Apocalypse: An Epic Poem - Softcover

Turner, Frederick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0983300291 ISBN 13: 9780983300298

Publisher: The Ilium Press, 2016

Synopsis

It’s 2067. The Antarctic ice sheets have collapsed. World sea levels have risen several feet and are rising faster still. The climate has changed catastrophically, and meteorological disasters are becoming a daily occurrence. Yet global power structures fail to respond, remaining frozen in political and ideological gridlock. 

To confront this chaos, billionaire Noah Blazo recruits a team of genius misfits to bypass the political paralysis. With support from a coalition of island and coastal nations that are vulnerable to these catastrophes, his team launches an unsanctioned geo-engineering effort to restore the Earth’s ecological balance—an activity that prompts a global power struggle immediately leading to war.

Events in the center of this conflict inadvertently trigger the emergence a quasi-divine being, Kalodendron, who dwells within the Internet. With her arrival comes a further threat to the Earth—the appearance of the dark star Wormwood, which looms within our solar system and is drawing closer.

With Kalodendron’s help, can Blazo’s team avert this two-fold threat the Earth’s destruction? Or do the tragedies that quickly follow ensure the planet’s final destruction?

Apocalypse features a rich cast of fully realized characters, including the old Texan, Noah Blazo, a beneficent Captain Ahab with his own secret grief; Anneliese Grotius, the internet genius who is also the curator of the Amsterdam Museum’s Flemish collection; big gloomy Ala Ifu-Eshu, who has dealt with her Boko Haram husband and becomes a leader in the art of seawater farming; the mathematicians Chandrasekhar Engineer and his son Gopal; the British naval maverick Peter Frobisher; the two popes, Pius XIII and Francis III; and the troubled narrator, Nemo, who has been commissioned by Noah to compose the poem itself as its events occur.

Apocalypse is a major new work on the poetic landscape, an odyssey that addresses the global anxieties, emerging technologies, and spiritual yearnings of our time. Addressing themes of humanity’s capacity for creation, destruction, rebirth, and redemption, Apocalypse is a transformative vision of the deepest and most passionate relationships that define us and give our lives meaning.

About this title

Review

"I loved the blank verse, so supple and expressive; and the command of a fictional history, the epic sweep of a macro-plot along with the many interesting characters and situations at the personal level. Also, the poetry of philosophy of history and science, always fitted to the action, and really forming the core of the action. I don't think anyone else does what you do, not in our time, and with so much being written and published, who else can say that? It's wonderful." -Kim Stanley Robinson, bestselling and award-winning author, in a letter to the author "Fred Turner['s...] brilliant future-epic poem." -David Brin, bestselling and award-winning author "...it was a delight to read, and it works extremely well in the context of other contemporary terraforming and geoengineering narratives." - Chris Pak, Editor-in-Chief of the Science Fiction Research Association's SFRA Review "I don't believe there is anyone else who could have written a narrative poem like this one. This is not cheap flattery but simply an acknowledgment that there are very few active writers who have the polymathic breadth and depth to pull off the high wire act of Apocalypse. ... This is an amazing creation, utterly absorbing-and I am very glad that you've allowed me an early entrance into this fascinating imagined world. Readers need this poem." - Robert Crossley, Professor Emeritus of the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Imagining Mars: A Literary History

About this edition

• Publisher: The Ilium Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0983300291
• ISBN 13: 9780983300298
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352