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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in pagan post-apocalyptic fiction

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Longing for the Apocalypse

 Way back in 1975, when I was 14, I’d already had two years of study with a Jehovah Witness friend. I was a bookish child, and her challenging of my beliefs led to my flirtation with the small colourful books full of Bible facts that the Witnesses used in their evangelizing. The lush illustrations and easy quizzes satisfied my curious, literal, pre-teen mind.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

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Series Title: The Frost Arcana

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

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Title: Traveler (The Druid Chronicles Volume One)

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

If you read only one pagan novel this year, let it be Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake.

The emergence of post-apocalypse narrative in early “twenty-first” century fiction, cinema, and television is an intriguing and suggestive phenomenon, offering rich possibilities for satire, cultural critique, and reflection on direction for possible futures. (I have written previously about the genre in modern pagan fiction.)

But of course, as every pagan knows, when it comes to Apocalypse, we've already been there and done that. In human history, Ragnarok comes again and again. This is how Kingsnorth can characterize his novel, now newly released in the US and currently long-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize, as “a post-apocalyptic novel set 1000 years in the past.”

Imagine that you've lost everything: your home, your possessions, your family, your culture itself, even your gods. This is the tale that Kingsnorth tells in The Wake. The year is 1066.

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  • Nancy Chase
    Nancy Chase says #
    I definitely think the book speaks a warning for modern times, in the voice of the distant past. Reading between the lines, so mu
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Glad to hear it, Nancy, and good reading to you. It's an honest book, emotionally difficult, and the fact that Buccmaster is no gr
  • Nancy Chase
    Nancy Chase says #
    Thank you for this review! I bought the book and started reading it last night. Already I can tell what a masterpiece it is. I

Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin, Masters of Solitude (1978)

After an invasion from China destroys the US, the megalopolis that covers the East Coast walls itself off from the wilderness to the West, where deer-like witches breed for psychic skills and create a genuine American witchery. Part of the fun is seeing what witch vocabulary might turn into in a few hundred years or so. (I don't need lep or a thammy to wish you a happy Grannog.) But those nasty coal-digging Kriss just keep cooking up toxic bugs to kill off the evil devil-worshipers. What to do?

Favorite line: “Who you callin' 'cowan'?”

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Confession: pagan post-apocalyptic fiction is one of my guilty pleasures. You know: civilization as we know it falls apart and it's up to the witches to rebuild. There's a surprising amount of it (for a sub-genre of a sub-genre of a sub-genre), and it offers us as a community a way to reflect on what a pagan future might look like.

I'm currently reading the latest installment in what is surely the most successful of the entire franchise: S. M. Stirling's Dies the Fire series. (Premise: on All Snakes' Day—March 17—1999 all the machines stop. Everything falls apart. The witches—among others—rebuild.) Ignore the title-by-Disney (The Golden Princess, wince. Not to mention the cover art: not just cheese, but stinky cheese. It's hard to be reading a book I'm ashamed to be seen with in public); as popular fiction goes, this is actually well-written, nicely-observed, and thoughtful stuff (on which, more in the future).

Our story so far: It's 2044. Our three principles have been having the same dream for the past three nights. One remarks, as if citing a quotation known to them all, “Once is coincidence, twice can be happenstance....” and her friend finishes, “The third time is either enemy action, or someone sending you a message” (245).

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  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I read "Too Much Magic" by James Kunstler in which he predicted that the oil bonanza from fracking would run out in 10 years. I t
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Why 2038?
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I just think of the Change happening in 2038 instead of 1998 and the story works as a fairly plausible view of the future. Plus I
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    You're got an enjoyable journey ahead of you, Anthony. Happy trails.
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    Thank you for mentioning this book. I just finished reading it today. It's the first book in the series that I've read and now I

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