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A review by lkedzie
Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey
4.0
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.
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.