Most obviously, these stories turn fear into entertainment. from Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey God destroys the world. God destroys humankind. Maybe one man survives. Humankind creates a powerful weapon that destroys humankind. Aliens destroy humankind. Robots take over and destroy humankind. Computers take over and destroy humankind. Computer error destroys humankind. A comet destroys Earth. An asteroid destroys Earth. A plague destroys humankind. Zombies take over and kill humankind. Overpopulation destroys humankind. Overpopulation causes humankind to eat humankind. God ends the world and the good people go to heaven, leaving the bad people behind–or God wipes out the evildoers and leaves the good people behind. Humankind endeavors to force the End Times to come. Humans creates monsters that kill us. Civilization collapses for various reasons. Climate change destroys humankind. The sun grows too hot or too cold and destroys humankind. Earth is demoed to make way for a hyperspatial express route. Humankind has imagined so many ways to kill ourselves off! From ancient times, we have expected the End Times, driven by God, nature, or human, or non-human, threats. We love these stories about the end of the world, the end of humanity. I love these stories. As a teen I read On the Beach, Alas, Babylon, Fail Safe. I watched Seven Days in May and The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine every time they were aired on tv. My favorite movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still and my favorite TV show was Twilight Zone. I had the piano sheet music to Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction. I memorized T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men: This is how the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper. My husband introduced me to Dr. Strangelove. My own grandfather was concerned about a coming Ice Age, raising donations for research and even presenting a program on the local public broadcasting station! And this was in the late 1950s! How did I ever grow up to be a pretty well adjusted, glass-half-full optimist? As a newlywed, I knew people committed to Zero Population Growth, worried about The Population Bomb. There was another rise of Christian millennism. I worked with people afraid of getting AIDS from a phone a gay coworker had used. In the early 1980s I was teaching Sunday School to a group of intelligent teenagers. None expected to live to adulthood or to have children. They were convinced the world would be blown to bits and Nuclear Winter would end civilization. Even the man I worked with with a PhD was worried. New threats are always just around the corner: Y2K, swine flu and AIDS and Covid pandemics, climate change, killer asteroids. My son and I read Kurt Vonnegut, The Day of the Triffids, Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Every generation is sure we are living in the worst of times with collapse just around the corner. The Good Old Days are behind us, we believe; Lynskey notes that Kurt Vonnegut reminds us that “There have never been any Good Old Days, there have just been days.” But that’s not how we see it. And as a book reviewer, I have read so many books about last people alive due to climate change. While writing the fantastic The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, Lynskey came up with the idea of exploring the “interaction between fiction, politics, science and the public mood.” For a book about our worst fears, it is extremely entertaining, and quite eye opening. In the end, Lynskey advises us “Everybody dies, everything ends–but not yet.” So, enjoy it while its lasts. Thanks to the publisher for a free book. (read less)

Most obviously, these stories turn fear into entertainment. from Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey God destroys the world. God destroys humankind. Maybe one man survives. Humankind creates a powerful weapon that destroys humankind. Aliens destroy humankind. Robots take over and destroy humankind. Computers take over and destroy humankind. Computer error destroys humankind. A comet destroys (read more)