The response to the midterm ballot has been nuanced and uneven, suggesting that many of America's partners would prefer to see themselves confronting not so much a cataclysm as shifting ground rules whose import cannot yet be reliably computed.
And for many, the aftermath of a disaster that killed more than 1,800 people, displaced over a million and caused regional damage up to $151bn proved not so much a cataclysm as a continuation of business as usual.
The books feature time travel, and focus on events in Istar before the Cataclysm, as well as the ensuing Dwarfgate Wars.
The novel ends, as it must, with a cataclysm at the moment of triumph, but Gerald lives on.
Even if it does, barring a cataclysm such as a Soviet-style collapse, it will still, in a few years, have a bigger economy than America's.
The other was the announcement last month that astronomers had tentatively traced the existence of gold in the universe to a cataclysm known as a gamma-ray burst, which can light up a galaxy.
Recently, a number of reviewers have argued that with its paranoia, its intimations of disaster, Don DeLillo's entire fictional output was geared toward a cataclysm such as 9/11 - and that, when it finally happened, it blew out his artistic lights.
The Old World's febrile, involuted energies seem pregnant with the century's coming cataclysms — as well as with the clean, surveillance-ready brightness of modern architecture and therapeutic psychiatry arising from the ruins.
Atwood's pilgrim in Hell is Snowman, who, following a genetically engineered viral cataclysm, is, as far as he knows, the only human being who has survived.
Not everyone here, of course, views the dispute as a cataclysm.
The lead single, "Bigger Than Us," has the guitarist Harry McVeigh wailing a chorus that depicts a breakup as a cataclysm.
