In Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (Pantheon, Jan.), journalist Dorian Lynskey traces the history of apocalypse narratives.
The book blends literary and film analysis with historical context. Could you talk about your research process?
I kept a list of every book that I consulted. I haven’t read all of them start to finish but it was 800 in total. I would imagine I’ve read a good percentage of that, certainly all the fiction and quite a lot of the nonfiction. Then the movies would be in the dozens. Every movie mentioned in there is one that I either watched for the first time or rewatched, even if it’s only mentioned in passing.
You link apocalyptic storytelling to scientific and technological advances. How do you understand the connection between stories and science?
What’s remarkable is that science fiction writers were so attuned to what was going on in science and what might happen next. H.G. Wells coined the phrase atomic bomb in a 1914 novel and he understood that it was possible, but obviously he didn’t understand exactly how it worked or how you would build one. Then that ends up influencing Leo Szilard, one of the people who worked on the Manhattan Project. In fact, a lot of people on the Project were reading science fiction. It’s remarkable how well-informed and forward-thinking some writers were, because they were like, “Well, this is the obvious ramification of a certain breakthrough, and we should be thinking about this stuff in advance.”
Can you talk about major themes that persist in stories about the end of the world?
The question of why we’re fascinated by depictions of the end of the world doesn’t have one answer. It can be a way of contemplating death, either your own death or the death of your civilization. It can be religious. It can be nihilist. It can be just the cheap thrill of knocking things down. It can be something profound and moving, and a reflection on how much we take for granted, how it might be imperiled, and how much we would miss it.
What’s one novel, film, or other piece of apocalyptic storytelling that has stuck with you?
The fiction that really informed where I ended up was the [1998] movie Last Night because it’s such an intimate, humane, and funny depiction of all the different ways a group of ordinary people would choose to spend the last six hours before the world ends. Relatedly, I found Station Eleven tremendously moving, as well as unusual and quite brave in its willingness to say that actually the world as it is is something we would really miss. There are things that we take for granted and don’t think are very special at all that are kind of miraculous.
