KNOCKIN' ON HEAVEN'S DOOR

It's never too early to imagine the end of the world.

- BY ARTHUR KRYSTAL

Visions of the Apocalypse crowd the human imagination, from the works of John of Patmos to the lyrics of Tom Lehrer.

It's a mite soon to start grieving, but scientists now project that life on Earth will probably end in about a billion years. A Monday in February, 1,000,002,025, would be my guess. On that inhospitable day, give or take a few million years, the sun will become so hot that the oceans will boil, Earth's oxygen will disappear, and photosynthesis will cease, as will all living things. We should be so lucky. There's a pretty fair chance that life could be wiped out well before then—say, in early June, 2034, or on a cloudy Sunday in November, 3633. Then again, who knows?

Plenty of people do, as it turns out, and, if you want to know who they are, Dorian Lynskey's “Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World” (Pantheon) is a good place to start. Lynskey, a British journalist and podcaster, has assembled biological, geological, archeological, literary, and cinematic permutations of existential finales, leaving no stone unturned, be it meteor, comet, or asteroid. If a book, a song, a story, a film, a headline, a title, or a study has “world” and “end” in it, Lynskey has unearthed it. Just about everyone who's had anything to say about the world's demise, from John of Patmos to Doris of Lessing, seems to warrant a mention.

Lynskey's own multilayered narrative pays respects, in its opening pages, to Saul Bellow, Norman Cohn, Richard Hofstadter, and Susan Sontag. Further along, the comedian Marc Maron shares a berth with the critic Frank Kermode. Jean Baudrillard also makes an appearance, which seems like shaving white truffles onto a perfectly good omelette. Popular culture nuzzles literary culture in these pages because the end of the world obviously casts a pall on all culture.