The term ‘apocalypse’ is currently understood to mean mass destruction, the end of the human race or the planet as a whole, or at least some sort of global disaster. As we know, however, the word literally means ‘revelation,’ and it was used as the title of the text that eventually became the final book of the Bible. Yet for most scholars who specialise in apocalyptic studies, an apocalyptic text must include an eschatological element. Nowadays, the term ‘apocalyptic science fiction’ refers to fantastic literature about the destruction of humanity, however that end comes about. How, then, did the Greek word for ‘revelation’ come to mean something far more limited: a revelation of the end-times? In other words, how did the eschatological element become a defining feature of a genre in which it may well have played only an incidental role when the genre was established? To understand this development, we might turn to recent genre theory, and particularly to the literary application of psychological theories on taxonomy. One such theory involves the role of the prototype: the instance or example of a type that becomes the model by which we categorise other phenomena as belonging to the same type. It may well be, then, that while in St. John’s day, an ‘apocalypse’ could be any sort of revelatory text, Revelation itself – through its canonisation – became the prototypical apocalyptic text, one that forever changed the genre by making eschatology a necessary feature of a ‘true’ apocalypse.

Storytelling has been an important part of human culture ever since the first civilizations arose. Stories have been used to record customs, convey morals, tell origins, and provide entertainment. There are several reasons why we enjoy stories. One is their linear style, which stabilizes the world we are talking about. Because the only way to get from the beginning of the story to the end is to hear the whole thing, the listener becomes very involved in the story. As listeners of stories we place ourselves in the time and place of the story and feel the same conflicts that the characters are going through. While the first stories were told orally, today we use many other forms of media to tell our stories. The two most prominent forms of telling stories today are through text, with books and magazines, and motion video, with movies and television. Both a text and a film do a great job of maintaining the linear style of oral storytelling. As the readers still have to reconstruct the story in their heads while being guided through the narrative, written stories involve the readers in their plot. By combining audio and visual elements, a film depicts action and environment in a more realistic way. Visual media have a tendency to make viewers more passive, because such media do not require them to image the story happening, still there are other techniques to increase viewer’s involvement in a film. The genre is the way a story is told, it is impossible to imagine a story without a genre. The genre theory says that communication genre is a form of communication that is adopted by a formal or informal community, which uses the communication medium in a similar way for a similar purpose. A new genre is generally based on one or more existing genres that are modified, repurposed, and/or remediated, often from the adoption of a new medium. The aim of this chapter is to understand the forms and purpose of new media genres and to analyze how they change the channels of communication of traditional genres.