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A meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency.
 
When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge.

In December 1993, gaming changed forever. id Software's seminal shooter DOOM was released, and it shook the foundations of the medium. Daniel Pinchbeck brings together the complete story of DOOM for the first time.

This book takes a look at the early days of first-person gaming and the video game studio system. It discusses the prototypes and the groundbreaking technology that drove the game forward and offers a detailed analysis of gameplay and level design. Pinchbeck also examines DOOM's contributions to wider gaming culture, such as online multiplay and the modding community, and the first-person gaming genre, focusing on DOOM's status as a foundational title and the development of the genre since 1993. Pinchbeck draws extensively from primary data: from the game itself, from the massive fan culture surrounding the title, and from interviews with the developers who made it. This book is not only the definitive work on DOOM but a snapshot of a period of gaming history, a manifesto for a development ethos, and a celebration of game culture at its best.

William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City imagines the destruction of London as a result of human-induced environmental devastation, the threat of which is becoming increasingly visible today. This urban apocalypse narrative connects to pressing cultural discussions on global warming, modern life in cities, public health, and the interconnectivity of human life on earth. This first critical edition of Hay’s novella makes available his account of one man’s tale of survival amidst a toxic fog—a survival that includes his relocation to Maoriland in New Zealand. The editors foreground the relevance of the story to present and future pandemics, the persistence of environmental disasters, and the global population’s ongoing migration to cities. They place the narrative in dialogue with nineteenth-century concerns about climate change, pollution, natural resources, health care, empire, and (sub)urbanization that have remained significant challenges as we come to terms with the lasting impacts of the Anthropocene in the twenty-first century.