Everything Must Go
The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
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.
