegrating into the sun halfway through the game. Your goal is to stop it.
    • In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey the Schwarzwelt swallows Earth in a few seconds if you die.
  • There's a free online flash game Pandemic in which the player assumes control over a virus by spending evolution points on symptoms like fever or making the virus transmitted by air. The goal is to kill every single human on earth.
  • This is at least part of the villain's plan in almost every Final Fantasy game.
    • Subverted in Final Fantasy VI, wherein the Big Bad, Kefka, actually succeeds in destroying the world, despite your best efforts otherwise. You watch as countless NPCs are killed as their land is ripped apart, and the world map is left permanently scarred. The rest of the game is spent trying to get revenge because you failed the first time around and trying to break his tyrannical grip on what'¨s left of society.
    • In Final Fantasy X this is subverted towards the end, as the protagonists try to end the "eternal spiral of death" that had the entire world in it's grip for a thousand years, bringing The End of the World as We Know It. In Final Fantasy X-2, the world is recovering from the confusion left after the removal of the Corrupt Church. It's played straight with the original creation of Sin, which turned a futuristic cyber world into a society of villages outlawing the use of machines and advances technology.
    • Serah and Noel attempt to avert this trope in Final Fantasy XIII-2 by changing the future. They ultimately do change the future...but the results are much, much worse.
  • In Chrono Trigger, the driving point of the game is to prevent Lavos from destroying the world in 1999 AD. (The 'present' year in the game is 1000.) And that one of the time periods you eventually find yourself is 2300 AD, thus providing the player a playable Post-Apocalypse.
    • Also, after a boss battle, the magical kingdom of Zeal does a Colony Drop where the entire floating continent falls from the sky. The resulting destruction (including a huge tidal wave) destroys just about everything, leaving a small handful of survivors in the world. This apocalypse is also indirectly caused by Lavos.
  • In Mass Effect, Shepard's mission is to prevent the End of the Galaxy As We Know it at the hands of Saren, whose ship is in reality an AI known as Sovereign, a representative of an ancient race of sentient machines (A Is) who are responsible for bringing about the destruction of all sentient organic life in the galaxy every 50,000 years or so.
    • In Mass Effect 3, this happens in the first TEN MINUTES of the game.
      • At the end of Mass Effect 3 this happens no matter what you do as the mass relay network, which galactic civilization is built around, is destroyed. In the worst ending, the Earth is completely scorched from your poorly thought out actions.
  • Terranigma kinda reversed it. The world has already ended from the start of the game and it's then the job of the Hero to starts the world again.
  • All four games in the Guild Wars series involve a looming threat that will destroy the world if the player characters don't stop it. The first game (Prophecies) twists the trope by having you discover at the end (just in time to be able to do something about it) that you've been duped by the Big Bad, and all your actions have been helping to bring the end of the world, instead of averting it. The next two (Factions and Nightfall) play the trope straight. The fourth (Eye of the North) subverts it at the end, when a cutscene seen by the players (but not the characters) hints that you didn't actually kill the Big Bad, and something end-of-the-world-ish is still going to happen anyway. Word of God has confirmed this interpretation in pre-release information about Guild Wars 2.
  • In World of Goo—and this meets the original definition of sheer—the world becomes incompatible with its inhabitants, like software, when it's upgraded into three dimensions.
  • Super Mario Galaxy has one, but purely by accident and is not a part of Bowser's plan, but ignoring the programming of the game, it would have happened anyway whether he defeats Mario or not, because he unwittingly puts his plan above his own safety. After beating Bowser for the final time, his star reactor sinks into the sun, causing a huge chain reaction that creates a massive super black hole that begins to suck up everything in the universe. This is the end of the universe as they know it! All the Lumas throw themselves into the black hole to stop the destruction in a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Avalon Code has this as its premise. The world is going to get destroyed, and your job is to collect (well, scan them by hitting them with the book...) anything worth being recreated into the next world. It turns out that this particular end is happening too soon, due to Werner and Olly's meddling.
  • Mother 3's Dark Dragon would easily destroy the world if Porky's minions managed to pull at least four of the Seven Needles.
    • He does anyway when Lucas pulls the final needle, but in the finale you find that most if not all of the good characters survived, presumably to be reborn into the next world.
  • Several of these in the Wing Commander series.
    • In Wing Commander III, one of the missions is to shoot down missiles carrying biowarfare warheads that would render a planet uninhabitable by humans for centuries. Also the fate of Earth in the losing scenarios of the game, though just hinted at with a Terminator-esque scene of a Kilrathi boot crushing a human skull. From the same game there's also the more literal world-enders of the Behemoth and the Temblor Bomb.
    • Believed to be the fate of humanity by Tolwyn in Wing Commander IV, without his plan to shape humanity into a race focused on killing, as enacted by the Black Lance.
    • The novel Fleet Action, by William Forstchen, not only has the Earth threatened with orbital bombardment by "dirty" nukes (averted by a Big Damn Heroes moment), but actually kills off two colonies in orbit around Sirius by that manner, on the way to Earth.
  • In Armored Core for Answer, it's implied that the main character wiped out the rest of humanity on ending C. Other paths to humankind's extinction exist in the game as well...
  • The Resistance series on the PlayStation 3 features The Virus systematically conquering and assimilating humanity in an alternate history setting.
  • This is the goal of pretty much everyone in Ar Tonelico 2. There are two different Instrumentality plans: Ascension halfway through the game and Sublimation at the end. You yourself almost destroy the known world when you screw up singing Metafalica early in the game, and at the end you have to destroy half of it in order to reveal the Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
  • In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the demonic lord Mehrunes Dagon seeks to destroy the mortal world, so the Player Character & Friends have to stop him. In the expansion pack, the player must save another world...from its own creator, who is insane and has an irresistible urge to destroy his creations every once in a while.
  • In the sequel, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Dragonborn must prevent the evil Alduin the World-Eater from resurrecting the long-extinct dragons and then eating the world and everyone in it.
  • Touhou, in its eleventh game, finally featured a Big Bad who was actually willing to pull one of these off. She just happened to be a crow who was powered by nuclear fusion, and turning the underworld into a new Sun.
  • Skarin from Viking: Battle for Asgard brings this about. Granted it's more the extremely uncomfortable variety but it still counts since he unleashes Fenrir who kills the Gods thus bringing about the Norse version of the Apocalypse.
  • In Fallout, The World As We Know It Ends on October 23, 2077.
  • In Fahrenheit (2005 video game), if you give Jade to the Purple Clan, the world ends in eternal winter. Giving her to the Orange Clan or learning her secret yourself saves the world, though in the former case that may only be for a short time.
  • In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, The Big Bad of the game wants to get rid of the world and create a new "perfect" one using Palkia and Dialga.
    • In Pokémon Platinum, it gets worse. After being defeated, and after the player defeats/captures Giratina in the Distortion World, Cyrus says: We will never see eye to eye. This, I promise you. I will break the secrets of the world. With that knowledge, I will create my own complete and perfect world. One day, you will awaken to a world of my creation. A world without spirit.
  • The End of the World level in Sonic the Hedgehog 2006.
  • Magic Planet Snack has this a couple of times:
    • There is a wizard in the middle of every planet. You have to tunnel through the planets.
    • More obvious in the good ending:

"And then they ate the entire universe. THE END."

  • This is the theme of World of Warcraft's next expansion pack, appropriately titled Cataclysm.
  • In the first two Space Quest games, Big Bad Vohaul plots to destroy Xenon. Roger must save Xenon from an Earthshattering Kaboom in the first game, and from insurance salesmen in the second.
  • Missile Command. Only you can prevent the nuclear destruction of Earth's last remaining cities. And you will lose.
  • In Champions Online, the fallen angel Therakiel is destined to bring about the Apocalypse in the city of Vibora Bay. Two mortals, Robert Caliburn and Valerian Scarlet, shall be the key players of this final conflict, though no one knows which side they shall take. Well, actually Valerian is working for Therakiel and you just handed the apocalypse starting artifacts to her. Oh, and you stole the gem that gives Robert his powers. Better fire up the time machine!
  • Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker's climax (of Chapter 4, at least) dealt with trying to stop Peace Walker from both launching a nuke to Cuba and transmitting false trajectory data to NORAD after Coldman, in his dying breaths, activated Peace Walker.
  • All of the Star FOX games deal with this trope on a more galactic scale; however, Star Fox Adventures plays this straighter with the potential end of only Dinosaur Planet (renamed Sauria in later games).
  • Since Odin Sphere is based on the Norse legend of Ragnarök, the world ends no matter what path you take. The fate of the world, however (whether it stays destroyed or reborn), depends on whether or not the player correctly chooses who faces the final bosses.
  • In the fourth installment of the Heroes of Might and Magic series, the world that the previous games take place in is destroyed when two incredibly powerful magical swords that were featured in expansions of the previous game clash. Fortunately, portals start appearing all over the place that take the lucky survivors to the new world of Axoth.
  • The planet of Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Phantasia suffers from this like a recurring rash. It happened for sure 4000 years before Symphonia at the conclusion of a devastating war, when the planet was split in two and taken over by a malicious racial supremacist theocracy, and then again between Symphonia and Phantasia when another devastating war set the planet up to be nuked back to the dark ages by a meteor strike. Also, there were several during the 4000 years of theocratic rule due to a resource conservation scheme,[1] but we only know of one for certain.[2] It comes close to happening again in Phantasia[3] but the heroes stop it that time.
  • In In Famous, Kessler and the First Sons have, in the name of human advancement, developed a device that can activate superpowers in the user... and it kills everyone else in a six-block radius in the process. It turns out that only some people with a specific genetic trait can even use it, and others who meet this criteria in the blast radius will also receive powers. It doesn't take long for most of the cast to come to the obvious conclusion: whoever can get their hands on this device will be able to make their own super-powered soldiers with plenty of collateral damage they can blame on terrorists, ushering in a new era of warfare that will irrevocably change the world for the worse. And all of that's just a Red Herring, because Kessler is actually a time traveler from a Bad Future and his real goal is to awaken his past-self's powers ahead of schedule so he'll be ready to face down a genocidal monster called the Beast before it can rise, at which point it will ravage the entire world and end all life.
    • In inFamous 2 we learn that Kessler was missing a vital piece of information and the Beast's actual goal is to save as many people as he can from an incurable plague that's spreading across the world, but his process kills others. The evil ending is agreeing that this is the best course of action and helping him do it.
  • In Rift, Defiant player characters are sent back in time from a Bad Future in order to avert the Class 5 or 6 apocalypse that's the result of Regulos winning.
  • In Arc the Lad the final boss's first sentient act after being released from imprisonment is to rip the world a new one. He seems to learn to prioritize better in the sequel, since when he is released that time he then decides to have fun after he kills those pesky heroes.
  • In Xenosaga humanity has unconsciously been causing a chain reaction to undo all existence over many myriad iterations of the universe, all because of the existential horror of uniting with the Collective Unconscious. The Big Bad is trying to stop this from happening. Sort of. God tries to figure out what our deal is.
  • Assassin's Creed II reveals that the main plot, Assassins versus Templars fighting over ancient artifacts that can control the fate of mankind, is actually part of a larger plot by Those Who Came Before. Assassin's Creed Revelations details how their First Civilization, countless millennia ago, was destroyed by a solar flare, nearly wiping mankind off the face of the Earth. The Pieces of Eden and the genetic legacy they left in certain human bloodlines were all designed to converge in 2012 and communicate the information necessary so that the modern-day Assassins can avert a repetition of this catastrophe.
  • This is what Galactus plans to do in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Should you lose to him in the final battle, he succeeds.

Visual Novels[edit | hide]

Webcomics[edit | hide]

  • College Roomies from Hell. Don't be fooled by the early years; the "from Hell" part is quite literal.
  • In The Wotch, Anne actually laughs at Xaos when he reveals that he wants to use her to destroy all worlds, claiming she is "not sure [he] thought this diabolical plan all the way through."
  • This is the threat K'Z'K poses in Sluggy Freelance. Other dimensions shown in the series have visited have faced similar threats. On a couple occasions the main characters have helped save these other worlds; on a couple other occasions, they're actually the ones responsible (directly or indirectly) for the destruction of the human race. Oops.
  • Tom Siddell described City Face (a Gunnerkrigg Court interim comic) as "a story of how love can save the world." It turns out to be literal: a fairy informs City Face that if he doesn't win the heart of his dream girl, the world could be destroyed, prompting the quote at the top of the page.
  • Averting this trope is the main reason Order of the Stick have been struggling to foil Xykon and Redcloak. May turn out to be a subversion, as recent revelations suggest there's more to the Snarl's prison than both good and bad guys have been led to believe.
  • In Irregular Webcomic the various temporal paradoxes eventually destroyed the whole universe. It got better.
  • Homestuck features a benign-looking computer game that turns out to summon the end of the world. In a unique variation, this is how the story begins, and rather than being the result of a villain's meddling, it is a natural part in a multi-universal circle of life. Not that that makes it any less disconcerting to see messages from the people left behind on Earth.
  • The Earth Explodes is the name of a web comic where after each strip the world explodes, well, the final comic in the collection is always a picture of the planet exploding. Exactly What It Says on the Tin, can be read here.
  • Far Out There opens with Trigger being trained from birth to prevent this. (It turns out to be completely unnecessary)
  • In Endstone, Jon tried to do this. Given the hints of a Lotus Eater Machine, this may not mean he's a complete monster.

Web Original[edit | hide]

  • If the Dimensional Guardians from Dimension Heroes don't find the seven cybaspheres and fix the rip the space/time continuum, both their world and Creturia will destroy one another.
  • In the animated Urban Fantasy Broken Saints, the Evil Plan of The Omniscient Council of Vagueness involves the death of almost every major politician and military leader on the planet, which, combined with the psychic trauma to surrounding populations and visions of "the eye of God" watching from the sky, will result in a collapse of modern societies, allowing for the Big Bad to rebuild civilization anew, more in keeping with his enlightened, philanthropic, and humanitarian views.
  • In the Giant in the Playground Freeform Roleplaying section, this has apparently been threatened three times, and a fourth is planned. Although this one's going to be a conquer, not destroy, the world.
  • SCP Foundation catalogs these as "XK-class end-of-the-world scenarios," and has many Artifacts Of Doom capable of triggering them.
  • This video. You've probably seen it, it's the one with the nuclear holocaust and the fucking kangaroos.
  • In the Orion's Arm universe, the Grey Goo plague of the "Nanoswarm Era" destroys the original Terran civilization (although many humans, robots, and A Is sruvive to create new civilizations from the ashes). The Amalgamation is threatening to do it again, and more completely.
  • In the flash game Mastermind, this is your ultimate goal; the titular Mastermind forgets to tell his henchmen this rather important fact. When it comes time to push the button and end the world, they're understandably freaked out. Then hilariously parodied when the Mastermind, having made his escape into space, looks back on the debris of Earth and muses "Now what do I do? Hm, maybe I should've thought this out more."
  • The Demented Cartoon Movie ends the world many times in a thirty minute stretch of time. Sometimes a series of worldwide nuclear explosions demolishes the planet itself. Sometimes the planet falls into the sun. Once, somebody just has to say a word that triggers the explosion of the planet.
  • Each story of a Global Guardians campaign was set up like a season of a television series. Specifically, the finale of each season was an end of the world scenario. Notable examples were the Xorn invasion, the near-miss of an asteroid, the release of a horde of elder gods on the planet, impending nuclear holocaust, drastic historical revision by way of a time-traveling bad guy, an invasion by Mirror Universe versions of the various superheroes, and quite a few other threats to the entire planet.
  • At the end of the Chaos Timeline, World War III between the superpowers Germany and China breaks out, and although it doesn't last long (less than one day, in fact), the world will never be again as it was before. Because the hackers Logos and their allied AIs take over the world and the military and tell the war off.
  • Skippys List has examples:

39. Not allowed to ask for the day off due to religious purposes, on the basis that the world is going to end, more than once.

Western Animation[edit | hide]

  • In Avatar: The Last Airbender, in the first episode of the four-part series finale Aang learns that if he doesn't stop the Firelord before Sozin's Comet, that Ozai will go on an Earth Kingdom and Water Tribe genocide, obliterating every race in the world except the firebenders. And the worst part is that he's more than capable of doing that.
  • This sort of thing happens a lot, to any number of planets, at various points in the assorted Transformers cartoons, comics, etc. Some planets make it, some don't.
  • The end of the world was threatened so many times by so many different villains of Xiaolin Showdown that it was eventually Lampshaded.
  • Used in Futurama, when the Professor and his crew must prevent a giant ball of 20th century New York garbage from returning to Earth and destroying the planet.
    • Then there was the What If episode where Fry destroyed the universe by never coming to the future, causing a Temporal Paradox.
    • And again when the Brainspawn plan to destroy the Universe after learning every piece of data in it.
    • And again when a box containing our Universe is about to be destroyed because it's in a Universe that's about to be destroyed because it's in a box that's about to be thrown into the Sun. Try to sort that out.
  • The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy enjoyed doing this in as many ways as possible: Martian Zombies, all-powerful demons, everyone being turned into Cthulu-esque monsters, everyone being turned into demons, everyone being turned into a different TYPE of monster...
  • The Grand Finale of Danny Phantom does this with an asteroid.
  • The Season 4 3-part finale on Teen Titans to conclude the big Raven arc. The world ended, but was restored after the Big Bad was destroyed in Raven's big moment of Calling the Old Man Out.
  • Justice League faced these several times.
  • Parodied in the South Park episode "Make Love, not Warcraft." A player in the game has become so powerful that even the admins can't stop him from killing other players, and the fear is that everyone will become frustrated and stop playing:

Gentlemen, this could very well lead to the end of the World... of Warcraft.

Real Life[edit | hide]

  • Well, in a few billion years, the Sun will become a Red Giant, which will mean the end of the world. Hopefully, we'll have found a better place to live. Maybe by the year 2525?
  • In about 450 million years, increased solar emissivity will make earth too hot for C4 photosynthesis to occur, making terrestrial life impossible. Shortly after, the oceans will partially evaporate, increasing the atmospheric pressure to Venus-like levels, and making things even hotter. Earth is well past her prime.
  • Various theories in modern physics predict that baryons have a limited lifetime. Considering that pretty much everything is made of baryons this would mean that given enough time the whole universe will simply fall apart no matter what happens.
  • There's always that threat that Mankind will stuff up something before any of the above "Real Life" Tropes even come close to coming true. There is even rumour of a small cult of people who believe that Mankind will push their "playing God" role too far and rather spectacularly fail, thus killing themselves. A wonderful quote from Jurassic Park which is much worth mentioning:

Dr. Ian Malcolm: God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs...
Dr. Ellie Sattler: Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth...

    • Never fear though; it'll be years before some corporate giant realises that it's only a simple task of some genetic mutation and they'll be making millions out of Raptor-thigh cutlets.
  • The Permian Extinction, which occurred on the Permian-Triassic Boundary, was very nearly the End of the World as We Know It. At least, it was very nearly the end of life as we know it. 95% of all species went extinct. The extinction that killed the dinosaurs (the KT Extinction) wiped out "only" 60% of all species. Somewhat interesting, the Permian extinction killed large numbers of individual species, but kept many groups intact. The KT Extinction killed whole groups (such as the dinosaurs, ammonites, etc.), but saved more groups of individual species.
    • Did we mention that it might have been caused by Siberia exploding? No, not a single volcano in Siberia...the entire region exploded, sending massive amounts of dust and volcanic ash into the air, causing acid rain to fall virtually nonstop.
  • As far as the "as we know it" goes, this has happened periodically throughout human history in both small scale (see: the fall of the civilization on Easter Island), and large scale (see: the fall of the Roman Empire). Society utterly collapses, economies revert to sustinence agriculture and some hunter-gatherer-ing from more complex dynastic and mercantile ones, and cultural development and arts get tossed to the wayside as survival becomes more crucial and difficult for most of the people. The world is still there afterwards, but it isn't as people knew it anymore.
    • The fall of the Roman Empire was far less damaging to European society than was once thought. Renaissance writers invented the decay of early medieval Europe in order to make their own accomplishments look better.
  • Somebody's world ends every second, when they die. But the rest of us don't notice. And when the world ends for you it will carry on for everybody else.
  • There are a number of proposals that super-advanced extraterrestrials might construct massive, astronomical-scale objects for their own purposes. If that's so, it's not so hard to imagine that future humanity might decide to do something similar (for example, building a Dyson Sphere). It would required an enormous amount of building material, which might lead to the human race deliberately deconstructing Earth itself to use as raw material. Same might so for the Sun too (by far the largest single object, and thus source of matter, in the Solar System).
  • The smallpox pandemic in the Americas pretty much makes a perfect example, except that it affected only half of the planet. Within a century it reduced the population down to about 5% and then strangers from unknown lands with superior technology arrived in huge numbers, often killing or displacing what little islands of civilizations had survived.

I feel fine, though.

  1. only one of the two halves would get the resources it needed at any given time, and it would periodically switch- and when that happened, societies in the previously thriving half would crumble
  2. the fall of the dynasty ruling Sylvarant
  3. the Big Bad needs humanity to use as few resources as possible, and decided the best and easiest way to do that would be to Kill'Em All, or at least nuke 'em to the stone age


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Tag Archives: 11.4

How to make mod_rewrite work on openSUSE 11.3

As you may know, this blog is hosted at home, on my 5 year old computer, running openSUSE 11.3, and apache.

Just a quick how to, of what I did to make it work. Read the rest of this entry

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software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-09
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
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text:
the m john harrison blog

Tag: england

in the park

Obelisk on a base of eroded local stone. Several little gravestones commemorating Chumble, Coco, Bessie, Mollie, Porridge, pet names that could be equally for animals or people. “This must be where they buried the servants,” C says. Much of the stone in the park is laminated. Judging by the quarry in the bay at the north end of the lake, and the exposed rock in the cuttings, this is intrinsic & not much to do with subsequent erosion. It comes out of the ground wafery and brittle. From a distance, the pillars of the Ionic temple seem like ideal volumes; closer to they’re rippled, loose, falling apart into the same world as you. Leaden, coffin-shaped garden planters with a knot design, a rose design, their edges are battered, cut, used-looking. An empty plinth between yews. Walled garden: lines of ruined Victorian glasshouses; rusty iron curves; grubbed-up tree roots, charred looking and still clasping chunks of the glasshouse foundations two or three bricks on a side. Clee Hill slumps on the hot skyline, against architectural June cloud, while an unaccompanied Italian greyhound wanders disconsolately between the tables on the terrace and someone says, “I don’t like the smell of sweet peas, they’ve got an edge to them. Something musty underneath.”

ag wars

–take a slice of your commission–take a slice off everything–if you look where their depots are–it’s dog eat dog out there–the tractor business is a different one–it’s coast to coast–it’s about cleaning up the balance sheet–run it as a franchise then run their own stuff on the side–did some things you probably wouldn’t agree with–the way of the world–they do a lot of tractors–80 to a 100 tractors, about 3%–I say I can’t quite believe that–he figures the whole area’s running 6 or 7%–the whole market looks worse–it’s not good–suddenly ag machinery looks worse, right out to the coast–suddenly you are just way way outnumbered–

how we can know it

All journeys are enchanted.

It isn’t so much that the landscape distracts you, as that something about the motion of the train — something about the very idea of constant, rushing, forward movement — makes you restless and slow to settle to anything. You read a few pages of a book and look out at some swans on a canal. A newspaper opened suddenly just down the carriage sounds like rain spattering on the window. Another chapter and you make your way down to the buffet or the lavatory. Between each event a rev- erie pours itself, as seamless as golden syrup, as smooth as the motion of the train. You wonder what the weather will be like in Leeds or Newcastle, turn to the Independent to find out, read: “The world economy is likely to remain subdued.”

Looking up from these words to a landscape of hedges and ponds, copses and little embankments, the Ephebe sees with amazement a strange vehicle bounding along beside the railway line.

In a long, complex frame of metal tubing, suspended on four tractor wheels, are cradled: an engine wrapped round with copper pipes and sheaves of old electrical wiring; clusters of what seem to be household butane gas bottles; and, well to the rear, the padded seat of some old-fashioned military jet, into which is strapped a man. Gouts of earth and water spray up from its enormous wheels. From time to time this whole machine seems to be consumed by a kind of radiant discharge, through which its driver or pilot can be seen helplessly or furiously waving his arms.

Is he a prisoner of his vehicle? Or does he prefer to drive on the edge of disaster like this? He is a wasted old man. When it can be seen, his face runs the gamut of expression, wild with fear one moment, laughing with excitement the next. His long gray hair blows back in the slipstream. His lips contort. He has fastened himself into a tight brown leather suit along the arms and legs of which run clusters of Neoprene tubing. Out of these at intervals erupt thick colored fluids, which splatter over his chest or into his eyes. Though he blinks furiously, he suffers the indignity without harm: but wherever the machine is touched it blackens and smokes briefly, and lightning writhes along its chassis members.

One huge wheel flies off suddenly into the air. The old man claps his hands to his face. At that moment the train enters a tunnel, and the Ephebe can see only himself, reflected in the window.

If the appearance of the machine has filled him with astonishment, its disappearance leaves him with a curious mixture of elation and anger he can neither understand nor resolve. By the time he is able to unclench his hands and wipe his forehead, the train has left the tunnel for open plowland across which spills a tranquil evening light. Wrestling desper- ately with one another, the old man and his machine have passed back into the dimension from which they came, where they leap and bucket and belly their way forever through rural England, scattering clods of earth, steam, small bushes and dead animals. But in the palm of the Ephebe’s hand remains a small, intricately machined metal item, melted at one end to slag.

This he brings home with him. For months it remains warm to the touch, as if it had only lately been thrown out of the hearth of the heart.

–from “The Horse of Iron & How We Can Know It & Be Changed By It Forever”, 1988.

some basically insoluble mystery

Sand came up like a fog from the beach and when I next looked he was gone.

I studied his business card. “Gift Company,” I read.

What had he offered us? I only knew it was unsuitable and wrong. But sometimes, now, when I look through the notebook in which I wrote all this down, and the dust in its creases — just blown from mainland Africa to make a beach in the Atlantic Ocean — I wish we had accepted.

Again, perhaps we did accept. This is how he made you feel. As if there was some residue, some basically insoluble mystery behind or beneath or in some way prior to the rubbishy white hotels, beach bars and endless Cambios. As if even Playa los Americas, one of the trashiest places on earth, had some secret nothing to do with cheap stereos, expensive leather goods and English beer. Something you can sense where a brand new road runs out suddenly in builders’ waste and prickly pear; or at the top of a low hill, in some unfinished concrete building that looks like a multistory car park; or in the amused eyes of the stray dogs of the seafront.

“Gift Company,” we read. Perhaps we did accept.

from “GifCo”, 1997.

Blake, Peckham and “the tree of angels”. The sheer willpower needed to envisage something. Even a memory has to be forced back into existence, and for all your effort what do you get? An artefact if you’re lucky, something not quite right in the corner of your eye. The exhausting effort to understand exactly what it is you’re trying to see. The exhausting effort to keep focus. The mad daily struggle against all the side issues that offer themselves. The struggle to keep the symbology intact/exact. I don’t care about anything else in writing now, as long as I get that part right. Everything else can follow along, rag tag and bobtail. Everything else is better that way any way.

country matters

The bothy, a long single-storey wooden structure which had once housed the unmarried male servants of the local fox hunt (an institution known in its heyday as “the Ampney”), stood in the middle of a field next to a few courses of brick and an overgrown cobbled yard. It was a shed, really, already cold in the afternoon, its untreated cement floors polished by decades of use. There was a kitchen at one end, a storage unit full of rusting bed frames and plastic-wrapped supermarket pallets of dog-food at the other. Between them, five or six empty rooms opened off a narrow windowless passage lighted by a single twenty watt bulb. To the extent that he had any, the boy had moved his belongings into the kitchen, where it was relatively warm. Two shelves held packets of cereal, tins of baked beans and 8%-proof lager. A single bed was pushed up against the wall in one corner. “I don’t need much,” he said. “I was never much for things.” There was a paraffin heater but no kettle. He made tea using lukewarm water straight from an ancient Creda heater mounted on the wall above the sink and paid his rent directly to “them down the fields”, who had acquired the bothy in some cash-free transaction he didn’t understand, and who sometimes dragged a bed into one of the other rooms for weekend use.

“It’s cheap enough,” he said.

The only contemporary thing in the kitchen was a reconditioned laptop from the early 2000s, wired into the overhead light socket through a brownout-protector. “It’s all in here,” he said, with a kind of shy irony: “My life.” He showed as much pride in the machine as in his uploads to YouTube. These unsteady, ill-lit glimpses, caught on a pocket camcorder, didn’t even seem cruel, only difficult to interpret. Jittery ellipses and smears of whitish light appeared and disappeared suddenly in a black rectangle. They picked out a hedge, a patch of long grass in a field, a fence post at an odd angle. Something zigzagged into the light and out of it again. Something else turned and turned and vanished suddenly into a hedge. At the end of each clip there was the boy, an ethereal smile on his face, holding up dead rabbits by their ears. Once, the dogs put up a deer, which stared at them then walked slowly out of camera. He had set some of the videos to contemporary pastoral music, others to thirty-year-old Death Metal. Watching them galvanised him all over again, the way a passing scent had once galvanised his dogs. He sat on the bed next to Anna. There was nowhere else to sit. She could feel him trembling with excitement. “What do you think ?” he asked her. ”What do you think of that!”

Once she had got over her distaste, Anna felt bored. She was glad when he turned off the computer and with a smile half diffident, half sly, pushed her down. “Let me get these jeans off you,” she said. She laughed. “They could do with a wash.” And later: “You’re hurting me a little bit.” He went on without seeming to hear and soon she had forgotten, the way you forget the creak and bang of the bed or the people coming and going in the corridor outside a hotel room. To fuck at all is a blessing. He wasn’t Tim Waterman, but he wasn’t Michael Kearney either, and he got hard again as quickly as most boys.

Anna fell asleep. When she woke the bothy was cold and the boy was standing naked by the window gazing out across the fields towards the village. The light had begun to fade. Wisps of mist were already coming up over the river. He’d had enough for the moment, she could see. His back, whiter and thinner than she had expected, seemed vulnerable, illuminated from within. Anna watched him a minute or two, then gathered her clothes and began to get dressed. When she thought the time was right, she said:

“I’ve got some work I need doing.”

The boy made a movement with one shoulder, a shrug or perhaps a wince. He wasn’t looking for work, he said. He had enough work.

“What kind of work is it ?” he asked.

It wasn’t much, she said. It was just some painting.

He had enough of that kind of work, the boy said.

“I need someone to look at my bathroom,” Anna said. “I don’t live far. If you called later in the week, you could do the work I need.”

He moved his shoulder again and kept looking out of the window. “Those dogs of mine were company til the grey hare got across them.” Anna, receiving this as “grey hair”, had no idea what he meant. “That spoiled everything. I could talk to them until then.” As she was leaving he turned round and said, “I’ll come and see you though ? I’ll be coming to see you ?”

Anna touched his arm and smiled.

“Put your clothes on,” she said. “It’s cold in here.”

The lane outside had filled with mist, yet if you looked directly upward you could see the stars. Anna turned towards Wyndlesham, walking as briskly as she could. Once or twice she raised her arms in the air, or smiled for no reason. She wondered what had really happened to the dogs. Those lovely, lovely animals. Perhaps he’d sold them. Perhaps he’d just grown tired of them. I can’t imagine what Marnie will make of him, she thought: although it’s none of her business. She looked for her phone, couldn’t find it; stopped suddenly, brought both hands to her mouth and laughed. I can’t believe myself, she thought. When she looked back, the bothy seemed to hang without support in the gathering dusk. Everything it represented was history. Since the banking meltdown of 2007, the stable-block itself–built by John Ampney in the late 18th Century from locally-sourced brick and pantile and not then intended to house the hunt–had tracked closely the declining economic curve: redevelopment, first as prestige office space, then as a paintball “shoot house”; a decade of squatting and abandonment; finally, annexation by the local authority as Kent and Sussex struggled to contain thousands of Chinese economic refugees washing up in the old Cinque Ports; after which it had been allowed to fall down.

–from Empty Space, 2012

love & perspective

I’ve spent the whole day writing about Love for Lydia, and now I wonder why. Bates isn’t a writer anyone’s much interested in any more. Love for Lydia‘s not even his best work. I start out adoring it and end up angry with myself for being pulled in. A bit like Richardson himself, I suppose. It was published in the early 1950s, when I was a child in Warwickshire, and it seems to catch that time better than it catches the time it’s set in. This post, Lost Worlds, from four years ago, suggests I’m picking up on that:

…when I began to read HE Bates, my memories of the town of my birth, Rugby in Warwickshire, became fatally enslaved to Bates’s fictional Evensford. How to free them, except with care & hard work, image by image ? They were far too similar. Black sticks of reeds where the towpath has collapsed into the canal. A dead cat in a gutter in melting snow. The movements of people through streetlight, projected faintly on to the ceilings and upper walls of a bedroom; their laughter. The bang & squeal of trains coupling and decoupling in the night. A constant sense of the dry cold winds of the early part of the year, on building sites, on the corners of the streets down by the railway, under bridges, across pond ice, over the vast empty expanse of the cattle market with its moveable metal dividers. How do you begin to retrieve a landscape you spent so much of your life forgetting ? Not by using satellite maps, that’s for sure. All they record is its absence. To separate Evensford & Rugby, I need a psychic splitter, & it is uncertainty. Evensford is a place certain of its feelings–certain anyway that feelings, whatever turmoil they create, are the point; that even coldness and despair are part of human warmth & hope; that human mess is nothing less than human. I can read that out of the pervasive combination of love & perspective Bates imparts to every story. But everything I felt–everything that was communicated to me–in the very similar social & geographical spaces of postwar Warwickshire was simultaneously clouded and sharpened by anxiety, cancered-up with stealthy growths of alienation.

Though I didn’t read it until the mid-1970s, Love for Lydia trapped me in what’s become a weird, 60-year double loop, a tangle of memory, landscape, politics, emotional politics. I’ve never been clever enough to reason my way out. It sums me up, somehow. Inexplicable.

poor souls’ light

6024417 Here’s the first scene of “Animals”, my contribution to the Curious Tales Christmas anthology, Poor Souls’ Light

“In late June, Susan rented a cottage for a fortnight. It was tucked away at the seaward end of a lane; beyond it there was only flat light on the sand dunes and open beach. The paperwork required her to collect the keys from a Mrs Lago, who lived at the other end of the lane where it joined the road. Mrs Lago turned out to be sixtyish, frail-looking but active, with watery blue eyes, bright red lipstick and a selection of cotton print dresses two generations too young for her. During the summer her grassy front garden, across which had been scattered some round white plastic tables, did duty as a cafe. She was in and out all day, carrying trays of cakes, fitting umbrellas into the sockets in the centre of the tables to keep the rain off. In the evening the onshore wind blew everything about, and it lay in the rain looking shabby.

“Susan called as instructed and found the garden full of sparrows. They gathered round her while she waited for the keys, cocking their heads right and left. They ate cake crumbs, first from the ground, then the chairs, then the very edge of the table. Then they took off all at once and one of them flew through the open door into the house, where it fluttered inside the window just above the sill among the china ornaments and little vases. Its panic was terrible. Mrs Lago went inside and after some reckless stumbling about appeared with it in her hands at the door. It was squawking and cheeping miserably. As soon as she let it go it shot off across the garden.

“‘I thought it was going to break my lucky horseshoe,’ she said, looking at Susan in a vague but excited way. ‘It’s been broken once before.’

“’Has it ?’ Susan said.

“You were always the junior partner in a conversation with Mrs Lago, your responses limited to, ‘Yes. No. Isn’t it ?’ and, ‘I did!’ Listening to yourself make them was a bit like listening to one end of a telephone conversation. She had a curious lurching walk. She owned two or three dogs that sometimes got out and ran up and down the lane, surprised by a freedom they couldn’t seriously exploit.”

give us a tune, uncle!

Uncle Zip returns. He’s on the horizon. He’s in the room. He’s wearing his cheap sunglasses. “He’ll give us a tune on the old squeeze box!” He’ll give us a tune from his old song book, & send us home again. (All the tired clones gather round & a single Christmas orange falls from the naked sky.) The gifts of the Uncle.

living with particulates in NO2

But we love the N02 postcode! Only your father, who lives in the country and is therefore guilty of all the usual historical crimes, ie for instance of being your father, wants fresh air! Country air’s not so fresh either, is it? Full of all that poo. In fact there’s no fresh air left anywhere in the world if you come to think of it and none of us is dead! Just look at this article from The Lanarkshire Times in 1342, “Thee eyre beeing no langyr frish, lyffe if not worth th lyvynng of’t.” See? Every generation ever has thought the world was fucked! But that’s just change! The only thing that’s certain is that things will change, Zizek or someone said that. I believe it and that’s why I love living with particulates. Here’s YouTube of our daughter hyperventilating some on a bike ride round the recently reclaimed Cadmium Park. Is there anything wrong with that little sweetie? I tell you what, I wish her more “pollution” not less! And I hope she has a fantastic life full of the craft beers with clever aggressive names and really exciting urban experimental music it brings. Where’s the toilet here?