WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

n the 2016 film , the end of the world happens suddenly. People can barely remember what life was like only days before an invasion—in this case, by extraterrestrials that could as easily be a virus—and while alarm and panic are common, initially humanity is incapable of sorting its way through chaos, stupidity, and delusion to arrive at courage, coordination, and farsightedness. All of this is to say that if you saw when it was released, it was one movie, and if you watched it hunkered down in your overground bunker during the Great COVID Storm of 2020, it was a different movie. By the same token, this piece you’re reading now about science-fiction movies—which, in the time-looping spirit of , was written before I wrote it—is different from the piece written in an alternate present when we weren’t all living in our own science-fiction movie. Welcome to Paradoxia, the