The Other End
Do you ever think that the human world is hopelessly out of balance, blighted, off track, and the only hope is some kind of apocalypse, some sort of end of the world that would allow the human race a new beginning, a fresh start without... ah... certain people?
You know you don't want and can't believe in the usual "End Times" scenarios that are predicted and ballyhooed by hysterical, superstitious people.
But when you look around at the world as it stands you see Darfur, you see Somalia and the Congo, you see the modern slavery of indentured servitude, you see children sold into prostitution, you see millions starving, you see mindless wars, you see people you care about dying of Alzheimer's and children dying of cancer and millions of others trapped in schizophrenia or living lives of media-hypnotized desperation...
You see a planet beset by a loss of biodiversity, a depleted ozone layer, slash-and-burn destruction of rainforests, and the onset of global warming...
And you know that because the population of the Earth is increasing, it's only going to get worse. This can't go on; something has to change.
What if you could change it? What if you could design your own Judgment Day?
What if there were another end rather than one based on childish interpretations of religion, bias, bigotry, exclusion, and cultural narrowness?
What if Judgment Day came for the whole world and offered true justice?
It would be THE OTHER END.
John Shirley
John Patrick Shirley (born 1953) is an American science fiction and horror writer of novels, short stories, and television and film scripts.
John Shirley's most significant cyberpunk novels are City Come A-Walkin and the Eclipse (A Song Called Youth) trilogy. Avant-slipstream critic Larry McCaffrey called him "the post-modern Poe". Bruce Sterling has cited Shirley's early story collection Heatseeker as being a seminal cyberpunk work in itself. Indeed, several stories in Heatseeker were particularly seminal, including Sleepwalkers, which, in just one example, probably provided the inspiration for William Gibson's "meat puppets" in Neuromancer. Gibson acknowledged Shirley's influence and borrowing ideas from Shirley in his introduction to Shirley's City Come A-Walkin.
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