Why Do Writers Write About the End of the World?

Visions of the end of the world are now so entrenched in popular culture, in cinema, television, and video games as well as novels, that it is strange to think that there was a time when the decision to tell such a story was considered absurd and obscene. That was the experience of Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein, when she published The Last Man in 1826.

(4 Elements to Write a Dystopian Fantasy.)

The first ever secular novel about the death of the human race was fundamentally an expression of grief. Shelley used the story of a lethal pandemic to dramatize the lives and deaths of her husband Percy, two of her children, and her friend Lord Byron, all in the space of six years. But the novel was immediately drowned by a torrent of contemptuous, and often misogynistic, reviews which questioned why she had written it at all. 

“The utmost efforts of thought are absolutely childish,” declared The Monthly Review, “when they seek to fathom the abyss of ruin, to number the accumulation of disasters, to paint the dreadful confusion, which await that final scene.” It accused Shelley of possessing “a diseased imagination” and “a most polluted taste.”

For the next few decades, the field of speculative fiction was barren in the UK. Edgar Allan Poe, whose “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839) was the first work of fiction to depict the shattering of the planet, was a similarly morbid outlier in the US. Towards the end of the 19th century, however, fin de siècle anxieties sparked a tremendous appetite for tales of “futurity,” including the apocalyptic. Laying waste to great cities and nations became normalized and has never gone away since.

The maestro of the form was H. G. Wells, who began his career by imagining the earth’s final days in The Time Machine (1895) and went on to explore so many varieties of doom that one magazine called him “a past-master of the debacle, an expert in Armageddons.” His most successful effort, artistically and commercially, was The War of the Worlds (1898). The world doesn’t actually end, but England takes quite a battering from the Martian invaders, and Wells introduced or polished several apocalyptic tropes, from vivid scenes of destruction to ruminations on survival and loss.

The War of the Worlds is a useful answer to the question of why writers and readers are so inexhaustibly fascinated by the end of the world, because there is no single answer. Wells pursues his scientific curiosity about the possibility of life on Mars and the newly discovered microscopic realm of bacteria. He satirizes imperialism and genocide, turning the British from colonizers to colonized. He explores extreme reactions to crisis: The sinister artilleryman who believes in molding a stronger, purer race underground foreshadows both fascism and survivalism. He prods at the fragility of civilization and mocks its hubris. He takes seriously trauma and grief. And he enjoys knocking things down, admitting that he had fun writing about “killing my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways.”

You can see these competing instincts at play throughout apocalyptic fiction: the howl of indignation, the sardonic cackle, the sorrowful elegy, the chilling deadpan, the call to arms. Take the very different catastrophe novels produced in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s by John Wyndham, John Christopher, and J. G. Ballard. In bestsellers such as The Day of the Triffids (1951), Wyndham was ultimately hopeful that humanity could preserve civilized values under pressure. Christopher, who considered Wyndham too sentimental, argued instead that the fight to survive would turn ordinary people into ruthless monsters. And Ballard tossed aside the desire to preserve or rebuild society, presenting earth-shaking disasters as an opportunity for radical transformation. Ballard described the cataclysm novel as a rebellion against the “huge reductive machine we call reality.”

There are even more extreme contrasts. Anna Kavan’s Ice (1967) dismantles the human race with unflinching determination and obvious relish, whereas Emily St. John Mandel’s pandemic novel Station Eleven (2014) mourns every loss and sharpens the reader’s appreciation for the everyday miracles that we all take for granted. Some authors, like Wells, end up arguing with themselves. Kurt Vonnegut’s numerous apocalyptic scenarios added up to a decades-long tragicomic struggle between empathy and misanthropy.

The most heralded apocalyptic novel of recent decades is probably Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning The Road (2006), which pares the theme down to its base ingredients of love and death. An unnamed father and son trek slowly through the cold, charred husk of America after an unspecified catastrophe has wiped out most plant and animal life as well as people, leaving behind mostly “men who would eat your children in front of your eyes.” With no hope on the horizon beyond living to see another day, and no scope for heroism, McCarthy asks why anyone would want to survive in such a world. The father admits that without the duty to protect his son, he would give up. Every spark of compassion or decency constitutes a remarkable victory over a situation that seems destined to snuff them out. It is the colossal, crushing bleakness of the novel that makes it so moving.

These are all books with moral seriousness and literary merit but when the subject is the end of everything, even the shallowest example of genre fiction reveals something profound about the author’s assessment of humanity and society. Whether the human race is facing an asteroid, a pandemic, nuclear war, homicidal AI, or an army of zombies, these stories ask us to think about what we have, what we could lose, and how we might feel about that. Mary Shelley realized before her critics did that stories about the end of the word are stories about us.

Check out Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go here:

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