I found the conception of the Apocalypse in Samuel Delaney's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand the most interesting part of the book. Delaney’s idea of how worlds end is so different from other books and from popular thought. For one thing, it is not really an Apocalypse, an end of days – life, and culture, goes on even after a world has been destroyed by that enigmatic thing, the Cultural Fugue. Secondly, the world does not end by asteroid collision, or by a trigger-happy country with too many nuclear warheads but by information, and by culture.

The characters are a little fuzzy in explaining exactly how information and culture destroys worlds, but it does not sound nearly as flashy. The closest anyone gets to defining what constitutes a Cultural Fugue, that I could find at least, is when Marq Dyeth says Cultural Fugue happens when “the socioeconomic pressures…reach a point of technological recomplication and perturbation where the population completely destroys all life across the planetary surface” (66). Frustratingly vague for a reader who does not know when the critical point of “technological recomplication and perturbation” is generally reached, and how exactly the population destroys itself. Would a nuclear holocaust fit under the umbrella of the Cultural Fugue? Even if it does, it is presumably not the only way, so what other dastardly ways does life have of snuffing itself out? Are they ways we have not even conceived of yet?

Regardless of how exactly life ends, the general threat has been deemed to be information. Exactly how one deals with such a threat is a major point of difference for the political movements of the worlds, but no one seems to deny that it does pose some kind of a threat. In the prologue, the Rat’s owner describes the boundless knowledge of General Information, then goes on to say: “Can you imagine? Living in a world where, if you want to know something – anything, anything at all! – all you have to do is think about it, and the answer pops into your head? That’s supposed to be how it works. Even our Free-Informationists are scared to go that far. They think we’d slide over into Cultural Fugue in a minute!” (24). People need protection, not from guns or bombs or meteors, but from knowledge, which seems so innocuous in and of itself.

Another major difference is that the Apocalypse (I’m not sure what else to call it) is something definite, a real threat that has actually happened in the recorded past and will definitely happen again, somewhere, in the future. It is not some vague threat that may or may not ever happen. In addition, the concept of the end of the world is not quite so catastrophic in Delaney’s universe. If one world ends, there are more around to continue. They are there to take in the few survivors, mourn the dead, and carry on culture and society. If my planet were to implode in Cultural Fugue, I wonder whether I would be reassured or annoyed that somewhere in the known universe, everyday life is toodling along, unconcerned with my death.