But is this the sort of end we mean when we’re exploring the end of the world in our storytelling? 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.
When it comes to the apocalypse, however, we’re not really worried about the end of the world. We’re worried about the end of our world. Individual mortality is clearly a theme that runs through apocalyptic fiction – as we’ve seen, we project our anxieties over our own death onto the world. Earlier I discussed H. G. Wells’s visions of how the world might end – the hammer blow from on high that is The War of the Worlds, and the gathering entropic gloom of the universal heat death in The Time Machine. His very last book, written decades later when he himself was an old and decrepit man, is called Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) and takes a different approach again. Barely a book, it is more like a pamphlet: thirty-four pages and eight short chapters. Written as he was dying, and published after his death, it is an unremittingly pessimistic prediction of the inevitable end of humanity.
This is easily the strangest thing Wells ever wrote. From his deathbed, he relays a sudden insight he has had that everything is approaching its end ‘within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons’. Something about the cosmos has suddenly and profoundly altered: ‘There has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life, not simply human life but all self-conscious existence, has been going on since its beginning.’ If his thinking has been ‘sound’, he says, ‘then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.’ Homo sapiens is ‘played out’ – ‘The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other animal.’ Mind at the End of Its Tether offers no hard evidence for Wells’s strange presentiment that everything was coming to an end; it simply keeps returning to the idea that a nameless something is bringing doom. Of course, what had changed in Wells’s world was the awareness of his own imminent end.
It is something we still do today, imagining the end over and over again, in a compulsive loop of disaster clichés, as we continue to struggle collectively with the knowledge of our own inevitable deaths. And in a sense, that is the end of the world; from an individual perspective, the world only exists because we are in it. Without that perspective, the world is lost when we are.
The apocalypse is not simply a conceptualising of death, collective or individual. Which is to say, it is that, but not only that. These stories also explore our insecurities about the world and our place in it. There seem to be many precarious aspects to the situation humanity finds itself in: fragile societies that could collapse into chaos at any moment; the insignificance of our lonely planet circling one of trillions of stars in a universe that is unfathomably large; our own human nature, which so often seems set to self-destruct. Through our stories we have constructed a version of the world that gives an illusion of security – one made out of societies, laws, religions. But that world of our creation is vulnerable to change and upheaval; even though physically it might not end, those structures can, and have, come crashing down. Imagining the end of the world is an expression of our collective anxiety over life as well as death.
We use these stories to make sense of it all, to impose order on an uncaring and chaotic universe, creating the fantasy that we have some measure of understanding and control. This is not something that the universe engages in. The Big Bang is not a story – it just is (or was). Gravity and entropy do not have some grand significance beyond their existence and function. The cosmos, after all, is under no obligation to make sense to us.
Nevertheless, we look to fictions to add meaning and structure to our experience, and our storytelling tradition is based upon a linear progression: beginning, middle and end. For us to derive any meaning from the story, we have to know how it will end. For example, many people read the
