ISBN: 165494769; 9781625494764
Pub. Date: February 2025
Up until a few years ago, poet and literary historian Kim Roberts had never watched an American science fiction film. When her friend and fellow poet, Michael Gushue, learned of this gap in Ms. Roberts’s cultural development, he set out to provide a crash course on the genre. To be clear, we are not speaking here of movies set in outer space — neither the old-style kitschy variations on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, nor the big blockbuster epics such as Star Wars or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Also not under consideration is the spate of works portraying dystopian futures, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to The Hunger Games. Rather, the focus is on a narrow subset of science fiction set right here on Planet Earth, in what was the present day when the films were made (mostly in the 1950 and 1960s). Typically the plots revolve around some harrowing threat to life as we know it — alien invaders from beyond the stars, gargantuan radioactive mutants, scientific experiments gone monstrously awry.
Together, Roberts and Gushue (along with friends) viewed twenty classic examples of this subset. In turn, the project resulted in a collaborative poetic dialogue, just released in book form — Q & A for the end of the world [ Kim Roberts and Michael Gushue; WordTech Editions, 2025]. At first glance their collection might seem a wry romp, a nostalgic revery, a paean to a by-gone era of cinematic innocence now eclipsed by high-tech wizardry and CGI. Well it is that. On one level. But do not be deceived.
It is perhaps no coincidence that a book about various imagined ends of the world arrives at a moment when imagination is increasingly overruled by encroaching reality, when it is difficult to get up in the morning without a sense of impending doom. “There’s a crack in the world,” Michael Gushue writes in his opening poem (“The End of the World”), “It [is] another day exactly like today”. Kim Roberts laments for “… all the lessons / we failed to learn … about … the hubris of man”. (“I have so many questions after watching Mothra Vs Godzilla”)
The allusion in Roberts’s poem is to climate change, the impending (some would say ongoing) devastation of the ecosphere. But elsewhere in their dialogue, the poets’ focus shifts, as well it should. “Don’t tell me that People / allow their humanity to drain away’, Roberts exclaims ( “I have so many questions after watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers”). And sadly, we all know the answer. They can, and do, surrender their humanity — even while they sleep. Especially while they sleep.
In his response regarding the same film, Gushue tells us “Terror is nothing but the beginning / of a kiss…. The real meaning of fear / is not the kiss. It’s the answer / to the question you have been asking / from the beginning: What’s missing? Nothing.” (“I have the answers to Invasion of the Body Snatchers”)
As the dialogue continues, questions and answers revolve in an ever-widening gyre. Are the authors telling us the centre cannot hold? Roberts asks “Will we descend / to our baser selves or learn / that fright is our true foe?” (“I have so many questions after watching The Thing from Another World”). Further along, in his response to “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, Gushue asks “What does it mean for us to have free will / when everything is at stake? The earth / stands still; we are terrified of moving”. (“I have the answers to The Day the Earth Stood Still”)
This reader begins to wonder whether there are really any answers at all? Or are our questions the best answers we can devise? How fitting that the final film discussed in this book is also the most enigmatic — the 1962 film, La Jetée. Consisting almost entirely of still frames, with no dialogue but an overdubbed narration, the movie’s topic is time travel and its paradoxes. The still images are confusing, seemingly disconnected, a post-apocalyptic revery. A man remembers watching a man die as a boy. Or does he? Or was he the murdered man? Were boy and man one and the same? “[R]emembering and oblivion / are cells in the mind’s chambered nautilus,” Gushue writes, and admits that the film raises questions for which he has no answers.
The only moving
part of La Jetée is a brief moment
where a woman wakes up in bed at dawn.
She looks straight into the camera, smiles.
It’s over in an instant. Birds can be heard
on the soundtrack. I don’t know what it means.
(“I have no answers for La Jetée”)
Despite the weighty issues they confront, both authors avoid overt didactics — They are showing us a series of visions of the future as imagined by filmmakers over half a century ago, a fraught future to be sure, where danger lurks and nothing is as it seems. The poems are in conversation with each other and with the reader. It is as if we are listening in while two friends, after viewing these films, chat about what they have just seen, perhaps over coffee or glasses of wine. Their words never get in the way of either the experience or the ideas evoked. That’s not an easy trick to manage, but Roberts and Gushue handle it ably.
This reader must confess to having seen only a smattering of the films covered in “Q & A for the end of the world”. He is aware of the remainder, if at all, only through reputation. But Roberts and Gushue convey their mutual enthusiasm for the genre, and this made me keen to see more. (I am especially intrigued by La Jetée, even knowing that in some respects it may be an outlier.) Yes, it is true that one may peruse this collection and take it solely on face value — a work of love for an often overlooked aspect of pop culture and cinematic history. And for that alone, an evening with Q & A for the end of the world will be time well spent. But there is more to be found if one probes — so many questions, not only about the films themselves, but about human nature — our need for certainty in the face of the unknown, our dismay when that certainty is stripped away. Questions, too, about modern society and where all this is taking us.
Like Gushue and Roberts, I have no answers. I can only advise that you read this book and “Keep watching the skies.”
Q & A for the end of the world; Kim Roberts & Michael Gushue; WordTech Editions, 2025.
• Luther Jett is the author of seven published books of poetry, including Flying to America, The Colour Wars, as well as two unpublished novels.
W. Luther Jett is a native of Montgomery County, Maryland and a retired special educator. His poetry has been published in numerous journals as well as several anthologies. He is the author of six poetry chapbooks: “Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father”, (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and “Our Situation”, (Prolific Press, 2018), “Everyone Disappears” (Finishing Line Press, 2020), “Little Wars” (Kelsay Books, 2021), “Watchman, What of the Night?” (CW Books, 2022), and “The Colour Wars”, which has just been released by Kelsay Books. His full-length collection, “Flying to America” was released by Broadstone Press in spring, 2024.