Sci Fi Wire has the best list of the year -- hands down. It's a list of 15 Doomsday prophecies. Naturally, they were all disappointments for folks looking for a little global drama.
Maybe the Mayans won't let us down in 2012.
Perhaps the most justifiable moment of End Times fervor came with the decade-long dance of death that swept over most of the Western world in the mid-1300s:
Well, with most of the world dying while covered in enormous, frostbite-colored sacs of pus from India to Iceland, thinking the world was about to end might not have seemed that unreasonable a supposition. Great fun abounds in the new iconography of the era, with skeletons (scary ones, not the Tim Burton-y, singing kind) carrying off the living. French doctor de Covino of Liège says that it seems as if one infected person "can infect the whole world." Florentine chronicler Villani thinks the plague was "divine action" the purpose of which might be to wipe out humanity, like the biblical flood.
There's much more where that came from. Sadly, they all conclude with Earth still rotating on its slightly tilted axis.
