Author: !Epic Tomorrows

The Epic Tomorrows of Earth, epictomorrows@gmail.com
Ecology of the absurd, Exclusive to COTW

You can really do it!

!Epic Tomorrows
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”, Shakespeare, Hamlet circa 1600
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”, John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667

Zeal is what you need! Get UP! Get unentranced! True, it is hell, but ride the diamond seams right through it, to where your grateful grand nieces will be waiting. Have an apple a day until there are none left, and then a handful of bitter berries a day, and find a new sweetness in that sharp taste.

Enough enough! I know I know, it worsens by the day, you do not need to tell me. Choose your own private bliss and hold steadfastly to it, do what work you can, enjoy the sunrise but more than ever the sunset and all that it is setting on.

I had a new student today. Just ten years old. He was not very communicative. He told me about his best friend. I asked him, why are you best friends? He replied, because I love him and he loves me. He reminded me that sometimes, love can be beautifully simple.

Zeal is what we need. Imagine the good we could do, even if it were just a few of us. There is zeal in ecology, the way it thrives and burns. But we have become lazy. Soon the Earth will force our hands, and we can thank God or Life at least for that.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, England, Exclusive to COTW

How to ruin a man’s orgasm

!Epic Tomorrows

By Eric Black

The physical techniques are well-known. There is a whole weird subculture online devoted to them. But I refer to the psychological and societal techniques. First, the man should be born into a liberal Western family, which retains just enough unconscious traditional expectation of high male performance as to confuse the young male mind, growing, as it would be, in a free-thinking family which claimed to be indifferent to gender roles. Second, the man should grow to be bisexual, but not to be too comfortable in his bisexuality. Third, his parents should divorce at a young age, with the father leaving the family and maintaining only brief fortnightly contact. Fourth, the man, as a teenager, should over-use alcohol, cannabis, and porn, should go to the wrong university, should leave early and not get a degree, should enter into homo-erotic friendships where neither side admitted the homo-eroticism and where the other guy would dominate the friendship, making it difficult for the man to socialize in a wide and balanced way; and should break up with his first girlfriend, painfully, after a couple of years. Fifth, the man should develop serious mental health problems in his early 20s, feeling like a failure, should make friends with people who later killed themselves, and should have all his prospects for making a living destroyed by peer pressure, the expectations of the university-uneducated and a persistent nagging low self-esteem. Sixth, the man should go through his 2os with no sexual contact with anyone, forcing his sexuality to become auto-erotic, exhausting his orgasms to the point of no return, almost breaking them. Seventh, the man should finally find a long-term partner, but whom he is ultimately not suited to and does not have regular sex with, ending in a protracted and tortuous break-up.

And yet, all this may not be quite enough to totally ruin a mans orgasm, because the man may marry a kind and understanding person, of whatever gender, who may help him to explore his sexuality, who may help him to recover his hardness, as well as his softness, who may support his critique of this abusive society, who may stay with him till the end.

Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Popular & established authors

The Fate of the World: The History & Future of the Climate Crisis by Bill McGuire

!Epic Tomorrows

The Fate of the World: The History & Future of the Climate Crisis by Bill McGuire, was released today on 21st May 2026. Bill McGuire is a volcanologist, climate scientist, activist, keynote speaker and writer of popular science and speculative fiction.

*******

Bill is Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL, a Co-director of the New Weather Institute, a Patron of Scientists for Global Responsibility, and Special Scientific Advisor to WordForest.Org. Bill has a personal connection with the founding editor of Centre of the Web, Matthew Azuley: Bill kindly wrote the introduction, for free, for the anthology Climate Collapse? -Calls to Action from Around the World, compiled and edited by Matthew Azuley and published by Arkbound.

Matthew is delighted about the release of Bills new book, although perhaps delighted is not quite the right word to use, in the context of unfolding climate collapse. Matthew remembers how impressed he was with Bills very accessible introduction text for Climate Collapse? Bill is a great science communicator, and he puts to shame other climate science communicators. Below is an example, an extract from the introduction to Climate Collapse?

We are in deep, deep sh*t. It’s what I told a BBC journalist interviewing me in 2021 about our failing climate, and nothing has happened since to alter my view. Indeed, things have gotten considerably worse. Whether we accept it or not, our climate is already broken to such a degree that it will have a colossal impact upon every aspect of our lives, the lives of our children and their children, and the lives of those to come, not just for years, but for millennia. 2023 and 2024 were the hottest on record, and quite probably saw the highest temperatures since the warmth of the last interglacial period, 125,000 years or so ago. Already supercharged weather has become even more monstrous, exemplified by catastrophic flooding in Spain and apocalyptic wildfires in southern California. Prospects are bleak, to say the least, but before delving more deeply into the future of our overheating world, let’s begin with the current state of play...

Buy Bills new book here.

Exclusive to COTW, FLASH!

Marabella, Hot and Cold

!Epic Tomorrows

By Dan Nawaz

Chauncy Clemens was leaping through the bonfire when his dress went up. We were untouchable ‘til then. 

We, the Marabella Sarcophagi, danced and took bolt filtre in the ash-fed southern forest every week. Most of us were the children of second generation Pelivosi —so there was never a shortage of cash for our elaborate homemade robes, or for our filtre and booze, and I never felt guilty about taking it. 

As Chauncy burned nobody was screaming. We were grieving the end of a lovely time alone, ending before our eyes. He was ever strange to me. Stubborn —could never take no for an answer, that boy, and in truth I was glad of him going even as I watched in that moment. 

Bolt filtre made you optimistic though. Like fire blossoming inside you. So when I started hacking him apart the rest became relieved, even enthusiastic to join in. We took parts of Chauncy home and hid him in our bedrooms away from adult eyes. Others —who knows who— fed him to the dog and buried him in the park and ate him and pickled him and asked him what it was like being dead and being everywhere at once. He was only ever taken to the reaches of ourselves, barely out of school mostly, but knowing he had made it out of reach to some secret place beyond sight, many of them began to nurture a sickly envy for the dead boy. I knew it from their look, coming back to the forest parties. From their hushed conversation and red eyed stare.  

I learned some weeks later that some of the Sarcophagi had begun bringing their scraps of Chauncy to the dances. I caught Annie Gorbale talking into her hands and yanked her to the treeline. 

“Fuck’re you doing Annie?”

“Doing nothing.”

I slapped her curd of a cheek and she dropped him, a blackened thing like tree bark. 

“He said he wants to dance.”

“Quit your nonsense, you’re scaring the new kids.” 

“But it’s you he wants to dance with,” Annie said with her wet eyes and her butterfly gown, and picked up the charred lump I saw was wrapped in dark, stained gingham like a bridal favour. The air was thick and I felt behind me the dance had slowed. I felt bodies breathing at my back, a whole crowd swaying together. Their presence thrummed as a group of many but more keenly as a single glaring and grave-sour scorn. They felt hot. Smelled like him too, like sour chocolate milk. Not my Sarcophagi anymore. Chauncy’s.

So, we danced. And when Chauncy wanted to kiss we kissed, and I tasted him distilled. And after, when I could breathe again and I was allowed to be scared properly I found myself carrying him still, even in my room, still kissing him when we were alone like he’d always wanted of me.

And it was like playing. Guessing how I might die each time, and when I guessed right at last, just laughing. It was the funniest thing. Laughing together because even Chauncy, even now, he didn’t know himself how it all happened or whatever was coming next. 

Outside the streets were dark and cold but dinner was waiting downstairs.

Collapse chats & diaries, Ecology of the absurd, Reflections

Learning To Live Slowly

!Epic Tomorrows

By Robin Boardman, co-founder of the global Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement; originally published on April 7 2026 on Robin’s website here. Republished with his permission.

This week, I let go of the last small thread of work I’d been holding onto with Revolution in the 21st Century. A few hours here and there — just enough to feel like I was still the person I used to be. Still contributing. Still part of something I’d spent years building.

But my brain has shut down to that kind of work now. So I wrote a gentle goodbye email to the team, and a farewell on social media. I’m hoping that by shrinking my world — and my worries — I might give my body the space it needs to recover.

Now I’m lying down with a migraine, dictating these thoughts into my phone. Speaking, in a strange way, both into the void and into the world’s largest language machine.

Chronic illness takes things from you slowly, and then sometimes all at once. Work — that identity of doing and producing — was one of the last things I was still quietly clutching. Letting it go feels significant. Not just practical, but existential.

Who am I, if not someone who does? What do I do when I see climate collapse unfolding across our gorgeous blue-green earth, yet live bound by these four walls?

I’m still working that out. My values are the same. My love and motivation undimmed. Yet physically, I can give a lot less. So meaning has gotten smaller. More specific.

I’ve started sewing again — patches, small art projects, techniques I haven’t touched since school. I bake for my housemates and neighbours. I keep the common spaces clean because I’ve noticed how much it changes the feeling of coming home to something cared for.

It’s not the life I imagined for my twenties. It looks, in some ways, closer to that of a retiree. But there’s an honest craft in it. A kind of housebound purposefulness — stripped of the stereotype associations of age or gender. Just a person who happens to be home a lot, trying to make that mean something for the people around them.

I hold it lightly. Some days it feels like a silver lining. Other days, it just feels like what’s left.

The hardest part, most days, isn’t the physical limitation. It’s the relational cost.

Illness makes you unpredictable. Unavailable. Hard to reach.

People you love have their own rhythms — their own crises, their own windows of openness. And when your body doesn’t run on a schedule, you miss each other. You fall out of sync.

So you find other ways.

Letters. Voice notes. Small things made with care. Slower, more asynchronous forms of love.

It’s an adjustment. And it’s ongoing.

Not everyone understands. Some are drifting away. That’s okay. I’m taking it one day at a time.

I’m still doing EMDR therapy. Still trying to bring my nervous system somewhere closer to rest — films, audiobooks, sitting in the garden, whatever works on a given day. Still watching for those small windows of recovery, and trying not to measure my life only by their absence.

Six years in, I’m not the person I was before.

But I’m still here. Still finding small ways to nourish the life I actually have. Still trying to keep despair at a distance with purpose, however quiet.

That feels like enough, for now.