Everything Must Go
The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
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- 7,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A brilliantly original exploration of our obsession with the end of the world, from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to the HBO’s The Last of Us.
'Will make you happy to be alive and reading – until the lights go out . . . Brilliant' – The Spectator
'Clever and voluminous . . . So engagingly plotted and written’ – The Guardian
We have always told ourselves stories about the end of the world. Long before we watched superintelligent AI wage war on humanity in The Terminator, or read about a catastrophic deluge in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, art, literature and politics were all haunted by recurring visions of apocalypse.
In Everything Must Go – a colourful, witty and stirring cultural history of the modern world that weaves in politics, history and science – Dorian Lynskey explores the endings that we have read, listened to, or watched with morbid fascination, from the sci-fi terrors of H. G. Wells and John Wyndham to the apocalyptic ballads of Bob Dylan and planet-shattering movie blockbusters.
Whether we’re fantasizing about nuclear holocaust or a collision with an asteroid, a devastating pandemic or a robot revolution, why do we like to scare ourselves, and why do we keep coming back for more? And how do fictional premonitions of the end play into real-life responses to existential threats?
Deeply illuminating about our past and our present, and surprisingly hopeful about our future, Everything Must Go will grip you from beginning to, well, end.
'I was blown away by this book' – Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
'Impossibly epic, brain-expanding, life-affirming and profound' – Ian Dunt, author of How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sweeping cultural history from journalist Lynskey (The Ministry of Truth) chronicles how films, novels, and other media have imagined the apocalypse from ancient times through the present. He explains that cultures across the world held a cyclical understanding of time until ancient Persian Zoroastrians developed a linear view that influenced Judaism and Christianity, as reflected in the Book of Revelation's "bloodthirsty, psychedelic visions" of fiery end times. Contending that artists have used apocalyptic stories to make sense of global and personal tragedies, Lynskey discusses how Lord Byron composed the poem "Darkness" to reckon with the blackened skies and failed harvests caused by the 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies, and how Mary Shelley wrote her dystopian 1826 novel The Last Man, about a plague that nearly eliminates humanity, to work through her grief over the deaths of her husband and children. "Writers of fictional doomsdays all reveal what they love or hate about the world... and what they fear," Lynskey argues, exploring how such films as Godzilla dramatized anxieties over nuclear weapons, and how Don't Look Up took a scathing view of indifference to climate change. Lynskey's astute analysis excels at teasing out the existential concerns that have animated artists over the course of millennia. Readers won't want this to end.
