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

Written by Dorian Lynskey

Narrated 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 28, 2025
• ISBN: 9780593912911

Dorian Lynskey

Dorian Lynskey has written about music, politics, film and books for publications including The Guardian, The Observer, The i Paper, BBC Culture, GQ, MOJO, Empire, Billboard, The New Statesman, The Spectator, the Los Angeles Times and Literary Review. He is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011), Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024) and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019), which was longlisted for both the Orwell Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize. He co-hosts the hit podcasts Origin Story and Oh God, What Now? and has co-written three Origin Story books (Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory, all 2024) with his co-host Ian Dunt. He is on the editorial board of George Orwell Studies and is one of the judges for the Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalists Award.

Reviews for Everything Must Go

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.