The Cambridge fens are submerged; East Anglia is evacuated; in London, the Thames Barrier has been activated. Mostly, however, Great Britain has been spared the worst of the great North Sea hurricane of 2067. Instead, the storm shifts east, “Swollen with heat and with the melting bergs / Calved from the West Antarctica ice collapse.” Holland's giant dikes are breached and a 40-foot wave of mud and seawater crashes through central Amsterdam. A desperate curator in the flooding Rijksmuseum

With an X-Acto knife and guided by red emergency lights, she cuts Rembrandt's Night Watch from its frame and drags the massive canvas to an upper floor as the north wing of the museum collapses. This is the spectacular opening scene of Frederick Turner's third epic poem Apocalypse (2016), appearing three decades after his two earlier epics, The New World (1985) and Genesis (1988). All three send the epic imagination to an unfamiliar destination, one far removed from Tolkien’s: to future time rather than the historical or mythical past.

The future was rarely a locale for literature in any genre before the nineteenth century. Dante put fortunetellers who had the effrontery to pronounce on future events in the eighth circle of hell where they had their heads twisted around so that they were forced to face backward. The future was god's province and human efforts to prophesy the events of time to come were reckless, if not blasphemous. In Paradise Lost Adam, after being given visions of the future history of the world by the archangel Michael, finds the experience so devastating that he warns his descendants, “Let no man seek / Henceforth to be foretold what shall befall / Him or his children.” Not until Mary Shelley's The Last Man in 1826, a narrative about the end of the human race by plague at the beginning of the twenty-second century, did a major English novel take the future as its setting.