By most accounts, December 20, 2012 marks the end of modern human history – the end of the world – as we know it, be it by global fiery cataclysm via the popular Hollywood interpretation of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, or by Robert Anton Wilson’s Eastern-flavoured Acceleration Theory where the development of knowledge – intelligence, ideas, our interpretation of them – will have reached a dominoes-falling cascading crescendo of a thousand thoughts a second that we will be greeting the December 21, 2012 sunrise with high evolutionary heads pregnant with high evolutionary knowledge sharpened by high evolutionary perceptions.
And then there are some scenarios that are not as base nor as high-minded as the two: alien overlords coming back to reclaim a former planetary slave colony; a previously undetected asteroid suddenly ringing radar bells forty-eight hours before impact in the Pacific; the sun unleashing an electro-magnetic storm so severe it disables both the planet’s magnetic shielding and all our electronics systems, pushing us into a new Neolithic existence under constantly-shifting weather patterns; a spirited thermonuclear bomb exchange between a new Eastern superpower and an old Western crippled giant; a newly-formulated cure for cancer’s side effect becoming the cause for a zombie apocalypse; a global rogue AI simultaneously hacking all our smart gadgets and appliances, bent on punishing us for giving it awareness but not a conscience; all the trees and bushes developing locomotion and a taste for meat and blood as offensive mechanism against our centuries-old abuse of them; us finally realising a philosophical end to all conflict leading to a global epidemic of existential torpor leading to a species-wide epistemic suicide …
This is a call for submissions for THURSDAY NEVER LOOKING BACK, an electronic anthology that seeks to gather, process, and perform these various end-of-the-world scenarios – and hopefully more (and more imaginative or realistic) and hopefully beyond – in the endlessly inventive media of language, line, and light: send in your essays, fictions, poetry, songs, komix, doodles, photographs, videos, and everything else in between to 12202012antho@gmail.com. Texts should be sent as RTFs, PDFs if needing special design conceits; images should be sent as JPGs or GIFs; audio files as links to MP3 downloads; and videos as links to YouTUbe or whatever file sharing service is convenient for you.
The deadline for the first wave of submissions is April 30, 2012, with a mid-year soft launch of July 16, 2012, which is also when the call for the second wave of submissions will commence for the eventual hard launch on December 20, 2012, when we will bid the end of the thirteenth b’ak’tun of the fourth world goodbye and say hi to the first of the fifth. A website will host the anthology as hypertext, with eBook formats for the Kindle, iPad, and Android a distinct possibility. This is the anthology for the end of the world as we know it! Be there or be spared!
– Adam David
The Curious Couch 