Everything Must Go
The Stories We Tell About The End of the World
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Average rating4.3
A rich, captivating, and darkly humorous look into the evolution of apocalyptic thought, exploring how film and literature interact with developments in science, politics, and culture, and what factors drive our perennial obsession with the end of the world. As Dorian Lynskey writes, “People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia.” In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularized in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods. With a discerning eye and acerbic wit, Lynskey examines how various doomsday tropes and predictions in literature, art, music, and film have arisen from contemporary anxieties, whether they be comets, pandemics, world wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Y2K, or the climate emergency. Far from being grim, Lynskey guides readers through a rich array of fascinating stories and surprising facts, allowing us to keep company with celebrated works of art and the people who made them, from H.G. Wells, Jack London, W.B. Yeats and J.G. Ballard to The Twilight Zone, Dr. Strangelove, Mad Max and The Terminator. Prescient and original, Everything Must Go is a brilliant, sweeping work of history that provides many astute insights for our times and speaks to our urgent concerns for the future.
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Talk about doomscrolling! Dorian Lynskey's book catalogs the numerous ways that the world might end, as portrayed in fictional media from Lord Byron's 1811 poem “Darkness” and H.G. Wells' [b:The Time Machine 2493 The Time Machine H.G. Wells https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327942880l/2493.SY75.jpg 3234863] and Emily St. John Mandel's amazing [b:Station Eleven 20170404 Station Eleven Emily St. John Mandel https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1680459872l/20170404.SX50.jpg 28098716]. The book is thematic rather than historic, but Lynskey asserts that the predominant cause of the apocalypses reflects the general anxieties of the era. Robots were first popular between the world wars, when the threats of fascism and communism invoked the fear of all-powerful machines without hearts. In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and again in the 1980s at the height of the nuclear arms race, nuclear armageddon was ascendent. Once we understood how viruses are transmitted, mad scientists unleashing contagious diseases proliferated. Lynskey is an engaging writer, but he gets a little too much into the weeds on some topics. I didn't need a refresher on the Manhattan Project to appreciate nuclear war themed apocalypses, and knowing who first coined the term “survivalist” didn't deepen my appreciation for [b:The Road 6288 The Road Cormac McCarthy https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1600241424l/6288.SY75.jpg 3355573]. But the longer it took me to read, the more I was able to avoid doomscrolling the current US descent into chaos.
