2013: The End of Days or a New Beginning? (2008) non-fiction book

Marie D. Jones' 2013: The End of Days or a New Beginning?: Envisioning the World After the Events of 2012 is a hodge-podge of the ridiculous and the sublime as far as the apocalyptic goes. If a doomsday scenario was ever in the public consciousness over the past one to two thousand years, you can expect to read about it here, from the prophecies of Nostradamus to Edgar Cayce, from West Nile Virus to honeybee die-off.

The 2012 Story (2009) non-fiction book

The 2012 Story: The Myths, Fallacies, and Truth Behind the Most Intriguing Date in History (2009) book by John Major Jenkins, an independent Mayanist, who's credited with discovering the galactic alignment that coincides with the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar on December 21, 2012. Jenkins does not subscribe to the doomsday view of 2012 and champions the transformation and renewal philosophy. You can find more information about his viewpoints at Update2012.com and The Center for 2012 Studies.

2012 Ice Age (2011) TV movie

2012 Ice Age from 2011 has to be one of the worst disaster TV movies ever made. A massive series of volcanic eruptions in Greenland causes an ice shelf to detach and head to North America "really really fast." Those pesky glaciers seem to have a mind of their own. Canada gets hit first by this icewall turned glacier that seems to disobey the laws of physics every minute. The scientist father of the family, played by Patrick Labyorteaux, can't seem to figure things out. His stock answers to questions from his wife and son about what's happening around them are phrases like "I don't know", "maybe", "it's possible". This TV movie is so bad it's actually worth watching, from the giant triangular pieces of glacier blown up by missile strikes from jet fighters that mostly land point first to the dreadful small plane flight with the computer-generated icing of its wings, a sad tribute perhaps to the 2012 movie with John Cusack. There are also echoes in here of The Day After Tomorrow.

"Long Count Calendar Blues" music excerpt

Since one of my passions is music, I've been working on a series of dance pieces as part of a concept CD I call "The Apocalypse Sessions: Dances for Dark Days." Here's an excerpt from a track I composed titled "Long Count Calendar Blues" in reference to the Mayan Long Count Calendar that allegedly predicts the end of the world on December 21, 2012.

A track excerpt of 2 minutes, 27 seconds duration is on the Internet Archive and the full version (not downloadable) is available through my SoundCloud account for your listening pleasure.

The Crystal Skull (2008) novel

British novelist Manda Scott in her 2008 novel The Crystal Skull tackles the 2012 Mayan Long Count calendar "prediction" of the end of the world by mashing it up with the mysterious and completely fabricated Mesoamerican crystal skulls (all known examples that have been authenticated were created in the 19th century present era and later, not by Aztecs or Mayans). She claims that the Mayans "carved thirteen crystal skulls" (paperback back cover blurb) and that the Mayans "to protect humankind ... sent them to the four corners of the globe" (paperback back cover blurb). The Mayans are not known to have had deep seafaring capabilities, so she must an ingenious explanation as to how they got the skulls to the four corners of the globe.

2012 Supernova

In the 2009 movie 2012 Supernova, the wavefront of a supernova explosion reach the Earth where it will produce the end of the world. Various heroic efforts involving spacecraft, astronauts and scientists attempt to stave off the inevitable demise of all life as we know it. According to one reviewer on the Internet Movie Database, the film has no connection with the year 2012!

The Hunger Games (2008) novel

Suzanne Collins young adult novel The Hunger Games (2008) is set in a post-apocalyptic North America. Out of the ashes a new nation called Panem emerged. Panem consists of Capitol and twice numbered districts, the thirteenth having been destroyed by Panem during an uprising. In retribution the rulers of Panem created the Hunger Games in which youth between 12 and 18 are selected by lottery to participate in a survivalist game to the death in a vast wilderness area and broadcast on live TV. This sounds like a cross between the Vietnam War lottery and other games-based post-apocalyptic entertainments such as the movie Deathrace 2000 (1975) and Death Race (2008), which is, oddly enough, set in 2012.

The Twelve (2009) novel

Judging from the reviews on Amazon.com, William Gladstone's first novel The Twelve (Vanguard Press, 2009) is a badly written story revolving around the silliness surrounding the Mayan Long Count calendar.




2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006) book

Daniel Pinchbeck's 2006 book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl is one of the key texts in the global debate around whether the world will end, according to the Mayan Long Count calendar, in December 2012. Pinchbeck is not the most objective of authors on this subject since his book is essentially predicated on the assumption that hallucinogenic (psychedelic) substances such as were used by Mayan shamans, produce knowledge of future events that can or must be accepted as valid.

There is no reason to believe that someone's drug-induced vision of a future has any basis in reality or that the same vision can be reproduced by another person. Further, there is no actual evidence to link the cyclical Long Count calendar with any ancient Mayan prophecy on the subject of the world's end when calendar reaches the end of its current cycle and starts over again. As I have noted elsewhere on this blog, not even the ancient Mayans when the calendar was still in use, believed that the world would end in 2012.

Like any good doomsdayer, Pinchbeck attempts to link his own predictions with current extrapolations about future global collapse with the Mayan Long Count calendar countdown. The problem, however, is that those scientific models are based on scientific observations and at the earliest the models are predicting drastic effects around 2050, well after 2012. In a newspaper article I read about his book ("Cult figure on a mission to unlock the mysteries of 2012", Jamie Portman, Vancouver Sun, November 27, 2009), Pinchbeck did not even list nuclear armageddon as a more likely causal scenario for global destruction brought about through competition for depleted resources by an overpopulated world.

While Pinchbeck has an outstanding resume as an author, I think anyone who spends a great deal of time dissecting crop circles and their relationship to the Mayan calendar as well as their own personal life, is not the most objective analyst of the historical record.

Nostradamus: 2012 (TV) documentary

Nostradamus and 2012, what more could an apocalypticholic wish for? This 2009 TV documentary, Nostradamus: 2012, was broadcast on Canada's History Television on November 15, 2009, likely to coincide with the premiere of the movie 2012 on November 13 and the United States' History Channel.

Update for July 1, 2010: I watched the DVD version and it's as bad as I remember it. One of the best factual bloopers is when the narrator states that the Mayans are thought to have observed the galactic alignment of around 26,000 years ago and that their Long Calender cycle, which is supposed to coincide with the next galactic alignment, was an astonishing astronomical prediction. There was a caption that appeared at one point after the narrator's bold statement that said "The Maya 2000 BC to 1500 AD."

What is this galactic alignment you're probably asking? According to this program it's when the sun appears to rise and pass across the center of the Milky Way galaxy, an area known as the Dark (better known as the Great) Rift according to these experts. One "expert," Lawrence Joseph (Apocalypse 2012) stated that the last galactic alignment coincided with the end of the last ice age. Nothing could be further from the truth since it's long been established and accepted that the last ice age, in which much of North America and Europe/Asia were covered by glacial ice sheets, ended around 10,000 years ago.

All the hype about 2012 is nothing more than fear-mongering with a very distinct anthropomorphic flavor. Assuming there is intelligent life elsewhere in this vast galaxy of ours, it's doubtful that they have any concerns at all about a galactic alignment that will have neither an impact on Earth or on any other part of the Milky Way. We are so far away from the Great Rift that the whole concept of the sun somehow aligning with the center of the Milky Way and causing catastrophic changes on Earth is ludicrous.

2012 and Counting (2009) article

Skeptic magazine (vol. 15, no. 2, 2009) published an article by David Morrison titled "2012 and Counting: A NASA Scientist Answers the Top 20 Questions About 2012." Most of the article is about the bogus (fictional) planet Nibiru, also known as Planet X, around which there is supposed to be a conspiracy to conceal its existence. According to Morrison's introduction, "I answer questions from the public submitted on-line to a NASA website (astrobiology.nasa.gov), and over the past two years the Nibiru-2012 doomsday has become the dominant topic people ask about."

2012: The War for Souls (2007) novel

Whitley Strieber's 2012: The War for Souls continues his 2006 novel The Grays. In 2012, he couples the Mayan prophecy of the end of the world with an alien invasion.

2012 the movie

The one trailer I've seen in theaters so far for the movie 2012 looks impressive -- a tsunami engulfs the Himalayas and overwhelms a monk who's sounded the alarm -- all caused by Planet X, also known as Nemesis or Niburu (the Destroyer). so I'm anxious to learn what's caused this catastrophe Clearly, Mr. Monk didn't need to bother since nobody would be left to hear or heed his warning. The full trailer at the official site is spectacular. Roland Emmerich, the genius director of two other mega-death movies, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, turns his attention to the powerful Mayan prophecy that the world will end on December 21, 2012. Now if the ancient Mayans had somehow synchronized their timekeeping efforts with the Western world’s calendar and had the world ending on December 20, 2012 (get it, 20122012 as some people might express the date), I might have been a believer, but then again, maybe all the big disasters are happening on December 20 and the world officially ends on December 21, 2012. The 2012 movie premieres on November 13, 2009. Watch the full trailer and a teaser trail on the official site.

In addition to the trailers, check out some of the movie publicity sites: This Is The End from some dude named Charlie Frost -- I'm pretty sure Sony Pictures dreamed him up -- but he's even on Twitter, The IHC or Institute for Human Continuity, whose mission is to prepare the world for 2012, and Farewell Atlantis, the title of the novel by Jackson Curtis, the character played by John Cusack in 2012.

A new fiction about the end of the world in 2012

The Year 2012 Bandwagon is getting a lot more crowded. Artist Brian D'Amato's novel In the Courts of the Sun (2009) weighs in at a hefty 882 pages. It's only volume 1 of a trilogy called the Sacrifice Game Trilogy. The second volume will appear in 2010. The dustjack copy erroneously compares the first volume to Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon -- I think a more apt comparison would be Stephenson's own historical trilogy The Baroque Cycle, though Cryptonomicon like D'Amato's novel does yo-yo between the past and present -- Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths and Gary Jennings Aztec.