The End of the World

I am not interested in writing about the fall of empires. Empires, like all things in the physical world, suffer a constant state of decay. It is the tinnitus of the universe, that high-pitched ringing of the second law of thermodynamics. The sound of everything moving from a state of order to a state of chaos.

All empires fall and there’s nothing surprising about it. The Roman Empire, the Zhao Dynasty, the Kingdom of Axum, the Aztecs, they were remarkable, glorious and sophisticated societies, but they all disintegrated – every last one of them. But this shouldn’t surprise us. What is surprising is that all who lived under them believed them to be permanent – immutable. The people of empire assume that theirs is different, theirs will last forever, or will at least continue throughout their lifetimes, which is all any of us care to think about anyway. No one notices the steady decay of those microscopic grains of sand falling from the foundation of empire. Every tick of the clock takes a little bit more empire with it until the thing collapses under its own weight. And all living in those times are shocked because no one thought that the empire would fall during their lifetime.

The thing about our current empire is that it’s global. It may be American in origin, but today’s empire isn’t represented through a single nationality or a ruling family, like the Windsors or the Khans or the Caesars. And it certainly isn’t located in democracies. The 21^st century version of the Pharaoh’s are a handful of multinational corporations, maybe 70 or 80 in all, along with their CEOs. These rulers control the world’s labor and economic resources. They have their fingers in the political parties and trade regulations and the banking practices that run our planet. The collapse of this imperial collective will be like nothing we have yet seen.

But, as I say, I am not interested in writing about the downfall of empire. Entropy is irreversible, whether acting on an abandoned shack or a crumbling social order built upon consumption. Besides, others have written about the end of the world with great imagination – a global pandemic, a nuclear holocaust, a zombie apocalypse. No, writing about the inevitable failure of our empire isn’t all that interesting to me. It’s what comes after the end of this empire, when the world resets herself, that interests me.

When our modern, industrialized, corporatized, digitized, state fails – and I think it will happen suddenly and globally – what will rise from her ashes?

To me, that’s an interesting story, and it’s the story I have attempted to write.

I am two books into a trilogy where decades after the collapse of our world, a new order begins to emerge. A world where small communities of faith living close to the earth begin to form the foundation of a new reality. When this world ends, will the meek inherit the next?

I’ve not found the right publisher or agent, so I will release the first part of the first novel, Nocturn: The Ethiopian Orthodox, in audio form. If you’re interested, stay tuned and let me read to you – not about the end of the world, but about its beginning.