It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And Dorian Lynskey Feels Fine)

Humans seem to be obsessed with the cause of their own finality. Perhaps because, subconsciously, we want everything to fit into a nice narrative structure that has a beginning, a middle … and an end.

And I hope that you can forgive
us, for Everything Must Go.
(Image via Amazon)

From the dawn of recorded history, there have been stories of the end of days, from John’s Revelations to the Fimbulwinter of Norse myths. And since the enlightenment, the task of providing an original, satisfactory narrative conclusion has fallen to science fiction authors, providing a secular eschatology. Over the past 200 years, apocalyptic fiction has been — under various guises — one of the most robust and popular subgenres of SFF. 

Documenting this prolific output feels like an impossible task, but British journalist Dorian Lynskey has made a valiant attempt in his recent book Everything Must Go. The book — published in the United States in February 2025 — should be strongly considered for a Best Related Work Hugo Award next year.

Beginning with a prologue on various gods and their respective end-times predictions, the book then divides narrative apocalypses into subcategories; meteors, plagues, rogue computers, climate change and the like. The categorization helps break down the subject into slightly more manageable sections, though each of these categories probably warrants a tome of its own. Lynskey’s overarching thesis that catastrophic fiction reflects the preoccupations of its time may not be revolutionary, but his painstaking research and herculean collation is impressive and even, at times, entertainingly presented.

A culture and entertainment beat reporter by trade, Lynskey approaches the subject with wit. It’s a charming book, though sometimes his pop-culture journalism style verges on flippant. Many of his pithiest quips can be found in the books’ introduction and epilogue. As with the best reference works, these sections are essential to understanding where and when to consult the remaining chapters. As stated in the introduction, “Writers of fictional doomsdays all reveal what they love or hate about the world as it is, and what they fear. Such stories are the ice-core data for dating the life cycle of existential concerns.”

Everything Must Go is clearly a labour of love. The relentless criticism of the many works that descend into fascistic reveries about the world made anew required unusual stamina. The subtext apparent in survivalist fiction, in particular, is put under the microscope. “The post-apocalyptic trope of rebirth from the ashes overlaps, often unintentionally, with fascist notions of regeneration achieved through virility and violence,” he writes.

In the face of apocalypse, The Bed Sitting Room
encourages us all to put on our best and go out 
in style. 
(Image via IMDB)

Some chapters, particularly the chapters on “impact fiction” (i.e., meteors, comets, etc.) and “zombies” become a bit scattershot as Lynskey lists countless works and goes off on tangents about the relationships between them and real-world events. The eight-year gap between Terminator 2 and The Matrix is related to Gary Kasparov’s chess match against a machine and then to the UFO cult Chen Tao in Texas. The cavalcade of references is overwhelming. At times it feels like Lynskey wants to include every single apocalypse in this book — which results in just under 500 pages, including copious endnotes and a 30-page index. (We would add that even in this, there is a certain joy for those who are deeply invested in the genre to see references to old and obscure books that they've read.)

As Lynskey explains, the genre is rarely about the end of all things, but rather about what happens next for those lucky few who withstand the cataclysm. While the cause of the end of the world might be uncertain, one thing we can rely on is that humans will be writing about it until it happens. Everything Must Go provides a foundation from which future documentarians of the apocalypse can build from. To paraphrase Billy Corgan, The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning. 

A New Moon Illuminates The Apocalypse

Rice offers an apocalypse from
a fresh perspective and with 
interesting insights. 
(Image via Goodreads)

Post-apocalyptic fiction is known for its hopeful restarts, but the subgenre can also include ultimately nefarious elements perhaps best described as fantasies of re-establishing paleoconservative social hierarchies. In the aftermath of societal collapses, readers are encouraged to imagine themselves as a heroic survivor, either uniquely prepared, or uniquely suited for the new world that arises from the ashes of the old. Unshackled from the confines and complexities of middle-class suburban civilization, the post-apocalyptic prepper fancies that they’d be able to reach their full potential.

From Robert Kirkman's Walking Dead, to Stephen King’s The Stand, to John Ringo’s The Last Centurion, many authors have used a white cis man empowerment framework to construct a political argument about what sort of idealized rugged individualists would thrive and what kind of world they’d build in the absence of society’s constricting rules.

Almost inevitably, there’s an aspect of libertarianism to these works. The end of centralized government that is inherent to these stories is obviously an appealing prospect to authors who believe government is generally a bad thing.

Over the past few decades the subgenre of post-apocalyptic fiction has sometimes seemed a bit stale. The protagonists are too often fungible, omnicompetent white dudes who live by a rigid moral code. Characters like Joel Miller (Last of Us), Dave Marshall (Slow Apocalypse), Robert Neville (I Am Legend), Miles Matheson (NBC’s Revolution), or Rayford Steele (Left Behind) are basically interchangeable. It should not be lost on anyone that Earl Turner — the protagonist of the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries — hews closely to this archetype. Race, class and gender are all entwined in the tropes and conventions of apocalyptic fiction, and often with reprehensible subtext.

Given this context for the subgenre, Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice is an admirable change of pace. Set a dozen years after a technological collapse, the book follows members of a small Anishinaabe community in Northern Ontario who have used traditional Indigenous knowledge and skills to survive as much of the rest of North America has fallen into ruin.

Although Moon of the Turning Leaves is Rice’s second novel following the Shkidnakiiwin community (after his 2018 novel Moon of the Crusted Snow), it stands on its own fully. Of the two, it offers more depth and insight into what has happened across this post-apocalyptic world.

In Rice’s first novel, the Anishinaabe community located north of Gibson Ontario survived the apocalypse by moving from their government reservation to the banks of a large lake where they’ve been able to subsist on fishing and hunting. By the second book, the resources of that lake and its environs have begun to run out, and the community sends a team of six people south to scout out their ancestral lands near Lake Huron.

Northern Ontario's wilderness provides an
interesting backdrop for an apocalypse.
(Image via Tourism Ontario) 

Led by Evan Whitesky and his 15-year-old daughter Nangohns (Anishinaabemowin for “Little Star”), the group is forced to confront what has happened to the rest of North America over the post-apocalyptic decade. While Rice’s first novel was about a group of people turning inward and forming community to survive, this second foray is about looking outwards and to the future to thrive.

In this setting, it should come as no surprise just how much time and effort these characters must put into ensuring they have enough food. The depiction of subsistence hunting, for example, brings into focus themes of respect for the land and for traditional practices. There are consequently long stretches of the novel in which not much happens other than surviving without modern conveniences, commercial agriculture, and supply chains. Some of that time might have been better spent on character development, as secondary protagonists can feel indistinguishable.

This is apocalyptic fiction with a rich sense of perspective, a strong authorial voice, and a compelling philosophical argument. In the event of a global societal catastrophe, it seems believable to us that the communities likeliest to thrive might be those who already faced a cataclysm (in this case, one that started in 1492) and thus carry a unique set of survival skills with them.

Is there an aspect of wish fulfillment and empowerment fantasy in Moon of the Turning Leaves? It would be easy to read it that way. But a story about a group of marginalized people seeking to return to their pre-colonization homelands has a completely different resonance than all the tales of privileged yuppies yearning for a might-makes-right world.

Moon of the Turning Leaves breathes new life into post-apocalyptic tropes, and deserves strong consideration for both the Aurora Award and the Hugo.