Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About The End of the World
Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About The End of the World
A riveting and brilliantly original exploration of our fantasies of the end of the world, from Byron's 'Darkness' and Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Adam McKay's Don't Look Up and Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron, by the Baillie Gifford and Orwell prize-shortlisted author of The Ministry of Truth and co-host of the podcast 'Origin Story'.
For two millennia, Christians have looked forward to the end, haunted by the apocalyptic visions of the Biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. Few now believe that 'the end of the world is nigh' in a Biblical sense. But for two centuries or more, these dark fantasies have given way to secular stories of how the world, our planet, or our species (or all of the above) might come to an end.
Dorian Lynskey's fascinating new book explores the endings that we have read, listened to or watched over the last two dozen decades, whether they be by the death and destruction of a nuclear holocaust or collision with a meteor or comet, devastating epidemic or takeover by robots or computers. In literature, science fiction, film and even music, such fantasies of doom have run through our culture for two centuries, informed by scientific developments from the creation of the atomic bomb to the invention of the computer or the robot.
As the world emerges from a devastating epidemic and our newspapers are full of stories of fires, floods and hurricanes, as we focus on the implications of AI and the use of nuclear weapons seems more likely than it has for decades, these stories - and what they say about us - seem more relevant than ever. And yet every decade since 1816's 'year without a summer' has seen its own fears. We may expect the end, but so did our parents, grandparents and forebears.
The result is nothing less than a cultural history of the modern world, weaving together politics, history, science, high and popular culture in a book that is uniquely original, grippingly readable and deeply illuminating about both us and our times.
Reviews
I was blown away by this book. The staggering range of references, the razor-sharp analysis, the wisdom, left me gasping out loud at times. Lynskey also somehow manages to make a book about the end of the world feel... hopeful. One of the best non-fiction writers around.
Impossibly epic, brain-expanding, life-affirming and profound. You’ll never see humanity the same way again.
Lynskey has a journalist's eye for a great story and a killer quotation... ridiculously well informed.
EVERYTHING MUST GO will make you happy to be alive and reading - until the lights go out... Brilliant.
A brilliant, scholarly, sharp and witty account of our weird eternal obsession with the end times... So enjoyable, that I didn't want it to end - the world, or the book.
Incredibly deeply researched, fluently written, moving deftly between close-up detail and broad-brush analysis.
EVERYTHING MUST GO is so engagingly plotted and written that it’s a pleasure to bask in its constant stream of remarkable titbits and illuminating insights.
With rich analysis and a remarkable level of research, Everything Must Go allows readers to feel a connection with generations past and offers a new lens through which to approach our current moment.
Lynskey's encyclopedic knowledge . . . and his glee at the sheer inventiveness of the doomsayers' creations, make this an unlikely page-turner . . . a curiously entertaining read.
A fascinating guide . . . full of lesser-known cultural gems.
A major piece of work, [a] heavyweight yet fleet-of-foot look at humankind’s fixation on the end of days, told through the prism of history, religion, literature, popular art, science and more, as compelling as it is authoritative.
Reading EVERYTHING MUST GO can serve as therapy for this kind of fatalism.
Lynskey has the kind of omnivorous sensibility essential for a project like this…a terrifically entertaining writer, with a requisite sense of gallows humor
Clever and insightful.
Deftly interweaves nature’s destructive power with art, literature, and religion.
Erudite, delightfully witty, and strangely cheering.
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