Arthur C. Clarke's science-fiction short story "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth" was published in the magazine Future Science Fiction in 1951, at a time of widespread concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the looming possibility of nuclear war.
In the story, the word "Armageddon" is used as an allusion to a place, and to both a prophesied and all-too-present event.
"Armageddon" appears only once in the New Testament of the Bible:
And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. (KJV, Rev. 16:16)
The word also appears only once in "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...":
He [Marvin] was looking upon the funeral pyre of a world—upon the radioactive aftermath of Armageddon.
In...
(The entire section contains 378 words.)
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