Everything Must Go

November 1, 2024
For many people, the 2000s have felt like one crisis after another. Wars, a pandemic, extreme weather, terrorism, and political strife have made the early twenty-first century seem like the end times. But, in this exploration of the cultural phenomenon of apocalypse, Lynskey shows that modern humans are not the first to be convinced that they were witnessing one. Drawing from historical sources, fiction, and film, the author examines existential fears ranging from comets and the events in the Book of Revelations to the atomic bomb and artificial intelligence. Lynskey argues that the modern "doomers," who acknowledge a proximity to the end as a way to flex an unearned moral and intellectual seriousness, have accepted the inevitability of human destruction to the point of inaction. Too much fear leads to giving up, which does nothing to help protect the future for those to come. 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 view our current moment.

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Starred review from October 28, 2024
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. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Calligraph.

Starred review from December 1, 2024
The end is just around the corner--and has been for thousands of years. It was Churchill who intoned that the future will be just one damn thing after another. That view informs this entertaining journey through the many theories of imminent Armageddon. Lynskey, a journalist and podcaster, has collected a huge amount of material, ranging from biblical prophecies to sci-fi movies. Many, of course, have believed that the end of the world is nigh, with perhaps a chosen few surviving. With dry wit, Lynskey connects these apocalypse fantasies to modern culture and human nature. The past half-century has seen a procession of worrying forecasts about overpopulation: resource depletion, plagues, nuclear war, the Y2K bug, and the Mayan calendar. Often it was the brightest experts who made the predictions--but made no apologies when they turned out to be laughably wrong. Hollywood has long loved disaster movies, throwing in aliens, zombies, and other post-collapse scenarios. The end of the Cold War changed the portentous picture, but chronic worriers soon found other causes, with Covid-19 and climate change setting off new rounds of dread. But this raises the question: Since the experts have been wrong so many times, should we believe them now? Lynskey is not sure why many feel the need to see only a dismal future, but catastrophic thinking can easily become a fashion. "The doomers," he writes, "have overdosed on dread." The point, the author says, is to find a place between empty despair and mindless optimism. Exploring a host of apocalypse fantasies with dry wit.

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