Introduction
The Apocalypse Will Be Serialized—and Fun!
The Editors
It is a very unusual thing to publish an epic poem of any kind in the twenty-first century—especially an epic that is specifically science fiction. This wasn’t always the case. Poetry used to be the central literary art. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel and short story may have been on the rise, but poetry reigned as the top form. Lord Byron was a rock star. Longfellow was proof that America had given birth to a national culture.
Storytelling is basic to human nature, and in antiquity, the epic poem was the long form, the novel. There was a reason. Most people weren’t literate and they had to get their story on by listening to someone tell one. Memorizing a long tale is no easy task, especially if your audience is paying you and expecting you to deliver something better than amateur yammer. Memorizing a novel-length epic or two (or ten) is a rather immense undertaking, and without regular rhythm and repeating forms such as rhyme, traditional imagery, kennings and identifying epithets (Zeus does a whole lot of cloud gathering in the Iliad, for instance, and quite a few bone-houses get fatally rattled in Beowulf), probably not possible at all for your average working bard.
Today we read. Well, you and I do, not everyone. So why write an epic poem in iambic pentameter?
Because (i.) it’s cool. And (ii.) there is something about the resonance, the compression, the nicely turned image—the poetry—that entertains and delights even an experienced modern reader. Poetic phrases, ways of expressing something, in an epic poem will get stuck in your head in a manner similar to a song. In fact, exactly as a song will, because that’s what it is. You remember a poem in a different way than you remember a novel. Scenes and characters might pop up when you are thinking about a book you loved. The same thing can happen with an epic, but usually these are accompanied by the way the thing got said.
An epic poem is a novel crossed with a song.
A science fiction epic poem has at its command that great property of science fiction, evoking a sense of wonder in a reader. Science fiction delivers the intellectual and emotional charge of telling stories about what might happen and what people might do about it. It’s just fun to read about stuff like that.
Fred Turner’s epic poem Apocalypse is all those things: cool, as memorable as your favorite song in many spots, and, most of all, entertaining. Fun.
It is the length of a regular novel, but written in ten “books,” perfect for serializing. So that’s what we’re doing. For the next ten weeks, we’ll present the next book from Apocalypse in consecutive installments. When we’re done with the ten books, we will gather them together as an ebook that will be available at Baen Ebooks and ebook retailers everywhere.
Just as with any decision to publish, we have a few considerations. First of all, Fred assumes that global warming is real and manmade. We know many Baen readers are skeptical of such an assumption. Heck, some of us editors are, too. But we think that they’ll find it worth suspending their disbelief long enough to get to the meat of Fred’s story: if the Earth is drowning, should we give up or do something about it?
Fred’s main characters are very determinably in the “do something about it” camp, and that “something” is geo-engineering. We may have broken the world, but we, humans, are also the greatest creation of nature. We not only can use science and engineering to save the world, we should. Mankind must not be allowed to die, even if the bulk of men seem to have every intention of offing themselves either accidentally through malice or on purpose by surrendering to some soul-killing meme of inevitability. Fred’s Noah Blazo, “Lucy” Wu Liqiu, Annie Grotius, and others in his cabal of scientists, thinkers, and warriors, are having none of this.
They figure out what to do. They act. And they fight to achieve what they know has to happen if the planet is to be saved—even if when it comes to engaging in a major naval battle with the Russian and Chinese navies (not to give out any spoilers, but Noah and his gang may just be tested in keeping to those convictions during the course of the story).
Fred Turner himself is a major modern poet. He is Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Fred has published over thirty books, including epic poems, books on Shakespeare, science fiction, and many collections of poetry, criticism, and poetry in translation. He’s won several awards and prizes, including Hungary's highest literary honor and Poetry Magazine's highest prize, and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize internationally dozens of times.
Fred considers himself a poet in the tradition of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe who saw their work as expressing all the voices and dreams of their culture, including its sciences, its other arts, its commerce and customs and communities and loves.
Fred is also a second degree black belt. Most of all, Fred has written many great poems, including two other science fiction epics, one of which, The New World, received global acclaim when it debuted and has become a modern classic in the epic form.
So here is Frederick Turner’s newest epic, Apocalypse, presented in ten installments on the Baen Books main web site, and then collected complete as an ebook that will appear when the serialization is done.
Watch every Thursday from now until the end of September 2016 for new sections of the epic to publish on the Baen.com front page. You can link back to previously published serialized segments, and Fred provides a helpful synopsis at the beginning of each to bring the reader up to speed on the story. He also includes a short description of the main action (without spoilers) for what is coming up in the current book of the epic.
So, without further fanfare, here is Book One of Apocalypse, an Epic Poem by Frederick Turner.