Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World

by Dorian Lynskey

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Politics, Audiobook, Religion, Science

493 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 11, 2024

About the author

Dorian Lynskey is a British music journalist who currently writes for The Guardian, among other publications.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The signal fact about the end of the world is that it has not happened yet, despite numerous predictions. In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 pandemic novel Station Eleven, an actress who has been studying art history remarks that ‘you see catastrophe after catastrophe, terrible things, all these moments when everyone must have thought the world was ending, but all those moments, they were all temporary. It always passes.’ Of course, in that novel, it doesn’t pass and almost everybody dies. The world is too full of nasty surprises for us to be complacent. But still, the unrealized fears of the past can be a comfort because the conviction that one is living in the worst of times is evergreen. For Kurt Vonnegut, one of literature’s most dedicated pessimists, the only way to manage dread of the future was to remember that the past was no picnic. ‘Yes, this planet is a terrible mess,’ he wrote. ‘But it has always been a mess. There have never been any Good Old Days, there have just been days…’”
- Dorian Lynskey, Everything Must Go: Stories We Tell About the End of the World


For as long as there have been humans in the world, humans have been ruminating on the world’s end. This is a function of many things: ignorance of natural phenomenon, such as eclipses; manifestations of religious belief; understandable reactions to horrifying events, such as plagues; and as a way of reckoning with one’s own mortality. From the Bible’s Book of Revelation to the films of Roland Emmerich, there is a long tradition of apocalyptic storytelling.

Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go is an in-depth tour of this unique canon, exploring mankind’s final days as expressed in books, poems, songs, films, and television shows. Despite its weighty subject matter, it is entertaining and insightful, making keen points on the underlying purpose of imagining the unimaginable.

Ultimately, though, Everything Must Go is also a huge bummer, because the power of end-time narratives is in their ability to change destructive behavior. But in this day and age – dominated by sociopathic oligarchs, normalized cruelty, and internet edge-lords for whom destructiveness is the ideal – that’s no longer possible.

***

Structurally, Everything Must Go is divided into seven parts, five of which discuss specific modes of earthly destruction, including impact by heavenly bodies, the Bomb, machines, pandemics, and climatic changes. Two of the parts focus more on life after the end, dwelling on “the last man on earth,” as well as efforts to rebuild a shattered society. This involves a bit of fine parsing. For example, Pat Frank’s excellent Alas, Babylon does not show up in the section devoted to nuclear war, but makes an appearance later in the book, as an example of a positive spin of the days after an earth-wide reset.

While doomsday has always been a human concern, Lynskey’s scope is a bit more constrained. He spends a lengthy prologue discussing the Bible’s description of Armageddon. However, for the most part, Everything Must Go ranges from the early nineteenth century to the present day. In so doing, he utilizes a wide variety of sources. Some are obvious, such as Nevil Shute’s classic On the Beach, in which Australia patiently awaits their extinction from cobalt poisoning. Others are less well known, such as the works of Czech writer Karel Capek, who gave to us the word “robot.”

***

As an avowed consumer of anything involving worldwide devastation, I found Everything Must Go engaging from beginning to end. With that said, certain sections worked better than others. Lynskey’s chapter on survivors of global cataclysms did not totally land for me, while his handling of artificial intelligence felt incomplete. At the same time, he often takes too long to get to a point. For instance, in discussing fears of thermonuclear war, Lynskey provides a lengthy summary of the Manhattan Project. Though credibly done, it’s not necessary for an understanding of atomic fiction.

Other parts, though, were great. As a onetime fan of Doomsday Preppers, I was fascinated – and a bit horrified – by the psychotic tinge in many survivalists circles, with proponents giddily imagining all the people they can shoot if they come near their bunker. Meanwhile, I thoroughly enjoyed Lynskey’s zombie tour, and the many societal critiques the undead have to offer.

Saving the best for last, Lynskey breaks down climate issues into various subparts, including extreme heat, extreme cold, and overpopulation. Here, Lynskey surveys the robust genre of climate change movies, from the deserts of Mad Max to the frozen world of The Day After Tomorrow, observing that these vastly different outcomes have made the job of climate scientists that much harder. He also spends a lot of time with Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, and engages in the many ethical problems one encounters when arguing that there are too many people on earth.

One of the main takeaways is that there is a very fine line between legitimately raising the alarm – thereby spurring necessary change – and exaggerated claims that cause people to tune out. In Ehrlich’s case, this meant having to continually push back his predicted date for the globe’s expiration. Not surprisingly, people stopped listening as life kept chugging along.

***

The end of the world does not necessarily have to mean the death of every last human on earth. Only the rarest of events could cause such a complete wipeout. What we’re really talking about – to quote R.E.M. – is the end of the world as we know it. This is a highly likely thing to happen in our lifetimes.

Perhaps this is a tad gloomy, but there are a lot of challenges we’re not up to facing. There’s no point in listing all the existential issues, since you can just get Artificial Intelligence to tell you, if it's not too busy plotting the robot takeover. Suffice to say, it’s quite possible we are on the darkest timeline.

In the old days – twenty-five years ago or so – stories about the end-of-the-world could still cut through the noise. One of the examples Lynskey cites is the so-called “Y2K bug.” Most people remember this as a media-driven non-event bordering on a hoax. Of course, billions of dollars were spent fixing the glitch. This is an example of the disaster-prophecy paradox, in which efforts to successfully stop a calamity turns into the evidence that we need not have worried in the first place. Today, any attempt at a warning about impending danger is going to get lost in a hurricane of toxic social media discourse, all of it fueled by the misinformation tech companies rely upon to increase their profit margins. The upshot is that apocalyptic tales will go unheard when we need them most, on the doorstep of the apocalypse.

[K.J. Charles]

A very interesting account of how people predict, discuss, cope with, and make art about the end of the world, divided into sections (disease, the bomb, zombies, etc). Highly readable although more descriptive than arriving at any particular conclusion, except that a lot of people are seriously invested in fantasising about the end of humanity. And, having met humanity, who can blame them.

[Bruce Katz · Rating 3 out of 5]

We seem to be built to imagine that we live, if not at the end of the world, then at least at the end of an era. We love to talk about the death of this and the fall of that, and to boast that we are there to witness it. We do like to feel special. — from “Everything Must Go”

“This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” -- TS Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

"It's the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine.)" -- R.E.M.

I confess I’m a sucker for a book like this, which probably reveals something about me I’d be better off keeping to myself. Some of my favorite works of nonfiction have been Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror,” “The Pursuit of the Millennium” by Norman Cohn, and Otto Friedrich’s “The End of the World: A History.”

(I’m certain there are a large number of works of fiction I’ve really liked that fall into this category — Cronin’s “The Passage” for one, and Brooks' “World War Z” — but I’ll come off to strangers as a more serious and thoughtful person if I stick to nonfiction.)

“Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World” is exactly what the subtitle says: A broad examination of all the ways we (which is to say, humans) have envisioned the End of All Things. More than a mere survey, it examines what the various formulations say about the times in which they appeared and sometimes about the personalities of the people who shared their vision. (One late nineteenth century author wrote of a deadly plague and shared his anxiety "if it happened to white people.") It also demonstrates pretty conclusively how much easier it is to give voice to the existential dangers we perceive than to actually do something about them.

Unsurprisingly, Lynskey begins the book with the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation and their respective visions of the Apocalypse. Both works had an enormous impact on Western religion and culture. Thomas Jefferson may have dismissed Revelation as “merely the ravings of a maniac,” but the work exerted a powerful influence on history, art, culture, and even politics. As examples Lynskey mentions Hieronymous Bosch’s The Last Judgement, William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” various Schwarzenegger movies, and (terrifying to relate because his apocalyptic beliefs influenced his work) Reagan Secretary of the Interior James Watt’s remark, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.” (Similarly apocalyptic thinking was present in the Bush W administration and certainly in todays' religious-political landscape.)

“Everything Must Go” chronicles all the forms the Apocalypse might come according to writers, artists, and others. And so we read about medieval millennialists, 19th century Millerites, the Black Death, colliding worlds, flaming skies, mushroom clouds, Terminators, zombies, plagues, asteroids, the extinction of the dinosaurs, artificial intelligence, climate change, various survivalist groups among us today*, and a lot more. A tour down memory lane where the trail goes in and out of shadow. For readers of a certain age (mine, for instance) the book will trigger familiar old sounds and images: the strains of "Eve of Destruction" will spark memories of scurrying under school desks or rushing out to the hallway for nuclear bomb drills, and neighborhood men in t-shirts digging what they imagined would one day be a bomb shelter in their backyards. The figures Lynskey cites range from the obscure and forgotten to DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, HG Wells, Aldous Huxley, Mary Shelley, Jonathan Swift, Czech writer Karel Capek, JG Ballard, Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, even Thanos the Marvel movie villain. Each case reveals something important about the culture or the artist or both. One thinks of the many films — Godzilla, Them, etc. — that reflect anxiety about nuclear testing, or 2001's HAL or the Terminator movies expressing anxiety about our technologies. I was aware of these connections, of course; I spent many afternoons in the local movie house watching double features (look it up: it was a real thing) about atomic monsters, alien invasions, and spreading clouds of radiation. I didn’t know this factoid concerning the movie Soylent Green: “In the book, the miracle food soylent is, as its name suggests, a bland but nutritious vegan synthesis of soy beans and lentils. In the movie, as Heston famously screams at the end, ‘Soylent Green is people!’ “ What does this change say about America in the 1970s? one wonders.

(A few other tidbits I feel compelled to share: When people described his 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead -- a film clearly attuned to racism in America -- as a “zombie” film, filmmaker George Romero was surprised. “ ‘People  .  .  . called them zombies,’ Romero recalled. ‘I said, “Wow, maybe they are.” To me, they were dead neighbors.’ " Elsewhere: “ Asked about the scientific accuracy of the 1998 film Armageddon, astronomer Phil Plait dryly remarked that the film “got some astronomy right. For example, there is an asteroid in the movie, and asteroids do indeed exist.”)

We read a good deal about War of the Worlds, When Worlds Collide, and , of course, but Lynskey introduces us to such individuals as Austrian playwright Jura Soyfer who in 1936 wrote a play called Der Weltuntergang ( The End of the World. Given what was going on in Europe at theme, one might guess at the tone of such a work. But in fact the play is satire. Soyfer was a 23 year old Jewish Marxist. In the play the Sun and planets decide that Earth needs to be cleansed so they send a comet to crash into it. One character, Professor Peep, tries to convince world leaders of the danger but they don’t listen When he warns Hitler that “The comet is going to destroy everybody,” Hitler responds by saying, “Destroying everybody is my business,” after which he goes into a rant about all deforces — Jews, Freemasons, Bolsheviks — who sent the comet to undermine the Reich. Word gets out, of course, leading entrepreneurial sorts to sell End-of-the-World bonds and comet insurance policies. Lynskey has fun describing how Soyfer “rips through every species of human idiocy.” Then he relates that Soyfer died in Buchenwald in 1939 at the age of 26. “For Jura Soyfer, like millions of others, Hitler was the end of the world.”

As he guides the reader through the centuries Lynskey shares fascinating details and observations. Among them: “Before the First World War, two-thirds of fictional end-of-the-world scenarios involved natural disasters and only one-third stemmed from human activity. After 1918, those proportions were reversed.” (No surprise, given how technology utterly transformed how arsenal were fought and how they were thought about by the public.)

The book is filled with small biographical portraits, idiosyncratic personalities, wry observations, and telling anecdotes. Unavoidably, “Everything Must Go” suffers from repetition. How could it not? The means of destruction may be different -- comet, virus, radiation, extraterrestrials -- but there are only so many ways to describe how the human population is wiped out. That aside, it’s a fascinating, fun, and insightful book. Visions about the End of the World have had a long history, Lynskey notes (the topic is “evergreen,” he writes). Looking back at all the prophesied Ends that never happened might arguably be reassuring.

But not always. What makes our time different, he says, is “that apocalyptic angst has become constant: all flow and no ebb.” Indeed. Because I am alive now and an inhabitant of our anxious, doomscrolling time, I can’t bring myself to be truly reassured by what didn’t take place in the past, though I often try. Everyday, every minute, we are flooded not only with stories of the myriad things threatening our survival but also maddening reports of powerful individuals who out of greed and self-interest discount the danger or even in some cases welcome the End (Lynskey talks about this too). I suppose reading a book or watching a film about the End might offer a harmless frisson of excitement, or serve as a means of keeping existential terror at arm's length. But I am reminded of that old joke about the difference between a pessimist and an optimist. A pessimist says, “Things can’t possibly get any worse.” The optimist says, “Oh yes they can.”

My thanks to Picador Publishers and Edelweis+ for providing a digital ARC in return for an honest review.



* Lynskey writes, “Survivalist narratives invite you to imagine yourself in that situation–would you prevail? Personally, I would consider it a miracle if I made it to the end of the week, but then the people most obsessed with survival are the people I’d least like to survive alongside.”

[Tom Mooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was immensely enjoyable and about as much fun as you can have with the end of the world. Lynskey takes us on a tour of the dystopia, from 1816 to today, taking in everything from Mary Shelley to The Last of Us, via Wells, Matheson, Wyndham, McCarthy, Mandel and more.

It feels like a real passion project and the fruit of a lifetime of reading and watching. A real feast for fans of the genre - but prepare to add about 500 books to your tbr pile!

[Crystal King · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book during a time that feels rather apocalyptic in its own way was a strange comfort--we have been here before, over and over and over. Lynskey's background is in the realm of entertainment and politics, so it makes sense that there is such an emphasis on the sheer number of cultural references within this book that reference the end times. As humans we know we're hurtling toward death and of course we're going to be obsessed with how that might happen before we're ready. This is a fascinating, engaging and comprehensive guide to everything apocalyptic. Long before I finished it, I was telling everyone I know to add it to their reading list.

Thanks NetGalley and Picador for the early read!

[Yuri Krupenin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Обширное исследование возникновения и эволюции апокалиптических нарративов, берущее в фокус современную культуру, в которой концы света более не происходят (как на протяжении практически всей истории до XIX века) по божьей воле, а становятся деянием рук человеческих или вышедшей из-под контроля стихии.

Крайне интересно отслеживает связи между событиями в реальном мире и апокалиптическими нарративами (Y2K bug как момент возникновения препперской культуры, смещение пандемийных нарративов с биологического оружия после 9/11, кобальтовая бомба как драйвер изменения характера ядерных катастроф, ... список очень длинный).

Неудобно даже об этом говорить, но невероятное достоинство книги в том что она учитывая тематику просто обязана была оказаться распечаткой невыносимо ебучего треда с реддита (cough Фил Плейт cough), но каким-то чудом избежала этой судьбы.

Не поставил 5 звёзд только потому что

* Местами читается скорее как справочный материал чем как работа преследующая какой-то набор тезисов
* Исследование Mad Max 2/Fallout-сценариев более-менее заканчивается собственно на Mad Max 2 и Fallout, а мне было бы интереснее скорее почитать как они развивались позже

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be honest I found this was more of a highly annotated bibliography or chronology of eschatological works rather than an insightful analysis of its titular question ('Why We Are Obsessed With The End of the World'). Still it was a thoroughly enjoyable diversion and filled in the time entertainingly whilst we approach our own environmental armageddon.

[Prince William Public Libraries · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comets! Asteroids! Zombies! Earthquakes! Post-apocalyptic fiction has never been more popular–or legitimate as a genre–than it is today. But how did we get here? And what does our obsession with the end of the world reveal about humanity?

Dorian Lynskey has plenty of answers. In "Everything Must Go," he delivers a fascinating and immensely readable survey of apocalyptic stories spanning thousands of years. Drawing from journalism, fiction, film, television, and even music, Lynskey assembles a thrilling collection of end-of-the-world scenarios, their imagined consequences, and their cultural impact.

Cleverly organized into major categories—Impact (asteroids and cosmic threats), The Bomb, Computers (including the new terror: AI), Catastrophe, Pestilence, Climate, and more—Lynskey paints an engaging and comprehensive portrait of humanity's fixation on its own demise.

This is nonfiction at its most compelling. While Lynskey's style is erudite, his writing remains accessible, and his presentation of complex material is clear and concise. Any fan of apocalyptic fiction will appreciate the scope and depth of "Everything Must Go"—and will walk away with a deeper understanding of why we are so drawn to stories of our own destruction.

- Review by Jennifer, Manassas City Library Staff

Click here to find the book at Prince William Public Libraries.

[Maru Kun · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read about the destruction of human civilization and the end of all human life.

I had been planning on reading Nick Bistrom’s “Global Catastrophic Risks” for some time, but saw that this book covered more or less the same ground while also including a lot of well researched, well chosen and often highly amusing cultural references from books, films, poems and so on.

If you are interested in the apocalyptic destruction of the world and everything you value and hold dear this is a great place to start.

[Jolanta (knygupė) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,6*

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was okay. I wasn't as invested in it as I could have been, and by the end I wanted to start a drinking game every time Susan Sontag came up.

[Keely · Rating 5 out of 5]

Warning: Do NOT read Everything Must Go if you don't want to end up with a sci-fi TBR list a mile long. I really loved this exploration of end-of-the-world stories, but it took me a long time to finish because I was stopping every other page to jot down a book to read or a movie to watch. As the subtitle indicates, this is literally a book about stories, so you do end up with lots of ideas for further reading and watching. I suppose that's not such a terrible problem to have.

Everything Must Go was right up my alley. Like many people, I'm drawn to apocalyptic stories, and Dorian Lynskey covers these in depth, starting with Revelation and other religious apocalypse visions, and ending with climate catastrophe stories. In between, he dives into stories imagining a last man on earth, comet and meteoroid strikes, the enduring psychological terror of the atomic bomb, robot overlord and AI fears, civilization collapse by zombies or other means, as well as pestilence and pandemics. For some readers, this exploration and the stories it discusses would be major downers, but for me, contemplating apocalypse is a way of coping with fears of of the many serious threats the world is facing in the 2020s. In addition, I really liked Lynskey's conclusion that it's healthy to land somewhere between an "everything is fine" and "everything is f*cked" mindset when it comes to the fate of humankind. To occupy that middle ground, you have to be able to think about and sit with the possibilities. That's the place where human ingenuity, cooperation, hope, and new thinking can come in to help manage the threats.

[Alex Cruse · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars.

If you like thinking about apocalypse, this is the book for you! If you like disaster films, this is a book for you too because so much of this is exploring the stories we tell about disaster via books, films, etc.

I have a lot of books to investigate now. The last bit was the scariest because it's the most salient. Highly recommend.

[Gordon Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

One day the world will end, but how and when the inevitable will happen remains very much up for debate; giving journalist, podcaster and author Dorian Lynskey almost endless research material through which to explain in detail the various forms global extinction may take and how they influence and are influenced by society and popular culture.

Topics examined include nuclear warfare, climate change, rogue asteroids, natural disaster, plague and zombie apocalypse. In the hands of a lesser author most of these themes could easily lead to a dry and depressing endeavour, however Lynskey's derisive, withering wit and playful condescension, plus his extensive pop culture references manage to keep things entertaining. The hidden motives and hypocracies of climate deniers, survivalists and doomsday peppers are acerbically exposed and there are delightful deep dives into the Terminator and Mad Max franchises, the works of Wells, Kubrick, Romero and many others -
albeit surprisingly little is seen of George Orwell and Douglas Adams. Things do inevitably get heavy and depressing - we are still talking about the end of the world after all - and the inescapable threat of The Bomb looms large at all times, but nonetheless Lynskey's warmth and enthusiasm for the subject shine through even the darkest passages.

Earlier in 2024 I praised Ian Dunt, Lynskey's colleague and frequent collaborator, for the depth of research poured into his latest book on British politics. Lynskey raises the bar still higher; giving the impression of having read every book (fact and fiction), journal, magazine and newspaper article on his chosen subject and then watched every movie, meticulously recording quotes along the way. The scale of the task is almost as intimidating as the end result is impressive.

Highly, highly recommended. If you'd like to try before buying, check out Lynskey and Dunt's sweary but brilliant 'Origin Stories' podcast.

[Jodie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The antidote to doomer thought spirals. Absolutely enlivening in a way I think we all need right about now.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A non fiction exploration into why we humans, some more than others, have always been fascinated with the end of the world. We use ”end of the world” as an expression for dramatic effect, we talk about the world ending and being apocalyptic even when it might just be one specific person, family or country’s day to day life that is changing. What does it even mean for the world ”to end”?

With Revelation from the Old Testament as a starting point, the author explores how we have thought and written about the end times, through different themes: climate, viruses, aliens, bombs etc etc.

As a person who loves reading apocalyptic stories I was fascinated by this book, why am I so interested in this? Before reading this I never really wondered but this book made me study myself. Personally, reading about catastrophes set in the future is easier than the ones happening now or the ones from history. Those ones are real, while the future ones could be changed, not happened or be prepared for. Our world right now politically is awful and where we’re heading with our climate is awful and I’m convinced we have troubles ahead from many fronts. But it’s hard to think about. This is weirdly my way of doing that without realizing it. I read for preparation, but mostly I read about how humans are without it being too close to home. For me, reading an apocalyptic story about surviving against an external threat is strengthening, all my day to day troubles are absolutely irrelevant when zombies arrive. But it’s also about reading about people, and what ordinary people will do when they need to.

This book explored all that, but something that made me really disappointed early on is that the author chose to only study westernised stories. I’m okay with narrowing a choice down, but it didn’t feel like he did it intentionally but mostly because he’s British and white and didn’t think about anything else. In the chapter about God which is the first chapter I was waiting for him to discuss different cultures and different kinds of gods and apocalypse stories but after discussing Revelation for 15 pages or so he said in one sentence that he didn’t consider Ragnarök etc as relevant as that story is younger than Revelation and hasn’t inspired enough art or stories. This is an extremely narrow thing to say, and I was surprised he was allowed to get away with that from his editor. Yes, the westernized world can be considered ”bigger” and ”more influential”, but why is that? And is that really true. I think not. I’m also baffled by the absolute Americanized focus, especially since he’s British. I though he was American for 2/3 of the book because he almost only discusses American politics and events and how it influenced stories.

Oh well, Americanisation and only Westernized focus aside, it was an interesting read. It opened up my interest to read more about this but from other parts of the world and cultures.

[CatReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dorian Lynskey is a British journalist and writer whose prior bibliography focuses on deep dives into conspiracies and dystopian societies. Everything Must Go, following the pattern, is an eschatological deep dive, drawing from what literature, history, religion, sociology, and medicine tell us about how, when, and why the world will end. Fans of genre-fluid nonfiction will likely appreciate this book, but may be overwhelmed at its heft (500 pages/15 hour audiobook) as I was. Still, a comprehensive and interesting read.

My statistics:
Book 58 for 2025
Book 1984 cumulatively (and somewhat apocryphally, judging from Lynskey's preceding book, The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984)

[megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insanely well researched and written

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

a project breathless in scope and very skillfully executed (no pun intended)

[Lerena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good book!! Super dense, lots and lots of historical and pop culture references, a lot of information but the overall point of the book (that humans have always predicted the end of the world and that it hasn’t yet happened, and that fear and doomism are unhelpful motivators for action) was made really well!

My favourite chapters were the one on zombies and the one on climate change. So good!

[Chris Cox, a librarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

How can you make a book about stories (movies, books and TV shows, et al) depicting end of the world scenarios entertaining? How do you write a book divided into chapters on pandemics, climate change, the bomb and the last man on earth readable? Mr. Lynskey does and I’ve put his book on 1984 on my to read list.

P.S. I was hoping for a mention for the 1991 movie, “The Rapture” but he couldn’t list everything!

[Logan Kedzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

My attempt to write this review in the style of R.E.M.'s "The End of the World" was unsuccessful. It came out more "We Didn't Start the Fire."

The book is a catalog of the ways that everyone dies. Not in a Tibetan Book of the Dead sense, but in a Rocks Fall sense. It is grouped in that way, by theme of how everyone died, or almost everyone usually, which leads to a sort of rough chronological presentation as different scientific ideas or faddish preoccupations arise.

If you are looking for book recommendations, the author has your back. The book focuses on fictional presentations, but the fiction often arises out of specific anxieties brought on by an event or a scientific discovery, so it necessarily covers actual theory and prediction as well. The range of works - different media, different eras, different degrees of popularity or contemporary traction - is impressive. The more obscure works, or forgotten, sometimes rightfully, are the most entertaining of the entries. This is a topic that has been under discussion for a while with wide ranging variation in its observations and applications.

The best section is the closing, which has a more contemplative tone. How do we live while under the threat of extinction, specifically now as relates to global warming? Can we make our fears matter? The weakest section is on technology (robot takeover and AI), where the catastrophe of the matter feels absent as opposed to a sort of general reportage. Or perhaps it is that the fears here are highly relevant to today's politics, even if not realistic, and so the lack of critical discussion is a missed opportunity. There is also the odd choice to end on two discredited theories (overpopulation and global freeze). The relevance of them as they connect with the threat of climate change is poignant. (This operates in a functional sense of what the fears were looking at as more about climate change, and in an ideological one, in how climate deniers will use them as evidence. That, of course, is the point of the juxtaposition, which is made clear by the text, but someone is going to get the wrong impression.))

The obvious complaint is things are a mile wide and an inch deep, where there is a lot more to be written about, but I have to point to the rule of fun at some point, and note that this is neither a dreary meditation nor scoff-fest, but a game of hopscotch in the ruins.

My thanks to the author, Dorian Lynskey, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Pantheon, for making the ARC available to me.

[Nelson Zagalo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I recently finished reading "Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World" (2025) by Dorian Lynskey, or, to be honest, I read to the middle and then read diagonally. Not that the book doesn't have its value. Lynskey presents an impressive chronological survey of narratives about the end of the world, starting with the Bible and moving through the centuries, covering topics such as the last man, the bomb, machines and pandemics. Hard work, no doubt. However, the overriding feeling as I turned each page was that of a wasted opportunity. The author could have asked OpenAI's Deep Research to do what he presents here.

Resenha alargada no Nx: https://narrativax.blogspot.com/2025/...

[Atiya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the author should have made it clear in the introduction that this book will mainly be dealing about the end of the world from a Eurocentric, global north perspective. There were too many white men and white authors referenced and very little pulled from other cultures and traditions which have also spoken about the end of the world. While that would have made the book very long, some white authors could have been skipped to make space for a wider, multicultural discourse. It s an alright book and I enjoyed that one of my favourite authors Emily St John Mandel was quoted in some chapters.

[Devin Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the concept better than the execution. it is a well researched review of the cultural fascination with the eschatology. If you want to know about how a fascination with the end of the world has shown up in literature and entertainment then this is a great resource.

For me it falls short when it comes to synthesis. Beyond a list of books, movies, etc, their plot points, and details on the authors lives it doesn't do much. Each section feels isolated from the other.

Reads like a reference. The author is surprisingly absent, which might be ideal if you want something antiseptic.

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

The historical context along with the apocalyptic stories written at the same time is kind of interesting. But if I’m being honest this was a lot of things I had already read about and didn’t present anything in a particularly novel or interesting way. It was more like a chronological history of fiction so it kind of read more like a list than anything else. I sort of expected there to be some sort of… interpretation or insight from the author but that never really happened.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fun book to read while living in America at this specific moment in history!

[Floris Kersemakers · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist", wrote Epicurus. Yeah, try telling humanity that. We are so death-obsessed that coming to terms with our mortality is the central theme in the world’s oldest story, the Gilgamesh epic. And what death is greater than the omni-death, the end-of-all-things, the apocalypse? In this delightful book, Lynskey takes us through religion, history, literature, and politics to create a full compendium of our obsession with our ending.

It certainly feels closer than ever to an apocalypse, doesn’t it? The Doomsday Clock has never been nearer midnight, wars are popping up across geopolitical faultlines faster than white girls can post Instagram stories, and political scientists are invoking the Fukuyama-history-did-not-end cliche with never-before-seen regularity. Are we being dramatic? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly, says Lynskey, we are being chronocentric (the belief that whatever time one lives in is more important, critical, and negative than what came before). Prophets of doom are as old as humanity itself; The bad times have come before, and we have survived them.

And at the same time, he readily admits that our capacity for destruction has almost outgrown our imagination. We had the idea of a weapon so gruesome it would force an end to war, then we built hundreds of them. We believed humanity would show itself capable of such violence that it would force us to look upon our carnage, despair, and never do it again. Then we did it again. (To quote Colonel Potter’s toast: “To Ryan, who died in WWI: the War to End All Wars. To Gianelli, who died in the war after that”). Lynskey doesn’t pretend to understand. What he presents us is an overview.

And a damn thorough one it is. From John of Patmos to Byron’s delightfully bleak poem ‘Darkness’, from Di Chirico to the artilleryman with dreams of a subterranean Empire of Humanity in “The War of the Worlds.” In two pages, he rapidly covers one of my favourite films — Dr Strangelove — and one of my favourite books — A Canticle for Leibowitz. It’s not just literature: historical figures dot the pages like archetypes of doom, from the ultimate mad preacher Savonarola to the techno-feudal prepper exemplified in Peter Thiel. Let’s be fair, the world came to us pre-doomed. So what the fuck do we do?

The mathematician Norbert Wiener said: “It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.” Or, as Lynskey simply puts it: “Everybody dies. Everything ends. But not yet. Not yet.”

[Zachary Barker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have finished reading “Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World” by Dorian Lynskey.

What use are the stories we tell of the end of the world? What motivates the authors of them? How realistic are the scenarios they portray? What do the stories say about our hopes and our fears? What to do they tell us about ourselves? All of these questions are addressed in this book to varying degrees.

The book starts on a pretty stark premise. The world will end at some point, if nothing else the life cycle of the sun will settle matters. So that is that. It then sets out it’s roadmap; which is basically a whistle stop tour of the various ways storytellers have thought the world may be brought to and end. Comets, Asteroids, computers, robots, societal collapse, plagues or climate change are just some of the preoccupations of disaster fiction writers and authors.

I have read Dorian Lynksey’s excellent book “33 Revolutions Per Minute”, so I was prepared for the author’s frequent digressions from the direct subject matter of the chapters. The same thing occurred here a few times. Considering some of the arguments and discussions were so well structured and well researched I personally felt these had a place. But I would caution readers that are perhaps a bit less patient than I am, that this book is not an easy read. Granted, you may well have guessed this from the subject matter.

The author starts right from the beginning, the Book of Revelations and the Battle of Armaggedon leading to Judgement Day. This is widely recognised as the foundation for many stories about the end of the world, but also one of rebirth since Judgement Day leads to the saving of the righteous but doom for the wicked.

In terms of the stories that come after the author has clearly committed himself to being immersed in the literature, films and other media related to end of the world stories. There is even a passing mention of video games, although weirdly not much mention of the Fallout series.

There appear to be many preoccupations and agendas for writing about the end of the world. Many books about the apocalypse are really about what comes after, leading to the sub category of post-apocalypse fiction such as the Mad Max series. Some writers have cheered and continue to cheer what they see as mankind’s inevitable demise. Some were and are genuinely concerned at what they see as lurking dangers that are being overlooked. Others just want to have their word on human nature; good or ill.

In conclusion, I cannot fault the author for thoroughly researching their brief. As someone who candidly admitted to having mental health problems himself, I am impressed that he didn’t let the subject matter drag him down. Although I imagine some of the more overblown literature and media samples probably provided light relief. While the preoccupation of most of the book is fictional, I was impressed by his earnest and well researched and scientifically literature explanations behind many of the would-be apocalypses. The chapters about computer and AI in particular brought some fascinating characters to life who were incredibly clever but had interesting takes on scientific ethics.

The conclusions the author comes to are intriguing. As a basis for inciting activism on an issue, apocalyptic tales can inspire action……..but only to a point. Millennial cults and movements arguably have a vested interest in the apocalypse. Some environmentalists have grimly decided that humanity simply needs to bow out and let the Earth have a break. It seems many different groups are preoccupied with the end of the world for different reasons.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything Must Go is a literary survey of how the world ends, from the Revelation of John of Patmos, through Mary Shelley, and then the technological apocalypses of nuclear war, rogue artificial intelligence, super-empowered plagues, and climate change. It's a solid book, with some odd lapses.

There is a longstanding fascination with the end of everything. We know through long experience that all things have a beginning and an ending. It would be both a privilege and a terror to be there at the end, to witness that final burning crash, or wander through decaying ruins. Universe death makes all our anxieties and insecurities come to the forefront. Lynskey ably skips through his subject, covering a wide range of stories, and how predictions of the world's end have not yet happened.

The sour notes are a pandemic chapter that somehow entirely elides COVID-19, which is an oversight that I can only think lampshades how hard it is to write art about a pandemic. Fiction about the Black Death and the 1918 Spanish Flu are miniscule in proportion to their human impacts. The last chapter, on climate change, has trouble fairly discussing an actual slow motion planetary extinction event, though one that has humans far down on the list of species effected. And similarly, the section on climate fiction is lacking in comparison to the in depth studies of end-of-the-world stories from the 1970s.

Surprisingly light for a hefty subject, Everything Must Go says mostly don't worry.