EVERYTHING MUST GO

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.