An exclusive sneak peek of APOCALYPSE
Read on for my favorite deleted scene
Come see me talk about APOCALYPSE!
Friday, May 16 at 6 p.m. at Cellar Door Bookstore!
Saturday, May 17 at 7 p.m. at Automata! RSVP here!
And I have an op-ed about disasters and community in the storied New York Post today! Click through to find out if I got eviscerated by the headline or not!
It was, unfortunately, a good time to sell a book called APOCALYPSE in the summer of 2020. And it is, unfortunately, a good time to be publishing it on May 6, 2025 (this Tuesday!). But it’s also a hard time for any book to break through The Chaos, even when its ideas are tragically (or rather, I’d argue, excitingly, creatively, bursting-with-opportunities-ly) relevant. Readers do not want or need any more depressing homework about the horrors. And honestly, as a reader of not-that-much nonfiction, I know I’d worry that’s what a book called APOCALYPSE would feel like right now.
Let me assure you that APOCALYPSE does not feel like homework. I worked hard to make it easy and propulsive, and the word I heard most often from those who got an early look was “readable.” But we all know it’s better to show than tell. So here’s a taste of APOCALYPSE you won’t get anywhere else.
Below is a deleted scene I originally wrote for my chapter on the conquest of Mexico (otherwise known, to current Aztec heads and future APOCALYPSE readers, as the Mexica-Tlaxcalteca war that some Europeans were also there for). That chapter is already the longest in the book, and so I had to sacrifice (ha ha) this darling.
All of the chapters contain reconstructed scenes set in the past like this one. I had such a great time writing them, probably the most fun I’ve ever had writing anything. But up until the book’s third and final draft, I thought they might just be warmups, or exercises, or ways to figure out what I was thinking before I turned on Serious Nonfiction Author voice and wrote the real book. It wasn’t until that last draft that I realized these scenes were the book. And not coincidentally, that was the draft that took APOCALYPSE to the next level, from good-enough-I-guess to the best thing I’ve ever written.
I have to ask one favor before we dive in: Please share this one widely. A book like mine lives and dies by word of mouth, and I’m counting on all of you to go forth and scatter the seeds with your friends, family, and followers. Also, if you teach and want to make APOCALYPSE actual homework for your students, I would be forever grateful, and I think at least some of them would be, too. (Click here to request a desk copy.) Thank you for every share, email forward, class assignment, and personal recommendation. It means everything to me.
And now, the deleted scene!
The family lived in Tlatelolco, the last place to fall. For generations, they had worked with obsidian, chipping and flaking the volcanic glass into blades, spear points, and knives of every size and shape. They also tended a small plot of farmland. The family’s home and workshop sat near a canal that connected their neighborhood with the rest of the island and beyond, but they sold most of their obsidian wares and surplus crops in Tlatelolco’s market, the greatest in the empire. Before the war, it had brimmed with every conceivable product, from everyday staples like corn and obsidian to luxury goods such as jade, feathers, and even enslaved people. By being sold in the Tlatelolco market, the obsidian tools the family manufactured made their way to the empire’s most sacred temples and most humble households.
Tlatelolco had always stood a bit apart from its sister Tenochtitlan, having been founded on the northern part of the island by a breakaway group of nobles after a conflict whose details no one could quite remember. Tenochtitlan may have been home to the most sacred rituals and most lavish displays of imperial wealth, but Tlatelolco’s market kept that wealth flowing into the capital. Its people, including the family, prided themselves on possessing the strength and adaptability needed to thrive in the world of trade. They didn’t rest on their status as residents of the capital and were always seeking out the next opportunity, the next deal, the next move that would strengthen their position. The people of Tlatelolco had always been survivors.
And so, when Tenochtitlan fell after months of the siege, Tlatelolco continued to hold its ground. The latest huey tlatoani and his court fled to their sister city, carrying what they had managed to save from the Great Temple before the foreigners tore it to the ground. The family was proud to fight the invaders, and they were proud to supply the Mexica forces with obsidian weapons. As their neighbors spent their nights repairing and widening the canals the foreigners were trying to fill in, the family did their part in their workshop, churning out as many points and knives as they could. Obsidian was far sharper than the foreigners’ metal swords, but it also dulled quickly and had to be continuously replaced. In the months since the siege started, the family hadn’t been able to get in touch with the traders who brokered with the mining towns to bring raw volcanic glass into the city. Their supplies were running low, but the family was willing to use every last piece they had in the war effort.
It wasn’t only obsidian that was becoming hard to acquire. The previously bustling Tlatelolco market was nearly empty, as hardly any food from the countryside could be smuggled past the siege lines. The family began to rely more and more on their own crops, but their small plot was never intended to fully support them. Worse, the foreigners had demolished the aqueducts that brought fresh water into the city and were intent on destroying the canals that posed such an obstacle to their horses. It was impossible to grow enough food under these conditions, even if the people of Tlatelolco had been the best farmers in the valley. People trapped on the island were starving, filthy, and sick—a sharp reversal from the prosperous, immaculate city that had existed before the war.
The people of Tlatelolco, and the refugees from Tenochtitlan, were prepared to fight to the end. But the new huey tlatoani Cuauhtémoc took his duty seriously, and his most important responsibility as Great Speaker was to ensure that his community survived. Even if it meant giving up power, even if it meant owing tribute to an overlord, even if it meant the future would look little like the past. The Great Speaker had to ensure there was a future at all, that the sun would continue to rise. And so Cuauhtémoc negotiated a surrender, including safe passage for those who wished to escape the ruined city. The family, who had relations in some lakeshore towns and long-standing connections to the obsidian traders and miners in the communities beyond, was one of the many to leave.
Perhaps the family thrived in their new rural lives. Maybe they dedicated themselves to farming, or found a new place within the obsidian trade. Now that so much of the raw volcanic glass was no longer being sent to the capital’s markets and workshops, new trade routes flourished, and people all over the countryside revived obsidian tool-making skills they had lost in the time of Mexica domination and imperial trade. Perhaps the family became obsidian traders, or perhaps they set up a workshop in a village that previously had their tools supplied by the empire but now needed to relearn how to make their own.
Or perhaps the family struggled to find a foothold in the countryside. They might have missed the city, the bustle of the market, the spectacular ceremonies, the sense of living at the heart of things. Perhaps the family didn’t stay away long. Just a few years, maybe a decade at most. Long enough for the worst of the memories to fade, and for much of the city to be rebuilt.
Whether it was the old family or a new one, someone moved back into the house in Tlatelolco just a few years after it had been abandoned at the end of the war. They rebuilt the house and the patio in the same layout they’d had before, and they maintained the canal as best they could. The farm couldn’t be recovered, but the market was back, and so the family, old or new, once again had enough food. They occasionally used the obsidian workshop, but the foreigners insisted on using their metals and so the demand for obsidian tools in the capital was not what it used to be, or what it continued to be in the countryside.
Nearby, the old temples of Tlatelolco had been razed, and a massive new church was being built with their stones. Alongside the church, the new priests founded a school for the children and grandchildren of the Mexica nobility. Occasionally a student from the school would come talk to the family, old or new, about what they remembered about life before the foreigners arrived. They told the family they were writing books about what might otherwise be forgotten—the politics, history, plants, animals, myths, and gods once known by “we people here.” They were also writing about the war itself, and they asked the family about that, too. Tlatelolco’s story was just as important as Tenochtitlan’s, and just as important as the triumphant story the foreigners wanted to tell about those terrible years, they said.
The students would also encourage the family to come to mass or attend the religious plays they were writing and staging. The students wanted the people to see what was good in the foreigners’ religion, which was now also their religion, and how it could help explain what had happened and build a path forward into a new kind of future. Soon they themselves would be priests, the students promised, and they would make sure the people of Tlatelolco were protected in this life and saved in the next.
The family, old or new, always smiled and promised to come to the next mass or play. Sometimes they even went. The plays were exciting, at least. But when members of the family died, they didn’t tell the foreign priests, who always seemed to stay in charge despite what they told their students. The family who lived in this house before the war had always buried their dead around their home’s private shrine, tucked into ceramic vessels or wrapped in cloth bundles and accompanied by offerings of ceramics and obsidian. The family that lived here now either remembered where the burial ground was, or they found it again based on their knowledge of the old traditions, which hadn’t been erased by the war, the church, or the school. They continued to bury their loved ones in the same place, leaving offerings of the new kinds of ceramics the foreigners had brought.
They also buried two old figurines, made before the war. They used to be little more than toys, funny creatures from stories and myths that sat near the family’s shrine. But now they represented both a memory and a threat. The foreigners had forbidden any piece of art that referenced the old religion, destroying as many as they could and replacing them with their crosses and saints. If the students from the school—or worse, the priests—found the figurines, the family could be in trouble.
But the old family had held the figurines close during their escape from the ruined city and sojourn in the countryside. Or perhaps the new family had found them waiting in the house when they moved in, glad to have a home once again. The family, old or new, had heard whispers that many of the gods the foreigners thought had been destroyed were actually buried under the new buildings rising all over the city, waiting for a day when it would be safe to emerge. And so they did the same with their figurines. The people of Tlatelolco knew who they were. They had always been survivors, and they would survive this, too.
Selected Bibliography
The house in Tlatelolco is described in “La otra conquista de Tlatelolco” by José Antonio López, et al., Arqueología Mexicana, Nov-Dec 2021.
Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría explores the resurgence of obsidian craftsmanship in the central Mexican countryside after the conquest in “Narratives of Conquest, Colonialism, and Cutting-Edge Technology,” American Anthropologist, March 2008, as well as his book The Archaeology and History of Colonial Central Mexico: Mixing Epistemologies, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
The students are writing The Florentine Codex.
The archaeologist Raúl Barrera Rodríguez and his colleagues in INAH’s Urban Archaeology Program have found many—though surely not all—of the Indigenous gods hidden beneath downtown Mexico City. You can read much more about that in APOCALYPSE!
