Website: apex-magazine.com

"Wondrous Days" Author: Genevieve Valentine Main Characters: Unnamed Main Elements: Science Fiction - Post-Apocalyptic "White Christmas" Author: James F. Reilly Main Characters: Bob, Billy, Margot, Linda Main Elements: Science Fiction - Post-Apocalyptic Non-Fiction 2012: The Good, the Bad, and the Apocalyptic by Dr. Amy H. Sturgis Interview with Genevieve Valentine by Stephanie Jacob

"Wondrous Days" - The end of the Mayan calendar becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, to be honest I found this one somewhat boring. I did like the twist that it seems to have been human caused rather than some mystical event, but otherwise all we had was two characters that hated each other and a somewhat confusing backstory...(probably not that confusing but I ended up skimming it.

"White Christmas" - This one is a little more interesting, but other than being a massive snowstorm, the kind of thing people have and will continue to live through. Yyes, this one is more extreme but since we see only a small family trapped in a remote chalet, you don't need an apocalyptic snow storm for the story to end exactly the same way. And given it was a short story I was sort of frustrated by all the fluff at the start, I felt like I was reading the Muppets Christmas.

To be honest, given it was the Mayan Apocalypse issue, with only two stories (note, I'm not a post-apocalypse fan to begin with) I wasn't particularly impressed, in fact the non-fiction parts interested me more. But then I'm sitting here in 2021, so not only do I know there was nothing that happened in 2012 (this issue is from 2009 so they could still freely speculate) I've already lived through things like Covid. Perhaps if this was a fantasy themed magazine they could have pulled out a story about the return of the gods or something exciting like that.