IN THESE LATTER DAYS, apocalyptic narratives abound -- stories that help us imagine the end of times, address or avoid real-world crises, and make sense (or fun) of history. We'll read and view works in such genres as the nuclear disaster story (Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove), the paranoid quest romance (Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49), the end-time narrative (Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor), the superhero apocalypse (Alan Moore and David Gibbons' Watchmen), the millennial fantasy (Tony Kushner's Angels in America), the biocatastrophe thriller (Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake), and the migration crisis story (Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men). We’ll reflect on Biblical apocalypses and explore contemporary conspiracy theories, writing critical essays and a final project involving research. These are texts that can be called "apocalyptic," whether because they envision the end of the world (or something like it) or because they offer a "revelation" of secrets about what's really going on. (As we’ll see, apocalyptic thinking can take a conspiratorial form, and conspiracy theories will not be neglected.) We’ll treat the narratives we study -- older and newer, religious and secular, familiar and weird -- as attempts to make stories out of the mess of human history in order to frighten, comfort, instruct or transform us. We'll pay attention to what they show about narrative form and to what they try to say about real-world issues: power, inequality, violence, money, subversion, sexuality, mind control, the death of nature, and the birth of troubling tomorrows. This is not a course in "science fiction," a term almost meaningless by now, but SF-like materials will appear in it. Questions? Write sad4@cornell.edu.