Dorian Lynskey's book, Everything Must Go, examines the multitude of stories humans have created about apocalypses and their aftermaths. He highlights the difference between postapocalyptic and postcatastrophic narratives, with the latter allowing survivors to reinvent society. Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven exemplifies this, showcasing characters grappling with the loss of civilization while some wish to preserve its artifacts and memories. The exploration of doomsday scenarios through various media reveals their deeper resonance with current societal issues, suggesting that these narratives are more reflective of our present than prophetic of our future.
As the British journalist Dorian Lynskey relates in his erudite, delightfully witty, and strangely cheering new book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, the fact that we can only ever speculate on the subject makes us speculate all the more frantically.
In Mandel's novel, some of the survivors want to preserve the artifacts and memories of civilization, while others consider it better off forgotten.
Apocalyptic narratives are, of course, always more about the vexing present than the enigmatic future.
There is simply no end of ends, Lynskey writes of the books, movies, TV shows, pop songs, and video games we've created to depict the apocalypse—or its near misses and the aftermaths thereof.
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