EVERYTHING MUST GO: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, by Dorian Lynskey
When it comes to make-believe disasters, our appetite is endless; yet we’re loath to anticipate real-world disasters until it is too late.
It’s a discrepancy that Dorian Lynskey explores in “Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World,” which happened to land on my desk as wildfires were tearing through Los Angeles. Lynskey, whose previous book was a “biography” of George Orwell’s novel “1984,” charts the doomsday scenarios that have enthralled and terrified people through the centuries. But our current era also offers us an unrelenting stream of catastrophe from around the world; we can no longer find respite from actual bad news. “What is notable now is that apocalyptic angst has become a constant,” Lynskey writes. “All flow and no ebb.”
Lynskey, a British cultural journalist, has the kind of omnivorous sensibility essential for a project like this. He has immersed himself in pulpy sci-fi, gloomy poetry, the literary criticism of Susan Sontag and the Book of Revelation. He sometimes gets so excited about his cultural stockpile that he can get carried away, letting loose a barrage of examples when a bit more restraint would do; at 500 pages (endnotes included), this is a book that would have lost none of its erudition or energy had it been 25 percent shorter.
But Lynskey also happens to be a terrifically entertaining writer, with a requisite sense of gallows humor. The extremity of his subject provides plenty of absurdity to work with. Reflecting on how a Nobel Prize-winning scientist predicted that “On the Beach” (a 1959 film that takes place after a nuclear war) would be “the movie that saved the world,” he notes wryly: “It is amazing what people thought a novel or a movie could achieve.”
This hyperbolic hope springs eternal — the notion that if only a story were hair-raising enough, a complacent public could be “traumatized into awareness.” Such was the case with the atomic bomb, which made for grisly prophecies not only of the sudden carnage of a fiery blast but also of the prolonged suffering of a nuclear winter. In Max Ehrlich’s novel “The Big Eye” (1949), a scientist lies about a planetary collision “in order to scare humanity straight.” Surveying the cultural landscape, Lynskey finds no shortage of “prophylactic predictions.”
“Everything Must Go” begins with a short prologue on God and Armageddon before moving swiftly to a more secular age. Lynskey’s tour starts in earnest in 1816, after the eruption of a volcano in Southeast Asia resulted in a “year without a summer” in Europe. Lord Byron wrote the poem “Darkness,” envisioning a sunless Earth that becomes “a lump of death.” Compared with the heavenly bliss promised at the end of Revelation, Byron’s godless planet was bleak stuff indeed.
The rest of Lynskey’s book is organized thematically, chronicling a churning culture that mirrors back to us our proliferating fears. The more we know about the world, the more we know about the myriad threats that might do it in. Lynskey moves smoothly from apocalyptic tales about comets and asteroids to killer robots and infected zombies. Nuclear annihilation remains a possibility, even if it has receded in the popular imagination as other dangers — pandemics, global warming — have come to the fore.
“Much of what we call postapocalyptic fiction is more accurately described as post-catastrophic,” Lynskey writes. “The world has not ended, but a world has.” What happens after everything is annihilated doesn’t offer much in the way of narrative potential. You need at least a few survivors to keep some dramatic momentum going.
Some stories reflect a “survivalist mindset,” with well-armed preppers prevailing in the aftermath of social collapse. Lynskey, citing an anthropologist, calls these types of narratives a “distinctly American phenomenon.” Many such stories also contain the suggestion, sometimes explicit, that the old civilization was unbearably corrupt and that its violent collapse was overdue. For anyone who chafes at modern life, the post-collapse world can be blessedly simple in its cruelty. The science fiction author David Brin derided these stories as “little-boy wish fantasies about running amok in a world without rules.”
On the flip side are those works that remind us of all the comforts and privileges we currently take for granted. “People often report that exposure to potent images of the end of the world can make the existence of the world as it is seem suddenly miraculous,” Lynskey writes. He also suggests that stories about the apocalypse make us feel less alone. After all, what they depict is a collective experience, however grim. Lynskey recalls a dream he had about the end of the world that left him with “an enormous sense of relief that my own death coincided with everyone else’s.”
But melodramatic fantasies about the end can also serve as a kind of lurid distraction from some of the more persistent problems at hand. The science fiction novelist Ted Chiang has remarked on how Silicon Valley tech bros seem particularly seduced by outlandish dreams of derring-do: “The question of how to create friendly A.I. is simply more fun to think about than the problem of industry regulation, just as imagining what you’d do during the zombie apocalypse is more fun than thinking about how to mitigate global warming.”
And sure enough, Lynskey says, most literary fiction about climate change is characterized by “a terrible impotence.” The novels of Kim Stanley Robinson, who describes his approach as “anti-anti-utopian,” are a notable exception. Lynskey lauds his refusal to resort to the easy binary of irrevocable collapse or glorious triumph. Amid all the plotting pyrotechnics he recounts in this book, it’s the small human details that move Lynskey most. As Robinson writes in “The Ministry for the Future,” “We will cope no matter how stupid things get.”
EVERYTHING MUST GO: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World | By Dorian Lynskey | Pantheon | 500 pp. | $32