The 'end time' is a term that conjures a future that is dystopian or apocalyptic. That the Pandemic is undeniably dystopian, and the climate crisis apocalyptic, makes Bruno Macaes' book Geopolitics for the End Time: From the Pandemic to The Climate Crisis an unsettling one to read. Discussion of geopolitics could be expected to take an inherently broad approach - however, the initial section of the book is highly personal. At the start of the Pandemic, Macaes was travelling in Asia, attending conferences. His interest in simile and metaphor is clear. He argues that 'technology works as an insurance policy' (4), describes Dubai as Casablanca in the 1940s, 'a free city where pandemic exiles can congregate' (5), and compares life in the Pandemic to 'space travel' (1). The last of these metaphors attempts to do more than illustrate the dystopian nature of the early months of 2020. It is used to suggest that 'the best image for our natural environment is not the pleasant greenery of the countryside ... but empty space, a medium fundamentally indifferent to human life' (8). A place in which, after all, coronaviruses exist.
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