Fantasies of the end take many different approaches: funny, inventive, ghastly, far-fetched and scarily realistic. It is fertile territory for our imaginations. But if we look more closely at the way we tell our stories, we can see that how we portray the end can also tell us much about how we understand the world and the people around us, not just about how we think about our mortality. They can illustrate our dread of judgement, the importance we place on our societal connections, the darker side of our own human nature. From religious doomsday and swarms of monsters to biological plague and technological doom, from the winding down of the universe to environmental catastrophe, in these pages we’ll explore not just our fear of death, but more importantly all the things we’re really afraid of in life.
This book was a lucky dip; a more or less “this looks like something” pick from NetGalley’s assortment of ARCs. Turns out, It's the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of? was perfectly suited to my tastes and interests: I thought this was going to be an overview of the ways the world could end — and it is that — but even more intriguingly, it’s how these possible end-of-days scenarios have been portrayed in literature, song, art, and film throughout the ages and around the world, and what these portrayals suggest about human nature. As both an author of science fiction and an English professor, Adam Roberts is incredibly knowledgeable about this subject and his tone veers from informed analysis to groanworthy jokes; and it all worked for me. (Note: As I read an ARC through NetGalley, passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Roberts suggests that people like apocalyptic plotlines because we’re used to stories having a beginning, middle, and end; and we need to know how stories will end. But, although we are each (superficially) aware of our individual mortality, we can’t imagine the world spinning on without us, so we’re always expecting the end to come within our own lifetimes — but with a hopeful caveat: the Biblical Apocalypse (or Norse Ragnarök, or other such traditions from the Hindus to the Hopi) may destroy the Earth, but the worthy will rise again in a better world; a nuclear holocaust (or its metaphorical equivalent, a zombie uprising) could lead to societal collapse, but some of us will be smart enough and strong enough to survive in the aftermath; we might push climate change to the point where the Earth becomes uninhabitable for humans, but by then we’ll be off in spaceships to untouched planets. “Eucatastrophe'' is the term coined by Tolkein to describe this type of story (one in which the protagonist escapes impending doom at the last minute through some happy turn of events), and according to Tolkein, and Roberts, these are the stories we like the best — and this book is filled with examples. Roberts treats equally Genesis’s prog-rock anthem “Supper’s Ready”, the comic zombie film Shaun of the Dead, and the works of authors as diverse as Susan Sontag, J. G. Ballard, and Immanuel Kant. In a representative blending of high and low culture, Roberts first explains Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch (as explored in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) as the strongest of souls; someone who could embrace an existence of Eternal Return (as the universe cycles through Big Bangs and Big Bounces and individuals knowingly live the exact same lives over, throughout infinity). Roberts then ties in the movie Groundhog Day, calling it “a masterpiece of supreme existential terror” and expanding in a footnote:
If you think about it properly it is the most horrifying movie ever made. How long must he have been trapped there to learn jazz piano, ice sculpture and French? This was no two-week glitch, but one that went on for years, decades — or longer; director Harold Ramis, a Buddhist, said at the time of the film’s release that Buddhism teaches that it takes 10,000 years for a soul to evolve to its next level, and that he assumed that was how long Phil is trapped in his loop. I couldn’t last that long, reliving that day over and over; I’d go mad. At what point do you think your sanity would snap? At what point might you give up on ethics and morality when you realised your actions have no consequences? You might think that you could assert joy in every second of your relived existence in such circumstances, but that groundhog isn’t going to snare me in its Nietzschean nightmare.
Roberts goes over all the most common scenarios for the end of the world — from St John’s visions of God’s wrath in Revelations to the environmental apocalypse portrayed in the Dark Souls video game trilogy — and if I had a caveat it would be to prepare for spoilers: I didn’t mind Roberts giving away the ending of Neal Stephenson’s Seven Eves (because I’ve read it), and while I could have skipped ahead, I let him spoil the plot of all three books in Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past series. (And I let him spoil it because I was so interested in what Roberts had to say about it.)
In reality, most of the ways we portray Armageddon are unlikely to come about any time soon: the gods seem unwilling or unable to destroy their creation; the sun has a few more billion years of fuel to burn; disease can be devastating — something we’re very aware of in a world shaken by Covid-19 — but not world-ending. The chance of all life being extinguished in one dramatic event seems small. It is more likely that we’ll slowly dwindle away — but then there is always something to take our place. Other people carry on when we die; other species may evolve in our place; other planets will continue to exist without Earth. Like the Eternal Return, an end comes; the end never does. Perhaps, in fact, the end of the world is not nigh. Perhaps it is never.
So: part philosophy, part criticism; part scholarly, part comical; the whole was consistently interesting and entertaining.
I just read World War Z for book club last month and it was sad that of the twelve of us on the zoom call, only four bothered to read the book because, "Ew, zombies." One of the discussion questions was something like, "Why do you think zombies are having such a resurgence in popular culture?" And it was just too bad that this group wouldn't take the question seriously (there was more than one "Who cares?" in response). Those of us who did read it reiterated our points about how "coronavirus" could totally be mentally substituted every time you see the word "zombie" (as that was the author's intention, having written it during the SARS epidemic) and I was thinking (but didn't bother mentioning) that it's well known that George Romero's Dawn of the Living Dead was meant as a commentary on consumerism, but I wish I had already read this book before the zoom meeting because Roberts makes the following point:
Why is it that zombies have become one of the most popular portrayals of the end, more so than any other monster? Partly because the zombie genre is so versatile; its themes of death, decay, mass-destruction and loss of control can be a useful metaphor for many things. Clearly they speak to our anxieties about death, both as individuals and as a species, but their reanimated corpses can also point to fears of cannibalism, the supersession of thought by empty craving, brainwashing, speechlessness and the herd instinct, to name a few.
I also recently read Under a White Sky and restated in the review for it that I have always had faith in scientists moving us towards a Star Trek-like future; one in which technology will be the great leveller and do away with poverty, ignorance, and inequality. But I guess I haven't really watched enough Star Trek because Roberts makes the point in his book that it is apparently canon that the Earth and humanity must be nearly destroyed before we finally pull together:
Star trek is almost unique, I think, in representing climate apocalypse as something that happened in the past, and which humanity overcame by collective action. Whenever the twenty-fourth-century earth is portrayed, it is a utopian blend of harmonious pastoral and urban stylings. Yet in "Future's End", a double episode of Star Trek: Voyager from 1996, a Federation starship is thrown back in time and we learn that 2047 California was flooded due to climate change. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "True Q" (1992), we discover that in the late twenty-first century, humanity worked together to find a scientific fix for the world-spanning tornadoes climate change had thrown up. Most famously perhaps, the whole story of the motion picture Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) concerns rescuing the last whales from extinction.
So, I guess the point is that we will need to hit some rock-bottom dystopia before we try to build a just society. That's more depressing than I thought Star Trek's message was (and again, the kind of thing I found so interesting in Roberts' book).
