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The End is Near, or Is It?

• Michele McAloon • Season 3 • Episode 136

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Dorian Linskey explores humanity's persistent fascination with apocalyptic scenarios through his book "Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World." This deep dive into our cultural obsession with the end times reveals how these narratives reflect our psychology, politics, and understanding of human nature.

• Mary Shelley created the first secular apocalyptic novel with "The Last Man," establishing a genre that continues to influence modern fiction
• Our imagination was "swallowed" by the atomic bomb for decades, making it the reference point for all other existential threats
• Pandemics often leave surprisingly little cultural impact despite their devastation, as seen after both the Spanish Flu and COVID-19
• Zombie narratives function as political commentary on social breakdown, revealing how communities respond to crisis
• Climate change has replaced nuclear war as our primary apocalyptic concern
• Apocalyptic language is used by various groups to motivate action or manipulate fear
• Looking at past unrealized doomsday predictions can provide reassurance about current anxieties

Find out more about Dorian Linskey at dorianlinskey.com or listen to his podcasts "Origin Story" and "Oh God, What Now?"


Michele McAloon:

Hi folks, you're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michele McAloon, your host and I have two great interviews coming up. They're really kind of about what happens at the end of the world. We have the. My first interview is with Dorian Linskey, who has written Everything Must Go, the Stories we Tell About the End of the World, and it is a super fun read. It's a great conversation, so I hope you enjoy listening to that. And then the second book, which will be a week later, is Apocalypse how Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, and this is a book by Lizzie Wade. So I figured it was probably a good time to talk about the end of the world. Heck, we have an American pope and, as I tell people, no balls do have a chance in hell, so we are so excited about that.

Michele McAloon:

Dorian Linskey's last sentence in his book about the end of the world is not yet. So, folks, I hope you read these books, I hope you listen to the interviews and I hope they give you hope. Want to find out more about me? Go to bookcluescom, and I'm also now a YouTube star on crossword author interviews, so find me if you can. All right, thanks, god bless. Hello folks, we are so lucky to have a very interesting author, dorian Linsky, and he has written a opus of a book called Everything Must Go, the Stories we Tell About the End of the World, and I believe the US version is Pantheon. Is that correct, dorian?

Dorian Lynskey:

That's correct yeah.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, and it's out in paperback now, correct.

Dorian Lynskey:

It's out in paperback in the UK but hardback in the US.

Michele McAloon:

And OK, great. Mr Linskey is an author, a journalist and a podcaster. He's been writing about music, politics, film and books for over 20 years for loads of different publications, including the Guardian, the Statesman, the Los Angeles Times, village Voice. He's the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute, a History of Protest Songs, and the Ministry of Truth, a biography of George Orwell's 1984. He is near and dear to my heart because he is a podcaster and he co-hosts the podcast Origin Story and also another one called oh God, what Now? And always looking for new podcasts. I listened to them this morning and they are well worth the listen, so I encourage listeners to go find those two podcasts. Dorian, welcome to the show. Thank you, michelle. All right, this book, everything Must Go. The stories we tell about the end of the world. That's not a happy subject. What motivated you to embark upon this subject?

Dorian Lynskey:

I don't find it an unhappy subject, I suppose, having done this book about 1984, and I became very interested in dystopian fiction and I suppose there you're dealing with the Second World War, nazism, stalinism, subsequent dictatorship, surveillance and so on I had a really good time writing it and I found it very reassuring, I think, to build bridges between current anxieties and ones from the past. These are sort of your psychic allies that people have been worried about similar things for a very long time. And when the weight of the present just sort of seems insufferable, it's really useful to think okay, well, what were people worried about in the past? What apocalypses didn't materialize? Because that's the point, everyone who worried about the end of the world was wrong about the world ending.

Dorian Lynskey:

They might've been right about a particular kind of catastrophe, and there's certainly, I suppose, what you could call like local apocalypses for sure, and a great many, many, many terrible things have happened, but that fundamental idea that humanity will end. Many people have believed it for many, many different reasons and it hasn't happened yet. And I found that quite reassuring. And actually, when you dig into these stories, of course some of these are some of the most entertaining and popular stories in the world. There are blockbuster movies about terrible events, but we do enjoy them. So I actually found it a very inspiring and sort of weirdly reassuring process.

Michele McAloon:

It actually is Actually your last line in your book. Not, yet it is. People have come through hard times and we've managed to survive. So why are we just sure the world is ending? And when we say we, this is collective humanity, since really from, as you show, from just absolutely the very beginning of time, we've always thought that the world was going to come to an end. What's the psychology behind that?

Dorian Lynskey:

I think it's a sort of fundamental product of a linear view of history. Some ancient religions Hinduism or Buddhism have a more circular view of history. It really never ends and it goes through good phases and disastrous phases, but it always renews. And as soon as you have a linear view of history which of course is what we find in Judaism and Christianity and Islam then it must end right. It's a story. It has a beginning and a very long middle and then an end, and there seems to be something about humans that they don't want to think that they're living in the middle. They want to feel that the catastrophe is going to occur in their lifetimes.

Dorian Lynskey:

And you see this in the Bible. You see Jesus telling his followers it's coming soon. You see it in the book of Revelation it is imminent. It's a chicken and egg thing, it's like.

Dorian Lynskey:

Well, are we, even atheists like me, influenced fundamentally by the Christian apocalypse and the idea that it's going to happen in our lifetimes the Christian apocalypse and the idea that it's going to happen in our lifetimes or did that idea come about? Because actually that's something in human nature that even if it's something that you really might not want to happen, you would rather it happened soon than in the distant future and St Augustine very successfully for hundreds of years managed to kind of keep a lid on apocalyptic fervor by rejecting the idea that it was coming soon. It's like nobody knows when the apocalypse will come, and it's probably going to be a very long way in the future and therefore we should not live in expectation of it. But then that was reversed, that way of thinking, and ever since there has been this idea of imminence.

Dorian Lynskey:

Within that there's all kinds of impulses. The Christian impulse is that this corrupted, broken, degenerate world will come to a sort of fiery climax and then we will enter paradise. For secularocalyptic thinkers it's more refining, okay. Well, you know, how can we make a better future? Might it require some kind of cataclysm? There are some people that just feel this immense weight of sort of misanthropy or guilt, that they feel that, that, that what we're doing cannot be sustained and in in a sense we would deserve the end of the world. So there's a lot of different individual impulses. Not everybody is going to have the same feelings about the end of the world, but I think that what is shared is that sense that it's coming soon.

Michele McAloon:

I think one of our most valuable resources that we have as human beings is time right, because we know in each of our individual lives we are only allotted so much time. And when I was reading this book, I just thought of how human beings have creatively dealt with both a individual understanding of the end of time but also a unified understanding of the end of time. And there's something very unifying, as you point out in your book, about the end times, about how we are going to maybe have this, you know, great moment of unification around some kind of big end time event, and I think that shows some kind of deep yearning in us as human beings too.

Dorian Lynskey:

Yeah, I mean I don't know whether that's the sort of primary impulse, because obviously in the Christian apocalypse it's certainly it's about separating out the good from the bad on judgment day. It's a very binary thing, Everybody is one or the other. But the impulse you describe I find really interesting and it's in Tom Lehrer's song We'll All Go Together when we Go, which is very satirical about nuclear war, very dark comedy, but I kind of like that impulse. And in the epilogue I mentioned a dream that I had like 20 years ago where I very much had that feeling that it was kind of reassuring that everybody was going to die at the same time.

Dorian Lynskey:

There's a great movie in the late 90s called Last Night by Don McKellar. It's a similar thing. There is a strange sort of unity and people behave in different ways and some people, you know, sort of lose their minds or go on crime sprees or whatever but but but quite a lot of other people feel a weird sense of calm or a collective celebration, almost that they are there for the sort of wake for the human race. I find it a really interesting emotional idea that you would all share in this catastrophe. But of course the point it hasn't happened.

Dorian Lynskey:

So what we can do is we can look at disaster studies and how people actually behave in disasters and you can see that actually, people generally behave pretty well after like an earthquake, a massive explosion, a volcano they don't tend to turn on each other. Earthquake, a massive explosion, a volcano, they don't tend to turn on each other. There's a lot more help than just crime and debauchery. That's because the world isn't ending. They've suffered something, but they get to survive. How people would actually behave if we knew the date and time that the world will end is kind of a mystery, and that's why I find all these speculations so interesting. And the writers each writer reveals their own view of human nature and their own feelings about the end of the world in the way that they write, and some are extremely pessimistic or nihilistic or misanthropic. Some are rather hopeful, some are rather spiritual, and so I'm aware, in writing this book, I guess, of my own biases that I was exploring how I felt about this prospect, about this idea.

Michele McAloon:

One of the best things about your book is it's not just, I mean, the topical level is about the end of the world, but it's a great survey of really our cultural history, of both technology and with literature. Although it's a book primarily about secular eschatology about the end of the world, you start with God, and I mean you go through AI, you go through pandemics, no-transcript, and one of the ones that I found very, very fascinating was the story of Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. She was actually a giant when it came to kind of doomsday literature, wasn't she?

Dorian Lynskey:

Yeah, she wrote the first secular end of the world novels I mean, it's not like there were lots of religious end of the world novels around before then. So she wrote the Last man, which is in the 1820s I can't quite remember the year off the top of my head, losing almost everybody she loved, some of her children, her husband Percy Shelley, her friend Lord Byron, and what the novel essentially does is dramatize and romanticize the lives of the people that she had lost. But they are wiped out by a lethal pandemic which leaves, as the client suggests, only one person left. Who's the narrator?

Dorian Lynskey:

But the narrator, in fleeing Britain and moving through Europe, retraces the stepsera pandemic which was happening around that time to make her grief and her own personal loss apocalyptic, real, really serious end of the world novel is so deeply personal and that and that's why I found it so fulfilling to start the book there that this was not, she was not taking glee and destruction, like every death, is a sadness to her and and in throughout apocalyptic literature a lot of the time people are having a lot of fun killing vast numbers of people. You know popular entertainment. You're not meant to mourn every loss in a movie. Like you know Deep Impact. That's by no means the, you know, the least empathetic disaster movie there is.

Dorian Lynskey:

Well, you know, like 2012, that movie, you're not meant to sort of feel that, whereas she does, and so there is a real emotional reckoning with death at the very beginning of this genre.

Michele McAloon:

Is that a good book? To read the Last man?

Dorian Lynskey:

It's not a great novel. It gets much more interesting when the plague actually arrives, because the first half, I think, is really just romanticizing Percy, shelley and Byron and it takes a very long time for the plague to appear. But once it does it gets pretty dramatic and pretty exciting, and especially when they're fleeing through Europe and what they encounter in Paris, this kind of dwindling band of survivors from England on the way to Rome. So it gets a lot better. It's long and it is overwrought and if you compare it to Frankenstein, I mean you can see why it was not as successful. But also critics hated it. I was shocked I mean you quote some of them in the book but I was shocked by how savage the reviews were and there was something so disgusting about writing about the end of the world. The idea of an apocalyptic novel was repellent to a lot of people and in fact for decades after this came out nobody was really writing them. You have to wait to the 1870s before you get significant novels in this vein. She was too early.

Michele McAloon:

That's interesting. But one of the things is this book, this Last man, it really kind of it produced a genre, right, the last man. You have a whole section sort of dedicated to that and I didn't realize the influence that these earlier writers had on later writers. So you have Mary Shelley and she influences I Am Legend, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, which goes on to be the Omega man, and you do a really good job of showing the threads.

Dorian Lynskey:

I mean, sometimes it's hard because it was out of print for so long and so sometimes there's no evidence that some of these writers had actually read it, or maybe they just heard about it you know Right, sure it. Or maybe they just heard about it, you know, right, sure. And so that I found quite interesting that you certainly see some novels where you're like they must have read it. The echoes are too obvious. This kind of odyssey through europe reappears in these last man novels in like um the 1950s, for example. But then also sometimes you think, well, okay, maybe this is just a really primal idea, and of course I am, legend is a Legend is also about a pandemic that sort of wipes out or mutates all the other humans apart from the main character. But that's so different, and I think that's the one that really kind of makes it a genre that has immediate influence. And suddenly lots of people want to do that, not just the movie adaptations like the Omega man, but other people trying out this idea. And that's what I find so interesting is that sometimes and I found this with Orwell as well that there are some ideas that seem similar and you assume, oh well, they must have read these other books, and often there's no evidence that they did.

Dorian Lynskey:

And you think, well, okay, what is it about this idea of being the last man? And it's normally, every now and then you get a last woman, but it's largely the last man. Even when mary shelley's writing, she manifests herself in the novel as a, as a man. What is it about that idea? And I think charlton heston puts it really well in the quote in the book it's almost the sort of ultimate desert island myth You're not cast away and you're not going to be rescued, because the whole world is a desert island. And how would you behave? What would you do in that situation? How would you retain your sanity, as well as your physical survival, as well as your?

Michele McAloon:

physical survival. It's almost like a primeval terror that I think we have, that we would be left alone, right? I mean because we're such community animals, we're such community people. I mean our identity is about community and to take that away is probably something really it's terrifying to us.

Dorian Lynskey:

Well, almost every last man's story chickens out and you find other people appear. There's a very good sitcom about it the last man on earth. But literally he's only the last man on earth for the the first episode and then he finds that he isn't. Then he finds other people. That's how it becomes a show. Right, it can't go if he is. There's a great australian movie called the quiet earth, or is it? New zealand great movie called quite often the 80s, and again wonderful section at the beginning where he thinks he's the only person there, like the opening section of the omega man. And it's always to me the most interesting bits are when they think they are the only people left but the plot has to go somewhere so they have to discover other survivors and that's where the drama comes from. But for me the stuff that is most haunting and fascinating about human nature is that early section where they think they're alone and they're confronting that primeval fear that you described.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, absolutely, will Smith in New York City when he's all alone, for I Am Legend, I mean, it's just to me that's the most tense part of the movie. You don't want him to meet other people. Yeah, I mean just it's. You know, oh my gosh. So what you've done in your book, you've divided it up into seven, I think seven different parts, and you said that you modeled that on another book. Right, what was the other book that you modeled that on?

Dorian Lynskey:

Oh right, I'm glad you picked up on that. Yeah, so there's a guy called Jeffrey Dennis. He was really interesting. He worked for the League of Nations between the two world wars and he wrote this book called the End of the World. There is a shocking number of books called the End of the World and I had to keep reminding myself which one I was thinking of. Very popular title and it's very witty and very interesting. Best contents pages of all time where it's just a list of all the ways that the world could end. So I thought that really inspired me.

Dorian Lynskey:

I read it early on. What's so interesting is he's writing this in the 1930s and, like everyone else who was involved with studying existential risk at that time in fact a lot of people were in the 1930s he's thinking could there be a new ice age, you know where we lose the sun's heat, or will the planet heat up due to the sun's activities, or will there be these giant volcanoes, or will we be smashed by an asteroid, et cetera, et cetera. And what he doesn't cover, of course, is nuclear war, because the atomic bomb didn't exist then. He's not really interested in pandemics. He's not talking about climate change, because science was was really in its infancy and was quite a kind of fringe field at that time, and so you know a lot of the things that we immediately think about. Obviously he wasn't really thinking about like computers, which didn't exist yet. So I found it. It's absolutely fascinating and it's a great read, but it's also a picture of a time when most of the things that we're scared of now either didn't exist or weren't fully understood.

Michele McAloon:

It sort of amazed me of how much what we're talking about now, this day where we come up with the words of doom scrolling and you know what generation dread and all of those horrible terms. But a lot of what we're afraid of now is what people were afraid at the end of the 1800s Edgar Allan Poe and the comet that was going to destroy the earth or the impact led literature of. I think that was later, maybe like the fifties, but back to the thirties. So I mean, this is something. This is a theme that we don't own. It just keeps coming up and up and up again, and that is. It's really interesting in your book to see where the threads of our current fears, actually how they've been expressed in the past.

Dorian Lynskey:

Yeah, I mean there's an artist, dutch artist called, called Cohen Tazela, who did a tapestry of the end of the world and he used and I wrote the program notes for him and he actually used the comet as this kind of consistent thread that wove through from kind of the ancient world to the present day. It's the comet slash asteroid. I mean they are different entities but it's the same kind of idea. It's the most consistent one. A lot of what we're dealing with AI, you don't really get that until like the robot in the 1920s, maybe some of the anti-machinery kind of satires and dystopias of the 19th century, but still relatively new, the atomic bomb. It draws on kind of some of the fears coming out of the first world war, again relatively new. The only one that you can go back and back back is the comet and I guess it's the plague, I guess. I guess pandemic.

Dorian Lynskey:

But the history of pandemic literature is a lot more, it's a lot more complicated and it's a lot more up and down. It's not as consistent as you might think, but there is something about, I think, the comet asteroid which is like the will of God, it's something that it is not our fault and that is so crucial because almost every other thing, notably climate change, also AI and nuclear weapons these are things that we have created. This is our fault, whereas the asteroid is just fate. And so there is something very just, very, very powerful about that idea that the end of the world would not be our fault, because we're so convinced now that it would be.

Dorian Lynskey:

And if you look at pandemic literature, there's a real shift. Say in the Mary Shelley novel, the plague is nobody's fault. Nobody knows how this plague works or where it started. It's just this kind of force of death, whereas now in novels like Stephen King's the Stand or countless kind of zombie movies, it's not some mysterious thing, it's a government bioweapon gone wrong or whatever. There is always this shift towards like don't blame nature, it's our fault.

Michele McAloon:

It's almost a relief that it's not us doing it to ourselves. It's the finger of God reaching down and shooting us a comet. It's the finger of God reaching down and shooting us a comet. One of the books that I read because of reading this book was Philip Wiley's when Worlds Collide. That's a whole thing about impact fiction and folks. It's well worth reading that book. It's not a difficult read but I mean it really shows you kind of a glimpse of a period of time and it's I thought it was brilliant.

Dorian Lynskey:

It has a lot of complex ideas. It's got incredible descriptions of destruction, you know, which just bring to mind disaster movies that have been made since then. But it also has a lot of ideas about how people react to bad news. You've got how scientists react. You've got how finance reacts. You know how it affects the stock market if some people just refuse to believe it. Some people panic, some people make plans and then it's all about finding basically it's escape vessel and who will be allowed to go on the escape vessel and find a new planet? And because wiley was quite an intellectual snob, he's very much just like well, let's just take all the clever people and leave behind. He didn't love the average man and woman that much. So it's just such an interesting novel. You're right, sort of politically and thematically.

Michele McAloon:

And it kind of keeps reproducing itself too. It's kind of started a genre that we love to return back to, to include the latest movie I Don't Look Up which was, you know, absolutely silly and ridiculous, but basically it was just impact literature. It was when worlds collide, basically.

Dorian Lynskey:

It's when worlds collide and other things as well. I came across this satirical Austrian play from the 30s, again called the End of the world, insurance and sort of Tim Pan Alley songwriters who are writing popular songs about the end of the world. It's just, it's really really funny in a very dark way. It's also very obscure. So I don't know whether, like I was saying earlier, I don't know whether that was an influence on Don't Look Up. And yet there are so many similarities. You know, you just think, well, maybe these are just again ideas that float around. These are the ideas that attract them. You know, they're attracted to this central concept. I find it so fascinating. If I ever got the chance, I would definitely ask Adam McKay, who directed Don't Look.

Michele McAloon:

Up.

Dorian Lynskey:

It's like do you know this? You know weird out of print Austrian play from the 30s, because a lot of the best jokes in Don't Look Up have precursors in that play. That's interesting.

Michele McAloon:

And then you say that the atomic bomb comes along and that the bomb swallowed our imagination, and you know what You're right. You show how the atomic bomb swallowed our imagination for decades, and I even contend that even today in our world politics, when certain leaders start shaking the nuclear rattle, if it doesn't touch upon something that we have seen almost in our literature too, it's so potent and I'm very wary of taking seriously, for example, Putin's threats, because that means you just cave in, oh my God.

Dorian Lynskey:

Well, we're so scared of nuclear war. You just have to give him what he wants. And I don't find his threats sort of credible. I think he's using that fear, and fear can be used in many, many sinister ways. Fear of nuclear weapons can lead to nuclear disarmament Great, sinister ways. The fear of nuclear weapons can lead to nuclear disarmament Great. It can also just lead to the threats of bullies because it is just so potent and is so sort of unimaginable.

Dorian Lynskey:

And you really see what I meant by swallowed imagination is, you see, after 1945, almost overnight it becomes the apocalyptic scenario and anybody who wants to draw attention to the things that they're worried about compares it to the atomic bomb. It's really interesting that people say computers could be as big a threat as the atomic bomb. Climate change could be a bigger threat than the atomic bomb. Overpopulation can rival the atomic bomb. All have to refer to it. It's like a given that that is the thing that people are most scared about.

Dorian Lynskey:

And there is this very, very odd correlation. You know, causation is not correlation, but there's a very odd correlation that happens in the 1970s, during a period where there were arms limitation talks, there had been test ban treaties, the threat of nuclear war recedes and suddenly you get this explosion in concerns about pollution and the climate and overpopulation and so on, and it was almost as if the bomb was taking up so much space in the popular imagination that you weren't able to start talking about all these other you know, existential risks and things that we should worry about. It's only when that threat recedes.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, that's interesting. I think you have to almost be a certain generation to understand the fear of the bomb and I think we're probably younger than that generation, but it did. It was a dialogue and I still think it touches upon us now. I really do, yeah.

Dorian Lynskey:

I think the peak fear was in the 1950s and weirdly, actually because the Cuban Missile Crisis scared people so much, including President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, that they made steps to make nuclear war less likely. So I had always assumed people were more scared after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Actually they were less, because it seemed that we had come to the brink and that we were going to do everything we could not to do that again. And then another spike in 83 and 84. And I certainly do remember that and I would have been very young and obviously I didn't understand all the reasons for it and I didn't understand all the kind of relationships between the US and the Soviet Union. But it was definitely a pop culture.

Dorian Lynskey:

There were so many pop songs and movies in the early 80s that referred to nuclear war. So I think I was just old enough to experience that last spike in terror. Just old enough to experience that last spike in terror when you get the day after and you get threads and you get songs like Two Tribes and Forever Young. That was the last time we were really scared. Now I think it just merges with other worries. I think climate change has become to us what the bomb was back then. It's the big one. Not to everyone, obviously. Some people are far more concerned about killer AI than they are. They don't care about climate change, but I think for most people or most people I know anyway climate has become the paramount fear.

Michele McAloon:

And it really has, although I have to tell you I think it's sort of receding now a little bit, but it really reached a fever pitch about climate and again that is a thing that we were doing to ourselves and not it was not being done to us. I'm not saying it's gone away, but it seems like it has receded a little bit and and it's been expressed in different ways, too many people are too cold, too hot, too too, something right at this point and how we're dealing with it. The climate kind of gave way to the pandemic again. I pandemic literature also has its own genre and it's but really interesting. You said after the spanish flu there really wasn't a lot of creative expression about going through the flu.

Dorian Lynskey:

Why a very serious that it sort of coincided with the end of the first world war and that it was the first world war that was felt to be the large, largest trauma, even though the spanish flu killed more people. And I was attracted to this idea that a war, you understand the individual and the nation. You can almost sort of assign kind of moral values to different sides, and it's much more comprehensible. And the people just could not make sense of what had happened with that flu pandemic and they just didn't really want to think about it. And it's funny how often I'm having conversations with people that I'm interviewing and even without me bringing it up they'll go.

Dorian Lynskey:

Isn't it weird that this pandemic happened and then we just moved on and we just don't really want to talk about it. And so I think that that was probably what was happening in the 1920s, that it wasn't just that you weren't getting many books and films about it, but that you know people in general, from politicians down to just like your friends and neighbors, did not want to talk about this horrible thing that happened. They wanted to move on because they couldn't really make sense of it. It doesn't really make narrative sense in a way that a war does, and I think that's why I call this subhead the stories we tell about the end of the world, because what I was coming back again and again to, whether it be in literature or religion or politics, was the narrative.

Dorian Lynskey:

Which narratives make sense? What is the moral message of a certain narrative? How might that influence politics or activism, you know, or activism, and there's something about a pandemic, particularly when you don't really understand how it started, which is certainly the case of spanish flu and, let's face it, there's still a lot of arguments about how covid19 started. I'm not sure what story we are telling, and people just don't really want to immerse themselves in stories about this horrible time. It is something that we just want to turn away from.

Michele McAloon:

I think you're right. I think people are so angry about it is part of the problem, and I'm not real sure where the anger came from, whether it was directed at government or whether it was directed at you know, whatever, but there's still almost a palpable anger about COVID-19. And I think we're still living out the effects of COVID-19, at least on the social political level that I don't think we like. And there's something we don't like about it all it wasn't fun, it was inconvenient and it was so disruptive to our lives.

Dorian Lynskey:

The thing is that there are so many things.

Dorian Lynskey:

We did an episode of Ogle what Now, where we talked about how COVID changed the world and we were looking at its effect on economics and politics and how we live and work and socialize.

Dorian Lynskey:

It was just endless, you know, and the trauma of a mass death event.

Dorian Lynskey:

And so I think it's very possible some sort of literary historians have said this that you can look at some of the products of the 1920s, the way that some of the social trends, some of the books and movies and so on, and go well, they were shaped by the Spanish flu, where most people would have known somebody, maybe somebody very close to them, who had died from it.

Dorian Lynskey:

And so I think it, I think it is possible to sort of think in a more broad sense of how covid might have shaped the stories we're telling now, even if they're not precisely about the pandemic. And in the same same sort of way, I say in the climate chapter that there are quite a few movies that feel like they're about climate change but are not specifically about climate. Right, it feels like they are symbolically, thematically, that they're, they're informed by that, just as if you go back to the 50s and 60s. There are many films that you could look at that you can say were influenced by the fear of nuclear war, but they're not about nuclear war, so sometimes these influences are felt on a more subliminal level, I think.

Michele McAloon:

I think you're probably right about that. Yeah, it's interesting. I think that story is still being told and will be told for another decade or so. It's just and how we digest it. There's one last subject I've got to talk to about zombies. I mean, oh my goodness, I have three boys and I brought them up with the Walking Dead, as every good mother should right. So tell us, where do zombies come from? Why zombies? It's something that has it seizes our imagination and we do not get tired of it.

Dorian Lynskey:

I had so much fun writing that chapter. It's part of the pandemic section and, of course, it's the only thing that I write about. That is not a plausible threat, because zombies do not exist. Um, and at first I was like I mean, you know, is it? I'm writing about climate change, I'm writing about you know, the history of ai and how do I work zombies into this, and I think so much of it comes from night of the living dead.

Dorian Lynskey:

You know that you have zombies previous to that. They're reanimated corpses or brainwashed living people, entranced living people in Haitian mythology. That's what early zombie stories are about. Then Night of the Living Dead comes along. He doesn't call them zombies because George Romero, the director, he didn't think that they were zombies. Zombies were exactly these creatures fromitian mythology, so they were just the undead and then critics started calling them zombies, so they became zombies.

Dorian Lynskey:

So he essentially creates, without meaning to, the modern zombie and so we have so many of his political concerns. It's it's really a rare case where I think you could say that one person's uh, influence at the very beginning of a genre is still being felt, because what is happening in night of the living dead is really the important thing is the effect on the community. There's a community. It's mixed in terms of gender and race and age and politics, and they're all forced into this farmhouse surrounded by zombies, and so much of what goes wrong is what the people do to each other is their fear and distrust, and rage, and conflict within the house is what makes them vulnerable to zombies. And in most zombie stories, the lesson is that if everybody pulled together, you would be able to fight off the zombies, and it's basically the cracks that happen within groups.

Dorian Lynskey:

So he made the genre deeply political, and so even in the trashiest zombie stories, you see some kind of idea that is being expressed about society, and some of them can go very, very deep and some of them are very shallow, but there's always something in there.

Dorian Lynskey:

And then I also think and this is expressed more in video games than in movies it's sort of the existential threat where you can knock their head off. What can one person do about climate change? What can one person do about nuclear war? What can one person do about nuclear war or an asteroid or any of these other things we're talking about? Or a normal virus, an influenza virus, with zombies? They're marching towards you and you can knock their heads off and you don't have to feel guilty because they're already dead. So it's a weird mix of something that is actually an idea that is very politically complex and really quite dark and satirical and can be very, very troubling. On the other end of things, it's just like let's shoot the zombies and that's very, very cathartic. It's a wonderful mix of these very different impulses.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, it is, and I mean the series the Last of Us. I love that series. I mean that asks some very deep moral questions at the end. And there's another Walking Dead series called Daryl and it's really about the interaction of faith. They open up a lot of discussion and you're right, because I think it forces us to look at ourselves and how we would react to disaster Dorian. In writing this book, what's been your overarching understanding? Have you gotten a better understanding of who we are as human beings, of yourself?

Dorian Lynskey:

That's a lot to ask. I've certainly got, obviously, a better understanding of why we tell these stories and all the different uses that they can be put to and how diverse they are, and that if I come across an apocalyptic story and of course they're still coming thick and fast, you know I could add quite a few more, even since I finished writing the book, that have come out since. So I'm always looking for, like what do the creators of these works think about society and human nature and what the end would mean, what you know, what do they care about? What are they scared of? What are they trying to say? And you can do that with the trashiest version you know available and it's still, I think, interesting questions to ask. So that's how I feel about the world.

Dorian Lynskey:

I don't know. I think it made me less scared of the end of the world per se, but very anxious about the ways that people behave in the world. You know the political situation is just so. It's so sort of immensely depressing. It doesn't make me think in apocalyptic terms and in fact, one thing I would hope people would take away from this book is be very, very wary of anyone who talks in apocalyptic terms, and there are people who do it with the best of intentions. The way that Greta Thunberg talks about climate change can be very apocalyptic. I can see what she's trying to do. I think her intentions are sincere. Whether or not that kind of language works, I don't know, but I don't doubt her intentions. People who were trying campaigning for nuclear disarmament they would use apocalyptic language Again, good intentions.

Dorian Lynskey:

But I write a whole piece about the way that Elon Musk uses apocalyptic language and how sort of inconsistent it is and how treacherous it is. He's convinced the world will end, but he keeps changing why he thinks it. So it used to be climate change. Now he doesn't care about climate change, but he thinks it's going to be wokeness that is going to help bring about the end of the world. So I think that it almost gives you these lenses through which to read this stuff, not just to watch the movies, not just to read the novels, but also just to think.

Dorian Lynskey:

What do people mean when Trump says, if we don't do this, you're not going to have a country anymore? That's apocalyptic language. It's not going, oh, the country will be worse, or you're not going to have a country anymore. What's he trying to do. He's trying to scare people. He's trying to create enemies who pose an existential threat to you. So it changed my understanding of the I suppose I come from a more left-wing perspective that the people who talk about existential risk are the people who are pointing out real things we should be worried about and trying to alleviate the risks that we will destroy ourselves in a war or through carbon emissions. And then I realized all the different purposes it was put to by people. That was my takeaway. As soon as someone starts talking about doom and the end of the world, you should be looking very carefully at their motives and what they tried to achieve.

Michele McAloon:

Absolutely, From the man who wrote the biography on George Orwell. There's probably some real wisdom in it. Do you know? Now you're an atheist and I am a Roman Catholic. I'm a canon lawyer for the Roman Catholic Church, so I'm a current believer. But you know what the words? I am with you until the end of the age, what Jesus Christ tells his followers. It has new meaning to it, to me. So your book you could take a lot away from this. And folks, this is a magnificent book. It's deep, it's fun to read. You see so many things that you've heard through in your life as being a citizen of the West, so many cultural references, so I can't recommend it enough to go out and get this book, do a little book club about it. It's really, it's really interesting. And where's the best place to find your work? Is it on your website, Dorian?

Dorian Lynskey:

Yeah, the website's a useful portal and it will point you towards you know where to get the books, where to listen to the podcasts. There's an archive of some of my favorite articles that I've written. So yeah, it's just dorianlinskycom.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, and folks, I'll put it in my show notes. Dorian, I can't thank you enough for taking time out of your busy schedule to speak with me.

Dorian Lynskey:

I really appreciate it and I think it's had some readers who are christian or of other faiths. They've got a lot of the book, even though my focus is on the secular found that really um gratifying. So thank you for saying that, thank you, thank you. Outro Music.