RUPERT GILES: It’s the end of the world.
SCOOBY GANG (in unison): Again??!!

Pat and I dearly loved the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For one thing, we could relate to the show’s perpetual threat of apocalypse. Just about every other week, poor Buffy had to wrangle the demon hordes of multiple hell dimensions, keeping them from rising up and overtaking the earth. Typically, her direst obstacle to saving the world was being grounded by her mother.

Pat and I have been married and writing together for a quarter of a century. Like Buffy, we’ve seen lots of apocalypses come and go, although most of them have fizzled out without the Slayer’s heroics. Back in the latter half of the twentieth century, nobody expected civilization to make it through the 90s. At the very least, America’s great coastal cities would be destroyed by earthquakes, and much of the country would be underwater. Then came the millennium itself, with technology promising more trouble than all twenty-two chapters the Book of Revelation put together. Remember that computer glitch that was supposed to plunge humanity back into the stone age?

And now we’ve got the so-called end of the Mayan calendar looming, just a couple of months away. As it happens, Pat and I have done some homework on the subject. We recently published our Living Now Book Award-winning novel Mayan Interface, which meditates on both ancient Mayan traditions and today’s headlong rush into cyberreality. The story is set this very year. And believe me, I’m not spoiling the plot in the least by revealing that it does not feature an apocalypse.

The whole end-of-the-world scenario stems from a widespread misinterpretation of the end of the 13th b’ak’tun of the Mayan calendar—specifically, the date 13.0.0.0.0, better known to most of us as December 21, 2012. It’s really the end of a cycle, not the end of the world. Mayan calendar dates for the future include one that’s still 41 octillion years away—a time that I, for one, have no idea how to even think about. Besides, the ancient Maya considered cyclical completions to be cause for celebration, not dread. A big party might be in order.

So the world is not going to end on December 21, 2012 …
… and people need to get ready for it.

Pat and I are alarmed at how unprepared the world is for this calendrical non-event. Human transformation is an everyday occurrence—or at least it needs to be. If people think they’ll be relieved of all responsibility to grow and learn by some cosmos-obliterating cataclysm, conscious evolution might stop dead in its tracks for a critical mass of human souls by the time the sun unexpectedly rises on December 22. And that’s a catastrophe worth worrying about.

Of course, New-Age-ish spins on this date predict something more benign—a kind of extraterrestrial intervention in human evolution. But as far as we’re concerned, this is scarcely less scary than the end-of-the-world scenario. It proposes that something out there is going to suddenly do our own job of personal and cultural transformation. Our very lethargy becomes a sort of solution to the world’s manifold problems.

Pat and I are not in the business of saving humankind from its own laziness. So what can we neofoxes do to keep this non-event from throwing a massive kink in the realization of human potential?

This may not sound like much, but …

 … we can tell Story.

As the protagonist of our novel puts it, stories “re-write the mind.”

And we think that Mayan Interface is a dandy Story to mark the end of the 13th b’ak’tun.