But the fact that Eliot was already fantasizing about the end of the world a century ago suggests that the dread of extinction has always been with us; only the mechanism changes. Thirty years before “The Hollow Men,” H. G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine imagined the ultimate extinction of life on Earth, as the universe settles into entropy and heat death. Nearly 70 years before that, Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man imagined the destruction of the human race in an epidemic. And even then, the subject was considered old hat. One reason The Last Man failed to make the same impression as Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lynskey shows, is that two other works titled “The Last Man” were published in Britain the same year, as well as a poem called “The Death of the World.”
In these modern fables, human extinction is imagined in scientific terms, as the result of natural causes. But the fears they express are much older than science. The term apocalypse comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “unveiling,” and it was used in a literary sense to describe biblical books such as Daniel and Revelation, which offer obscure but highly dramatic predictions about the end of days. “A river of fire streamed forth before Him; / Thousands upon thousands served Him; / Myriads upon myriads attended Him; / The court sat and the books were opened,” Daniel says about the Day of Judgment.
Everything Must Go takes note of these early predecessors, but Lynskey mostly focuses on books and movies produced in the U.S. and the U.K. in the past 200 years, after the Christian apocalypse had begun “to lose its monopoly over the concept of the end of the world.” He divides this material into sections to show how the favorite methods of annihilation have evolved over time, in tandem with scientific progress.
In the mid-19th century, as astronomers were starting to understand the true nature of comets and meteors, writers began to imagine what might happen if one of these celestial wanderers collided with our planet. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Destruction of the World,” published in 1843, was perhaps the first to evoke the initial moment of impact:
For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things … then, there came a great pervading sound, as if from the very mouth of HIM; while the whole circumambient mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame.