0:11

Good evening everyone, welcome to Shakespeare

0:14

& to Shakespeare and thank you for coming

0:16

out on this very cold, on this

0:18

very cold, blustery, snowy Parisian November evening.

0:21

At a moment, in Must Go, the stories

0:23

we tell about the end of the world,

0:25

the end of the world. Doreen Linsky peer that a peer-reviewed

0:27

of people aged between 16 and

0:30

25 around the world. around the that

0:32

56 56% agreed with the

0:34

statement, humanity is doomed. 2020

0:36

Yugoslav poll, nearly one in three Americans

0:38

in three Americans said they expected

0:40

an apocalyptic event in their lifetimes

0:42

with the Christian relegated to fourth place

0:44

by a pandemic, by a climate change

0:46

and nuclear war. and nuclear war. zombies

0:48

and up the rare. up the rear. But

0:51

why the pessimism? Is it an Is it an

0:53

informed response? to the the current state of the

0:55

world, which, which, let's face it, given the

0:57

climate catastrophe, various regional wars that threaten

1:00

to turn global, to multiplying multiplying the recent

1:02

explosion in the area capacities of AI

1:04

in the area too rosy. of AI, isn't too do Or

1:06

do its deeper. lie deeper? Perhaps it's it's

1:08

something inherent to the modern world, or

1:10

or deeper still to the human condition itself.

1:12

itself. And the reason, why are we

1:14

so drawn to books, films, plays, TV shows, video

1:16

games and visual art that portray the end of

1:18

the world in one way or another? the end of

1:20

the world times, way or another? possible at

1:22

others. at times, terrifyingly provides

1:25

valuable insight to all these questions and

1:27

others besides valuable insight which begins in ancient

1:29

times, including a trip, pun intended, through

1:31

the Book of Revelation, before really ramping

1:33

up in the go, which humans began looking

1:35

at the power of their scientific advances

1:37

pun that they might not be able

1:39

to change the world but also destroy

1:41

it. it. Then of course comes to 20th century

1:43

the bomb the robots and the intelligent machines

1:45

and the rest is the rest is, well, in

1:47

a sense the opposite of history. Like many of the

1:50

best many of the best non -fiction

1:52

books, by focusing on one of

1:54

the specific even even such a cataclysmic

1:56

as Armageddon, Durainlinsky doesn't just unpack the subject at hand.

1:58

but in doing so also tells us some about

2:00

the way we think about ourselves, the way

2:02

we interact with each other, our perspective on our

2:04

lives and on the world. lives and on the world.

2:06

go is an extraordinarily interesting, oddly uplifting

2:08

read, and I'm delighted Dorian joins me

2:10

to discuss it tonight. Please join me

2:12

in me to to Shakespeare it tonight. Please join me

2:15

and welcome him to Shakespeare and Company.

2:17

Thanks, Adam. Thank you for coming out in the

2:19

snow snow. Very touching. Can

2:21

we I guess, with I

2:23

guess, with your interest in the apocalypse. So

2:25

You were here five five years ago a little more than

2:27

five years ago now to discuss your book now, to

2:30

discuss your Orwell George about

2:32

1984 about when I was

2:34

reading when I was reading, everything must

2:36

go. I suddenly had the thought had the

2:38

thought that... in a certain sense you

2:40

might think of 1984 almost as a

2:42

as a kind of anti in

2:44

as much as the as much as the

2:46

sort of it is situation that Winston Smith finds

2:48

himself in particularly at the end

2:50

of the novel is a kind of

2:52

a stasis of the world goes on

2:55

a the boots stamping on the face

2:57

for on all eternity stamping was there

2:59

a kind of for all eternity so was there

3:01

a kind of a your in interest? Yeah, because

3:03

I I realized that the of what I'm

3:05

interested in, in my first book

3:07

was history my songs. And so

3:09

I realized that what I was interested in was so I

3:11

realized that what I was interested in

3:13

was know politics and society

3:16

and how politics and how the

3:18

art and the art that the

3:20

influences even -life events life events. And

3:22

when I was researching the Orwell

3:25

book, which became some ways like

3:27

a history of of

3:29

dystopian, but dystopian fiction know, it's know

3:31

broad. And so broad and so

3:33

in the case of if

3:36

you're interested in 1984 all all

3:38

political it's all about it's all

3:40

about And so sometimes I'd

3:42

be coming across in be coming across

3:44

in the research and really interesting

3:46

stuff that just wasn't wasn't relevant at all,

3:48

because it was about the collapse. It

3:50

was about the end. the end.

3:53

You know, there is no

3:55

state or or whatever no no in

3:57

some cases. in some cases and so so

3:59

I because it's a sort of an

4:01

extension of that, like, oh, is there

4:03

something in all of this? something in all of this,

4:05

in these other kind of dystopias. And

4:08

then, yeah, I just I just thought it'd be such

4:10

an interesting subject to explore because it's such a

4:13

to explore, because it's such

4:15

a huge idea. And again, I always

4:17

like tracking where ideas come

4:19

from stuff that we we so

4:21

familiar with now. now. This

4:24

is said, with I said with 1984, so

4:26

familiar with that kind of with

4:28

that kind of the future And here

4:30

And so familiar with the we're

4:32

so of the with the cliches of the

4:35

comic coming towards us or the zombie or, you know,

4:37

might be, the post -apocalyptic

4:39

world, where did these

4:41

ideas come from? They always start

4:43

somewhere. These words always originate somewhere. somewhere.

4:46

And it's really surprising. know,

4:48

the word know, the didn't really exist. didn't

4:51

really Max 2. until Mad Max

4:54

too. And I think it I think it must have

4:56

been in the press notes that they gave to

4:58

reviewers, because suddenly all talking about all talking about and it

5:00

was all those words it as soon as it

5:02

appeared, as soon as it appeared, everyone off. It was like, this

5:04

is a useful word. word. that's quite subtle as

5:06

well, because the well, because the first kind of kind of -post

5:08

-apocalyptic in a way. in a way. Whereas second one

5:11

is really is really that... Yeah, yeah, yeah. The

5:13

has really happened. We're even going

5:15

back to that stuff. I think

5:17

what was nice is that some

5:19

of the is that some of the I

5:21

was investigating was investigating are like novels about

5:23

pandemics and novels about -of -print for a

5:25

reason, you know. out-of-print eccentric stuff. know, some

5:28

But then eccentric stuff. But then also there was...

5:30

Some of the most famous stuff,

5:32

stuff, Dave the Mad Max and Mad Max and

5:34

the and the Book of Revelation

5:36

which the Book of popular book. I guess

5:38

is a very Hence book. And being

5:41

And being able to of of at all

5:43

at all of those things with like

5:45

a fresh eye, and sometimes ask

5:47

these questions what's What's really going on

5:49

Like what's Like what's happened in

5:51

Mad Max? what's sort of You know, to the

5:53

sort of happened to the world in

5:55

the And when you're And when you're watching The

5:57

Matrix, it doesn't really matter. You don't really care. You

5:59

don't really care. I was actually thinking, what

6:01

does it say about AI? What does

6:03

it say about how you've ended up

6:06

in this situation? So that was the

6:08

nice thing. Some stuff I'd never come

6:10

across. And some stuff I'd watched or

6:12

read before. I'd never thought about it

6:15

in those terms. Yeah. You say, you

6:17

talk about the book of revelation. There's

6:19

true, like sort of at the beginning

6:21

of the book, you do talk about

6:24

sort of historic. visions of the end

6:26

of the world. And of course in

6:28

the French Bible, of course, the book

6:30

of revelation is apocalypse, in fact. And

6:33

yet there is definitely, as I said

6:35

in the introduction, kind of a ramping

6:37

up, like up until you get to

6:39

the early 19th century. you know you've

6:42

got the the visions of the end

6:44

of the world are principally religious or

6:46

principle or mythological and then suddenly there

6:48

seems to be kind of a first

6:50

kind of spate of it's what what

6:53

is it that sort of that drove

6:55

that do you think it's really it's

6:57

mainly France so not just saying to

6:59

be friendly. No,

7:02

but it is because you've

7:04

got people like scientists that

7:06

are sort of cuvier who's

7:08

identifying, you know, fossils and

7:10

dinosaurs and expanding our sense

7:12

of not only that how

7:14

old the world is, but

7:16

the fact that there used

7:18

to be other creatures here

7:20

who are now extinct. There's

7:22

a fascination with extinction, there's

7:24

a fascination with ruins. you

7:27

know the discovery of Pompey in

7:29

the 18th century, the Lisbon earthquake,

7:31

so people are thinking about, sort

7:34

of, you know, hubris and nemesis

7:36

and how the greatest cities can

7:38

be destroyed. Then you've got the

7:40

French Revolution, which seems like this

7:42

massive kind of unprecedented upheaval and

7:45

the world can be turned upside

7:47

down. And all these, and at

7:49

the same time, you've got people

7:51

willing to think about the world

7:53

without God. you know you've got

7:56

people who can be you know

7:58

atheists without killed. They would just

8:00

be shouted at, you know, people

8:02

like Percy Shelley. And then you

8:04

really get this point. And as

8:07

far as I know, as far

8:09

as all the research I did,

8:11

it literally, you get to the

8:13

point in 1816 with Lord Byron,

8:15

and he writes this poem called

8:17

Darkness, which is where the kind

8:20

of book begins, sort of property

8:22

narrative. And as far as I

8:24

can tell that is the first

8:26

time someone has told a story

8:28

about the end of the world

8:31

without God in it, which is

8:33

this crucial psychological break because in

8:35

revelation and religious scenarios at the

8:37

end of the world, It's not

8:39

the end of consciousness. It's not

8:42

the end for everybody. Like the

8:44

righteous people get to go to

8:46

paradise. Exactly what the nature of

8:48

that is quite unclear at the

8:50

end of revelation. But you know,

8:53

there's a happy ending. Right. I

8:55

mean, lots of people have died,

8:57

but the survivors. I'm loving it,

8:59

basically. And Darkness is like, when

9:01

it came out, some of the

9:04

reviews were just like, this is

9:06

the most, what a horrifying thing

9:08

to write, because it's literally about,

9:10

like, the world shuts down. Like,

9:12

everything is just gone. And then

9:14

Mary Shelley, a few years later,

9:17

published this novel called The Last

9:19

Man. which again was like a

9:21

commercial disaster had some of the

9:23

worst reviews. I think any author

9:25

who was at bad review should

9:28

read those and you know it

9:30

was essentially taken yeah like the

9:32

critics were attempting to almost sort

9:34

of wipe it out because they

9:36

were so horrified by it's about

9:39

a pandemic and leaves just one

9:41

person left alive and that was

9:43

the first novel about the end

9:45

of the world. But then it

9:47

sort of doesn't, it lapses for

9:50

about 50 years. People don't really

9:52

pick up on this idea because

9:54

it is still considered outrageous. The

9:56

end of the world without God.

9:58

Yeah. And then you get to

10:01

the late 19th century and suddenly

10:03

people. get very interested and again

10:05

it's changes in scientific understanding in

10:07

technology, anxieties, it's always anxiety is

10:09

driving this, you know, about the

10:11

coming war or whatever and then

10:14

it doesn't really stop from then

10:16

to now it changes the nature

10:18

of the end of the world

10:20

changes but the the obsession with

10:22

it is just sort of unrelenting

10:25

really. Yeah, yeah. Let's stick with

10:27

Mary Shelley for a bit because

10:29

it just becomes increasingly clear what

10:31

a sort of extraordinary figure she

10:33

was. So sort of, you can't

10:36

really have any discussion about AI,

10:38

for example, or robots, without some

10:40

sort of reference to Frankenstein coming

10:42

in. And then reading your book,

10:44

we discover that sort of she

10:47

is... she wrote one of the

10:49

first, probably the first contemporary novel,

10:51

which was the first one I

10:53

guess sort of apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic

10:55

novel, like yeah. And you talk

10:58

in the book about how obviously

11:00

so much of both, I think

11:02

particularly the last man is drawing

11:04

on personal tragedy, but there's something

11:06

really fascinating about the fact that

11:08

this, that she could, could draw

11:11

on that personal tragedy. to explore

11:13

these ideas which are so much

11:15

faster than the one. Well, I

11:17

mean, it was sort of, you

11:19

know, when you're writing a book

11:22

like this, you kind of want

11:24

history to help you out with

11:26

the kind of connections and the

11:28

timing and actually everything that happens

11:30

around that summer of 1816, where

11:33

it's when she starts writing Frankenstein,

11:35

it's when Byron writes darkness. And

11:37

what had also happened was that

11:39

there was an earthquake in Indonesia

11:41

called, so a volcano called Tambora

11:44

erupts. And it is the biggest

11:46

volcanic eruption in modern time, like

11:48

bigger than Krakatoa. And even though

11:50

people didn't understand at the time

11:52

what was happening, it created so

11:55

many particles in the atmosphere, they

11:57

circled the earth, and they created

11:59

basically temporary. change. So

12:01

a year later, the summer of

12:03

1816, the most appalling weather leading

12:05

to all kinds of calamities and

12:08

famines and constant rain and dark,

12:10

you know, the day was dark

12:12

when it shouldn't have been and

12:14

all of that. So that all

12:17

feeds into this sort of apocalyptic

12:19

sense. And then what happens is

12:21

that the people that she spends

12:23

the summer of 1816 with all

12:26

die. You know, John Polydoree dies.

12:28

a husband Percy dies, Byron dies,

12:30

two of her children die. So

12:32

the last man, because I thought

12:35

it was really important not to

12:37

just talk about the end of

12:39

the world in terms of like,

12:41

you know, just on the level

12:44

of ideas, also on emotion. So

12:46

the last man is basically her...

12:49

expressing her grief on a global scale.

12:51

And if you read like her letters

12:53

and her diaries, it is apocalyptic. And

12:56

I think people who have experienced grief

12:58

will know that feeling of, you know,

13:00

why doesn't the world stop, essentially? Yeah.

13:02

Why is everything going about their business

13:04

when I've suffered this loss? And so

13:07

essentially she does that. She kills everyone.

13:09

And it's heartbreaking. And so there's a

13:11

pandemic, which given the science of the

13:13

time is, you know, she didn't really

13:16

know how pandemics work, but that's the

13:18

thing that she uses. And he just

13:20

wipes out all these people who are

13:22

very clearly based on her children and

13:24

her friends and her husband. So that's

13:27

I think what makes it, that's what

13:29

makes it so powerful. It's not a

13:31

genre exercise. It's her thinking, how can

13:33

I express my loss and that's by

13:36

the loss of everyone. Yeah. Is that

13:38

is that something which you in all

13:40

of the books that you read and

13:42

you know you read a lot for

13:44

this it's so there's so many we

13:47

were talking about this just before like

13:49

how you you when you read it

13:51

you guys you start building a list

13:53

of all the different books you read

13:55

all the movies you want to see?

13:58

Is there kind of a line for

14:00

you between those two things? pieces like

14:02

either it is in one sense a

14:04

genre piece or it is kind of

14:07

a global expression of something deeply personal

14:09

or most of them somewhere in the

14:11

middle do you think? Well they're all

14:13

expressions of personalities so it's always like

14:15

I think it always reveals like what

14:18

do you think of human nature and

14:20

there is these these very sort of

14:22

tender empathetic elegiac stories of the end

14:24

of the world. which have

14:26

a real sense of appreciation for

14:29

humanity or the sort of the

14:31

comforts of the modern world and

14:33

what it would be like if

14:35

you lost them. And then you've

14:37

got people that kind of hate

14:39

people, like quite misanthropic. And they

14:41

just kind of want to wipe

14:43

everything in. And then, you know,

14:45

and so there's all, but there's

14:47

all, it's a spectrum. There's all

14:49

these different ideas. And so if

14:51

you're reading J.G. Ballard, you're very

14:53

aware of his sense of the

14:55

world and humanity and how people

14:57

are or how people should be.

14:59

You also get it with John

15:01

Windham. There's a really interesting accommodation.

15:03

John Windy me wrote, David Triffids

15:05

and the Crock and Wakes and

15:07

other novels. He's always about almost

15:09

like you rebuild community. The disaster

15:11

has happened, but you kind of,

15:13

you're always moving towards restarting it.

15:15

And then John Christopher, who was

15:18

around this bit younger, but similar

15:20

time, and he wrote stuff like

15:22

Death of Grass. And he was

15:24

like, John Wyndham was just way

15:26

too optimistic. And he just liked

15:28

people too much and had too

15:30

much faith in them rebuilding the

15:32

communities. So in a his, everything

15:34

is just, everything goes terribly wrong

15:36

and is not fixed. And what

15:38

I realize is even though it's

15:40

not about the end of the

15:42

world, but it kind of is,

15:44

is Lord of the Flies. Right.

15:46

You know, and it's almost like

15:48

you've got these two, you know,

15:50

you've got Ralph and you've got

15:52

Jack. got one person that's like

15:54

we've got to retain our civilized

15:56

values and our connection with the

15:58

world that we've lost in the

16:00

hope of reconnecting with that world

16:02

or rebuilding that world. And you've

16:04

got someone else that just goes,

16:07

all bets are off, let's just

16:09

do what we like. Let's go

16:11

crazy. And that essential dichotomy you

16:13

can see within a movie, say

16:15

like Mad Max. But you can

16:17

also see it between writers and

16:19

between filmmakers that the people that

16:21

want to preserve order and the

16:23

people who want to revel in

16:25

chaos. And it is unnerving how

16:27

many people, you get the feeling

16:29

that they were quite like the

16:31

world to end. Yeah, yeah. It's

16:33

interesting. You mentioned John Wyndham, because

16:35

one of the most recent book

16:37

of his I read was the

16:39

Midwich cookies. And there's definitely an

16:41

attempt in there to rebuild the

16:43

society after these kind of, essentially,

16:45

sort of alien evasion with like.

16:47

They've decided, no, this isn't going

16:49

to work bombing the village. So

16:51

I wonder if maybe that came

16:53

in a particular, maybe a more

16:56

pessimistic point to this. He can't

16:58

quite, at the end of the

17:00

truth, he can't quite make up

17:02

his mind. It's like the pessimist

17:04

and the optimist is sort of

17:06

wrestling within him. Whereas some people

17:08

very clearly kind of tilt one

17:10

way or another. And I found

17:12

that fascinating that every story about

17:14

the end of the end of

17:16

the end of the world is

17:18

revealing, on the part of the

17:20

writer. But that's interesting actually this

17:22

idea of optimism and pessimism because

17:24

it seems in a way they

17:26

often go together. So for example

17:28

when you're writing about the sort

17:30

of Fandicek at the end of

17:32

the 19th century and the beginning

17:34

of the 20th century, you actually

17:36

are right that all the evidence

17:38

of decadence and gloom was matched

17:40

if not exceeded by proof of

17:42

tremendous excitement about the future. So

17:45

there's almost this idea that sort

17:47

of the you can have the

17:49

hope and you can have the

17:51

excitement, but then that will also

17:53

feed this. this terror about what

17:55

the future could bring as well.

17:57

Yeah, and I think it happens

17:59

differently in the 1990s that there

18:01

are kind of, you can tell.

18:03

really different narratives about the 1990s,

18:05

and you could say it was

18:07

a rather sort of very optimistic,

18:09

probably how I experienced it was

18:11

a rather optimistic, arguably complacent time,

18:13

the way you couldn't really see

18:15

what was coming down the track,

18:17

and that it was the end

18:19

of the Cold War, and the

18:21

relative, you know, as the decade

18:23

moved on, relatively prosperous times for

18:25

the West. And there's another version

18:27

of it where you can just

18:29

see the obsession with the end

18:31

of the world through, you know,

18:34

Y2K and Apocalypseic cults and conspiracy

18:36

theories. You can see all this

18:38

incredible sort of dark, anxious, pre-malennial

18:40

energy. and both of those things

18:42

are true yeah you know and

18:44

it's very easy to tell one

18:46

narrative about a time and you

18:48

just go well this is almost

18:50

like you know the 70s difficult

18:52

decade 90s easy decade yeah and

18:54

of course that's not true of

18:56

course those things always happening at

18:58

once and so in the 1890s

19:00

I used to take for granted

19:02

the really gloomy sort of versions

19:04

because they're very persuasive because they

19:06

pick out all these examples and

19:08

you go I guess it's pretty

19:10

gloomy and then on the other

19:12

hand this you know amazing excitement

19:14

about all these new technological innovations

19:16

and about what the world could

19:18

be and some people thought they're

19:20

drifting inevitably towards war and some

19:23

people literally up until 1914. We're

19:25

convinced we weren't, you know. So

19:27

there's always those like competing instincts.

19:29

And I think you really see

19:31

them in certain people like in

19:33

HD Wells and in John Windham

19:35

where, you know, they fill the

19:37

tug both ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:39

Of course, H.G. Wells was one

19:41

of these writers who bridged that

19:43

time, actually, so the sort of

19:45

essentially the last half of the

19:47

19th century and the 20th century.

19:49

And he figures quite prominently in

19:51

the book. Alongside other, there are

19:53

certain other figures, so we mentioned

19:55

Mary Shelley Shelley, there's H. G.

19:57

Wells, there's also a writer who's

19:59

much less known today, but was

20:01

seemingly very important at the time,

20:03

sort of Philip Wiley. you get

20:05

a sense while writing the book

20:07

that these certain very sort of

20:09

creative, imaginative individuals were changing society?

20:12

Were they responding to things they

20:14

were finding in society and sort

20:16

of providing an expression of it?

20:18

Or were they, were the novels

20:20

they were writing, the stories they

20:22

were telling, also kind of pushing

20:24

people in one sense or another?

20:27

I think like Philip Wiley who

20:29

I don't know if you know

20:31

I didn't really know much about

20:33

him I don't know if anybody

20:35

I never heard of him really

20:37

right so he's not but he

20:39

was a massive figure he would

20:42

have you know if you were

20:44

living in America you know doing

20:46

30s 40s 50s you would have

20:48

known about him and he's a

20:50

figure that we don't really get

20:52

anymore which is like HD Wells

20:54

which is a guy with like

20:57

It's unbelievable sense of what he

20:59

can do, that he can write

21:01

fiction, and he can write movies,

21:03

and he can write nonfiction essays,

21:05

and he gets like security clearance

21:07

from the Atomic Energy Commission to

21:09

go and witness nuclear tests. He's

21:12

involved in the civil defense program

21:14

in the 1950s of building bunkers

21:16

and stuff, until he, like a

21:18

lot of people, realized the bunkers

21:20

probably wouldn't work, and then becomes

21:22

incredibly depressed. And like his most

21:24

famous novels, When World's Collide, and

21:27

it's about a comet, no it's

21:29

not even a comet, it's a

21:31

planet. It's a planet that smashes

21:33

into Earth and about the people

21:35

that try and escape Earth in

21:37

the sort of Noah's Ark situation.

21:39

So he was incredibly important figure

21:42

and he knew so many people

21:44

and he had such influence on

21:46

politics and on the general conversation.

21:48

And like HG Wells, he

21:50

sort of feels like if only

21:53

people listen to him things would

21:55

be all right and he just

21:57

and and so it's just not

21:59

listening properly and so by the

22:02

end of his life, he's writing

22:04

about, in the 70s, he's writing

22:06

about climate change. You know, quite

22:09

early on, I mean, the concept

22:11

was around, but not the people

22:13

were writing about it. And he's

22:16

just had enough. He is a

22:18

furious old man, much like Wells.

22:20

And it's almost because of that

22:22

sense of that slightly preposterous idea

22:25

that this writer can make the

22:27

world see sense as they see

22:29

it. And of course it doesn't

22:32

happen. And then the world keeps

22:34

disappointing them. I don't know whether

22:36

there are any writers like that

22:38

anymore, you know, all across that

22:41

and have that sense of that

22:43

power. I have the feeling that

22:45

writers in some way are more

22:48

kind of siloed cultural figures perhaps

22:50

today than they were certainly in

22:52

a time of HG Wells for

22:54

example. Yeah, like he

22:57

could be, I mean, she would argue,

22:59

like, at some point, the most important

23:01

person in the country who wasn't actually

23:03

in government. Right. I don't think you

23:06

would say that about any writer now.

23:08

No. But that does tend to, it

23:10

doesn't seem to make them happy with

23:12

what I learned. Yeah. And they are

23:15

upset, those people, both those writers are

23:17

obsessed with the end of the world.

23:19

They keep writing about it in different

23:21

versions and, you know, worrying, I mean

23:24

just fascinating figures, but H.C. Wells, people

23:26

obviously remember because, if only because of,

23:28

you know, War of the World and

23:30

the Time Machine and so on. And

23:32

Finnet Wiley basically just disappeared. It was

23:35

like, almost as soon as he died,

23:37

it was all, let's never talk about

23:39

him again. So there are some of

23:41

the figures in the book, like George

23:44

Griffiths, who was like, before H.G. Wells,

23:46

the most important science fiction writer in

23:48

Britain writer in Britain, absolutely fascinating stuff.

23:50

But again, just sort of forgotten. Yeah,

23:53

yeah, yeah. We talked about how sort

23:55

of like the interest, I guess, in

23:57

apocalyptic stories, grew and grew and grew

23:59

to. the 20th century

24:01

and through the 20th century. It

24:05

must also be forgotten that something fundamental

24:08

changed, particularly in the mid-20th century, which

24:10

was up until that point, humans could

24:12

be, I guess, the victim of the

24:14

end of the world, but they could

24:17

not bring about the end of the

24:19

world. And there seems to be kind

24:21

of a tipping point very much in

24:24

the book as well, which I think

24:26

you even say that the section on

24:28

the bomb is the longest chapter. But

24:31

did you find in your sort of

24:33

in your reading that there was... something

24:36

about the books and the

24:38

films and the art around

24:40

it that changed as a

24:42

result of the bomb. Well

24:44

it's a kind of, it's

24:46

almost impossible to get your

24:48

head around like the shock

24:51

of the atomic bomb. And

24:53

what I hadn't really appreciated was quite

24:55

what a kind of shock that was

24:58

to everyone. Because of course it was

25:00

initially used, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki

25:02

and it was used to essentially end

25:04

the Second World War. And I thought

25:07

that was how it was generally seen.

25:09

But then people were absolutely terrified about

25:11

this thing. And some people have been

25:13

predicting it, including HD Wells, for, you

25:16

know, 30 years that such a thing

25:18

could exist. And the shock of it.

25:21

Philip Wiley actually said the only people

25:24

who weren't shocked were the people that

25:26

were in science fiction and comic books

25:28

because there were always, you know, it

25:30

was like a Mickey Mouse cartoon about

25:32

an atomic bomb before it existed and

25:34

Batman movie and all of that stuff.

25:36

So it had been explored in the

25:39

sci-fi, but when it actually happened. the

25:42

trauma of it was immense and

25:45

even in like newspaper if you

25:47

read sort of what was in

25:49

like the New York Times about

25:51

the the implications of this yeah

25:53

it's unbelievably harrowing it's not it's

25:55

sort of almost just like okay

25:57

we won the war but in

25:59

the you're into that.

26:01

And the book that really sums it

26:03

up for me, like the psychic damage

26:05

of that, is Roll Dahl's first book,

26:08

which is out of print, for a

26:10

reason, has never been reprinted. I've gone

26:12

its name. Yeah, I might have it

26:14

written down here. It's one of the

26:16

Gremlins, I forget the name. It's one

26:18

of the Gremlins. So it's quite weird,

26:20

because on one hand, it has Gremlins

26:22

in it. And on

26:25

the other hand, it has a description

26:27

of London being nuked in a very

26:29

distressing way, based on reports he'd read

26:31

of Hiroshima. And so it's an absolutely

26:34

bizarre book. And he basically just disowned

26:36

it, never had it reprinted, because I

26:38

just sort of freaked out. He was

26:40

so terrified of a war that he

26:42

kind of wrote this scream of a

26:45

book. and then basically buried it. And

26:47

in his later books, if you say

26:49

also by this author, it's not even

26:51

there. I think it's called Sometime Never.

26:54

Yes. Yeah, so that sort of summed

26:56

it up and every now and then

26:58

you just you'd see this kind of

27:00

letter to the newspaper or whatever they

27:03

go from some student going what's the

27:05

point of doing anything when the world

27:07

could end tomorrow yeah and that maybe

27:09

that sort of period got me to

27:12

the heart of one of the things

27:14

I was trying to do with the

27:16

book which was this idea that because

27:18

we live in the present. We kind

27:20

of think that the present is the

27:23

most important time and that what we're

27:25

experiencing has never been experienced before and

27:27

if we're anxious, it's almost like no

27:29

one has ever been this anxious before.

27:32

You know, technology has never been moving

27:34

as fast as it is now, etc,

27:36

etc. And to sort of go back

27:38

to the 1950s, which is a time

27:41

that in the kind of cultural cliche,

27:43

is quite sort of placid and conservative

27:45

and, you know. and

27:47

buttoned up and just see in

27:49

the letters page of the Times

27:52

just this sort of howls of

27:54

despair and and so what you

27:56

see then in fiction is this

27:58

sense which has never really ended

28:01

that if the world ended it

28:03

would be our fault, that extends

28:05

through everything. Even zombie fiction. It's

28:07

always sort of human's fault in

28:09

some way. Yeah. And there's also,

28:12

I guess, the two possibilities of

28:14

it being our fault, that it's

28:16

either someone malevolent doing it intentionally

28:18

or also possibly even more terrifying

28:21

that it might be an accident.

28:24

Yeah, which we see with the

28:26

AI debate. Now, there's actually an

28:28

existential risk of AI. Some people

28:30

think that you will get a

28:33

situation where AI becomes, as an

28:35

intelligence explosion, AI becomes sentient and

28:37

decides that it just doesn't like

28:40

human beings and would like to

28:42

rule the world. And some people

28:44

hold that as a very serious

28:46

idea. More common is the idea

28:49

that AI doesn't really know what

28:51

it's doing, and it's all about

28:53

programming. And if you tell it

28:56

to do, if you don't program

28:58

it properly, then it can interpret

29:00

its instructions in very bizarre and

29:02

destructive ways. So the Norbert Wiener

29:05

who was in the event of

29:07

cybernetics and an early kind of

29:09

critic of what became AI used

29:12

the example of the sorcerer's broom

29:14

which is from Gerta but also

29:16

Disney's Fantasia where you know you

29:18

the apprentice asks the broom to

29:21

fetch water but then can't get

29:23

it to stop and then basically

29:25

you know almost drowns because it

29:28

just keeps fetching water yeah and

29:30

he thought that's what AI could

29:32

be and that is still what

29:34

some of the most serious whereas

29:37

there go it could just be

29:39

that it could be human error

29:41

and that any problem with AI

29:44

is a problem with humans and

29:46

So it's quite interesting going back

29:48

to the sort of an even

29:50

pandemic fiction, whereas it used to

29:53

be just like, oh, this virus

29:55

has appeared and we are all

29:57

victims like in Mary Shelley. Right.

30:00

nothing to do with us.

30:02

Whereas now in pandemic fiction,

30:04

it's always some kind of

30:06

reckless scientist or it's a

30:08

bio- weapon or it's something

30:10

we've unleashed through damaging the

30:12

environment. You know, it's like

30:14

it's always us now. Yeah

30:16

yeah yeah in just sticking

30:18

with the bomb for a

30:20

moment I definitely want to

30:22

come back to AI but

30:24

like did you notice any

30:26

sort of change in I

30:28

guess the the quality of the

30:31

art for better or worse

30:33

once I guess the the

30:35

possibility of the end of

30:37

the world had become a very real

30:39

one rather than perhaps you know when

30:41

Mary Shelley was writing or even up

30:43

to essentially up to the bomb it

30:45

was sort of it was perhaps a

30:47

metaphor more than anything else. I

30:50

mean the weird thing is that

30:52

between the first and second World

30:54

War a lot of stuff was

30:56

pretty heavy, again this is mostly

30:58

kind of out of print, so

31:01

novels, but there's some deeply harrowing

31:03

stuff there post-apocalyptic, you know the

31:05

premonitions, the sort of the fear

31:07

and the gloom is there before

31:09

the devices, and then it actually

31:11

takes quite a while for you

31:13

to get proper movies about the

31:15

atomic bomb. and what that could

31:17

mean and they start dribbling out

31:19

in like the early 50s and

31:21

you see them through the 50s

31:23

but a lot of the time

31:25

it's it's it's done through filter

31:27

through something else. Susan Sontag wrote

31:29

a great essay called The Imagination

31:31

of Disaster and she's sort of

31:33

watching all these sci-fi movies and

31:35

disaster movies and her theory is

31:38

that they're all really about the

31:40

bomb even when they don't seem

31:42

to be about the bomb. You

31:44

know Godzilla is direct

31:46

response to Hiroshima. And a lot of the

31:48

others, they seem to be, that it's always

31:50

lurking in the background. And so it's sort

31:53

of everything becomes about the bomb, even when

31:55

it doesn't seem to be. talk quite a

31:57

bit a bit about

31:59

Kurt Vonnegut in the book the

32:02

book and one thing,

32:04

one specific thing because I

32:06

guess, his connection to

32:09

to the bomb is he was in

32:11

Dresden when it was bombed.

32:13

it was bombed and It

32:16

struck me that, you know, know, aside

32:18

and perhaps I guess I guess

32:20

W.G. Sabaud because he was born,

32:22

he was think, I in the

32:24

ruins of Dresden. Dresden. It seems like the

32:27

bomb, know, you know, what happened

32:29

to Dresden and what happened

32:31

to Hiroshima Hiroshima on earth? if you're

32:33

sort of sort of if you're measuring

32:35

the destruction was probably relatively comparable

32:37

in some sense. But that does,

32:39

did seem to be on the it

32:41

did seem to be on the world, psyche at much

32:43

bigger impact impact from the the

32:46

fact that it was one bomb capable of doing

32:48

that. that. as opposed to however

32:50

many hundred hundred thousand that the Force force

32:52

Well, it was Well it and I

32:54

think and I think that you know know,

32:56

the movie Oppenheimer was criticized

32:58

in some some respects for

33:01

not sort of about enough

33:03

about the consequences. of Hiroshima and

33:05

and Nagasaki. where I where I thought,

33:07

because of all this research

33:09

I'm I mean it was that brilliant. brilliant

33:11

in the it got to about

33:13

what those people in in the were

33:16

thinking were thinking was that even though many of

33:18

them did of them did feel guilt about the

33:20

way the bomb had been used. far greater greater

33:22

of the fear of what would happen next that

33:24

I kind of of there's quite a lot of lot

33:26

know you quite a lot of people a lot

33:28

of people. in the the book to

33:30

show how widespread this was It was

33:32

really about it could do. And not, it could do.

33:35

sometimes, well, you know, selfishly bombed well,

33:37

what if somebody bombed New York? than that,

33:39

But could it than that, the could it destroy

33:41

the world? And the movie actually

33:43

gets to this sort of theory where some of the

33:45

of the people in Man on Hand

33:47

project thought that the that the Trinity test. could set

33:49

to the atmosphere. This turns out not

33:51

to be be a thing thing that can happen,

33:54

but they thought that it might. the And

33:56

so the apocalyptic quality of it and the

33:58

I quote a lot of lot of descriptions. of

34:00

people witnessing Trinity and they talk

34:02

about Genesis and they talk about

34:04

revelation, they talk about the end

34:06

of the world and that was

34:09

how it was literally at Trinity

34:11

like from the moment of its

34:13

existence that was how people saw

34:15

it. Yeah there seems to be

34:17

almost a flip in the use

34:19

of metaphor in a way it's

34:22

like they're almost we

34:24

were talking about like the end of

34:26

the world being a metaphor for things

34:29

in a personal life and now the

34:31

very real possibility of the end of

34:33

the world and they're almost scratching around

34:36

for metaphors to find a way to

34:38

to talk about it. And also we

34:40

should bear might because a lot of

34:42

the these key writers were in the

34:45

war and so John Updite said about

34:47

Vonnegut that the end of the world

34:49

was not an idea to him it

34:51

was something he had experienced meaning Dresden.

34:54

that John Wyndham was involved in both

34:56

the Blitz and the invasion of Normandy.

34:58

Rod Serling, who created the Twilight Zone,

35:00

was in one of the most horrific

35:03

battles in the Pacific, where like 50%

35:05

of his unit was wiped out. So

35:07

there was that as well, is that

35:09

it's all obviously tied up together. So

35:12

they're coming into this sort of nuclear

35:14

world, and they're terrified of that. But

35:17

they've also got this trauma. You

35:19

know, J.G. Ballard was in Occupied

35:22

Shanghai. I grew up in Occupied

35:24

Shanghai. And so what you get,

35:26

our vision of the post-apocalyptic and

35:28

the post-apocalyptic, is largely shaped by

35:30

the visions of people who would

35:33

live through World War II. And

35:35

so you get. you get that

35:37

sort of you get that devastation

35:39

that they witnessed sort of fed

35:41

through into a more futuristic setting.

35:44

Yeah yeah yeah I'm interested in

35:46

that idea that you mentioned from

35:48

from Susan Sontag that sort of

35:50

people were doing things which weren't

35:52

explicitly about the bomb but were

35:55

about the bomb and there's also

35:57

you quote from the counter cultural

35:59

writer Jeff Nutter said that he

36:01

claimed the entirety of post-war youth

36:03

culture from the beets to the

36:06

beetles was a response to the

36:08

psychic distress of living with the

36:10

bomb. And I'm curious because one

36:12

of the big kind of, I

36:14

said, growth areas for Apocalypse, I

36:16

guess in the last kind of

36:19

50 or 60 years, has been

36:21

zombies. And whereas, for example, you

36:23

know, the bomb AI were going

36:25

to come on to, climate change

36:27

will come on to are all

36:30

sort of very very real zombies

36:32

you know I'm gonna go out

36:34

on the limb here like I'm

36:36

if the world is gonna end

36:38

I'm gonna I put money on

36:41

it probably not being zombies a

36:43

zombie denial and yeah and yet

36:45

they do seem to have captured

36:47

something about the public imagination do

36:49

you think that's Yeah,

36:52

again, like a like Sontag would have

36:54

said, a result of the bomb or

36:57

something else or these other kind of

36:59

very real apocalypse is that we don't

37:01

quite know how to, I guess, how

37:04

to process in art. Yeah, I think

37:06

it is. I think it's a very

37:08

weird, it's a very weird one because

37:11

it's so big, you know, and I

37:13

was reading one of the references was

37:15

like the zombie encyclopedia, you know, and

37:18

I'd seen a fraction, and you probably

37:20

only need to see a fraction, you

37:22

know, you know, the best, the best

37:25

ones. So on the one hand, straight

37:27

away from Night of the Living Dead

37:29

onwards, which essentially is where you get

37:32

the modern zombie. I mean there's a

37:34

whole other Haitian zombie but that's kind

37:36

of a different entity. The modern zombie

37:39

and that was deeply political and that

37:41

was essentially about kind of again how

37:43

humans will bring about their own downfall.

37:46

But then it just expanse and it

37:48

just it just grows and it grows

37:50

exponentially, you know, it spreads like a

37:53

sort of zombie plague. And it becomes

37:55

a metaphor for like everything. So, you

37:57

know, I put it in the chapter

38:00

on pandemics because there's to do with

38:02

its kind of how it represents contagion

38:04

and how it kind of multiplies like

38:07

bacteria. But then other people, you know,

38:09

you can use it as a metaphor

38:11

for war, you can use it as

38:14

a metaphor for, you know, racism, you

38:16

can use it as you can just

38:18

have it as the only apocalyptic threat

38:21

that you can just shoot shoot, essentially.

38:23

You cannot shoot climate change. but

38:26

you know the zombies are

38:28

coming towards you and there's

38:30

something quite satisfying about just

38:32

like kill the zombies. So

38:34

there's that as well. It's

38:36

almost like a safe space

38:39

apocalypse and yet if you

38:41

want to 28 weeks later

38:43

the sequel 28 days later

38:45

is one of the like

38:47

bleakest sort of popular movies

38:50

that I've seen its messages

38:52

like forget it.

38:54

The messages like there is no happy

38:56

ending, any attempt to sort of save

38:59

people's lives or to rebuild society will

39:01

actually will not just fall apart but

39:03

probably make things worse. So it's sort

39:05

of like you can do anything with

39:08

it. You can make it the most

39:10

trivial comedy. or you can make it

39:12

the darkest, most despairing, misanthropic story. So

39:14

I think that's it and it gets

39:17

you away from needing to deal with

39:19

the reality of whatever it might be,

39:21

nuclear weapons or climate change or AI,

39:23

and be in this kind of like

39:26

fictional space, but then you can explore

39:28

all these real things. Yeah, and I

39:30

found that fascinating actually, the idea of

39:32

a kind of an embodied problem, as

39:35

you say, like something you can, you

39:37

can shoot or you can hack down

39:39

or you can, you can beat in

39:41

some way. Well George Romero, Nightly Living

39:44

Dead, he said he actually thought it

39:46

was computer games, not movies, that had

39:48

really popularized the zombie. And it's because

39:50

they are the perfect thing that you

39:53

can just shoot without qualms. You never

39:55

have to feel like bad about it.

39:57

know men. I don't have bad people

39:59

feel when they're playing computer games. I

40:02

don't really play them. But certainly on

40:04

the occasions when I've been shooting zombies,

40:06

I don't feel morally conflicted. Yeah, yeah,

40:08

yeah. So when the, obviously at the

40:11

end of the Cold War, the threat

40:13

of the bomb. retreated. I mean it's

40:15

kind of unfortunately in recent months and

40:17

years resurfaced it to an extent but

40:20

there was almost like a need it's

40:22

it feels like when reading your book

40:24

to sort of to find another end

40:26

of the world and so the first

40:29

one that seems to come and you

40:31

know anyone who lived through the 90s

40:33

would have these kind of these impact

40:35

movies so you know films like Armageddon

40:38

so something something coming from space so

40:40

again I guess we're back to the

40:43

the kind of apocalypse which is not

40:45

our fault. Yeah, perhaps. But those ones,

40:48

I mean, they're still around and you

40:50

know, they come back from time to

40:52

time, but they, the ones that really

40:55

seem to have captured the public imagination,

40:57

I guess kind of the big three

40:59

of the 21st century seem to be

41:02

AI or you know, intelligent machines, pandemics

41:04

and climate change. Is there one of

41:06

those three do you think which kind

41:09

of feels

41:11

like a sort of a natural

41:13

development from the fear over the

41:15

bomb and the previous sort of

41:17

apocalyptic threats. Well, I suppose, I

41:20

mean, there's plenty of examples for

41:22

all of them. I mean, my

41:24

sort of theory of this was

41:26

that climate, you can't really make,

41:29

it's very hard to make movies

41:31

about climate change. So the day

41:33

after tomorrow is the most successful.

41:36

I suppose don't look up, which

41:38

uses a comment as a metaphor,

41:41

has probably been seen by more

41:43

people that's on Netflix, but in

41:45

the box office it's a day

41:47

after tomorrow. The day after tomorrow

41:50

is scientifically not sound, because it

41:52

has to happen very, very fast,

41:54

because that's how their movies work.

41:56

So I think what happens is

41:59

that the sort of climate anxiety

42:01

filters through all. other kinds of

42:03

movies and I think I listed

42:05

some of them there's Wally downsizing

42:08

mother like lots and lot and

42:10

they're all very very different movies

42:12

but they're all sort of expressing

42:14

that and I think you almost

42:17

have to go into a metaphorical

42:19

space because it's very hard to

42:21

make a movie or write a

42:23

novel that is directly about climate

42:26

change because it's so slow. I

42:28

mean not slow enough but it

42:30

is sort of in dramatic terms

42:32

slow. Whereas at the bomb there

42:35

was that thing where it was

42:37

just like literally people just going

42:39

it could all end tomorrow. I

42:41

don't think that is a common

42:43

feeling now even though you've got

42:46

saber rattling and from Putin and

42:48

so on. I don't think people

42:50

still feel that in that way,

42:52

that it's just kind of like

42:55

flicking a switch. I think it's

42:57

a much slower thing. And so

42:59

that has to be dealt with

43:01

in fiction in more kind of

43:04

subtle, and I find really interesting

43:06

ways. I think it's almost like

43:08

the background noise for quite a

43:10

lot of films and books. Yeah,

43:13

on the subject of pandemic stuff,

43:15

I get the feeling like when

43:17

you're talking about the art or

43:19

literature that was created around the

43:22

Spanish flu, so just sort of

43:24

which sort of ravaged the Europe

43:26

in the sort of the 1910s

43:28

and 20s. You're almost kind of,

43:31

it's quite difficult to find any

43:33

sort of, really sort of decent

43:35

literature, which refers to it directly.

43:37

Like someone told me quite recently,

43:40

which I never thought about before,

43:42

is how Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Wolfe

43:44

is, in a sense, a Spanish

43:46

flu novel, because in fact, Mrs.

43:49

Dalloway begins by just, it's the

43:51

first time she's come out after

43:53

recovering from the flu. So these

43:55

things are not made explicit, but

43:58

a novel specifically about the Spanish.

44:00

example, it's weird because it keeps

44:02

coming up as like a side

44:04

fact in biographies. So when Yates

44:06

was writing the second coming, he

44:09

was, you know, I think his

44:11

wife had the Spanish flu. Neville

44:13

Schuet, he wrote on the beach.

44:15

during the First World War, one

44:18

of his military duties was the

44:20

funeral parties of soldiers, fellow soldiers

44:22

who had died a Spanish flu.

44:24

So it's around there, but people

44:27

didn't write about it. And this

44:29

has been remarked about quite a

44:31

lot. And nobody really quite understands

44:33

why. There's a pandemic novel called

44:36

Gosslings before the First World War,

44:38

which you would think might have

44:40

been written afterwards. And it wasn't.

44:42

It captures some of that feeling.

44:45

So again, this is like a, this

44:48

is, this was a theory, but it

44:50

came out of also studying responses to

44:52

the black death, was that it didn't

44:54

make sense, that it just, there was

44:57

no logic to it. They didn't understand

44:59

why it was happening to them. And

45:01

then a lot of people thought, when

45:03

we emerge from this terrible thing, things

45:06

will be. better. We would be transformed,

45:08

we would be cleansed, something would be

45:10

better. And then it kind of wasn't,

45:12

like it, you know, obviously did change

45:15

the world in certain ways, but it

45:17

didn't have this kind of, it didn't

45:19

have a sense, you really understand of

45:22

cause and effect, particularly back then when

45:24

they understand so much about pandemics as

45:26

we do now. But it really stopped

45:28

me writing this after COVID, that there

45:31

was maybe a similar sense that we

45:33

didn't know what moral lesson to draw,

45:35

that it would have made sense if

45:37

you just went, the world has been

45:40

transformed, we have looked in the mirror,

45:42

and we've realized what we really value,

45:44

and what we appreciate, and what we

45:47

take for granted, and now we're going

45:49

to be better. you

45:52

know like hasn't really happened

45:54

so I think that's why

45:56

and there are some I've

45:59

definitely been keeping for any,

46:01

you know, COVID-informed, you know,

46:04

disaster novels. But it's just

46:06

really hard to draw those

46:09

conclusions, those sort of moral

46:11

narrative conclusions from pandemics. I

46:13

think, and as well, sort

46:16

of from a book-selling perspective,

46:19

I think you really get a sense of

46:21

people want to put it behind them as

46:23

well. Like it's sort of, it's something which,

46:26

which happened, you know, which we all live

46:28

through and you know, we all had that

46:30

moment, particularly in the early days of the

46:32

first lockdown, it's like. Well things can't go

46:34

on as before, you know, we're, we will,

46:36

once we come out of those things will

46:39

be different. And I think perhaps the moment

46:41

we're out of it and we realize things

46:43

aren't going to be different, we feel have

46:45

been embarrassed a bit of shame, you just

46:47

don't want to think about it anymore. Well,

46:50

there's an amazing statistic which I found completely

46:52

counterintuitive, which was that after the Cuban missile

46:54

crisis, The percentage

46:56

of Americans that said they were

46:59

scared about nuclear war, that was

47:01

their major concern, halved. Because it

47:03

got to such a pitch where

47:05

people just thought this is it,

47:07

it's happening this week, and then

47:09

it didn't happen. And so I

47:12

thought that would make people think

47:14

more worried and go, Jesus, that

47:16

was close. And instead, they just

47:18

went, oh, it's fine then. Or

47:20

they just could not sustain that

47:23

pitch of anxiety. They just couldn't

47:25

live day after day worrying about

47:27

that. And I do think there

47:29

is that. And I feel like

47:31

that's why. there is a

47:34

danger for activists that use apocalyptic language

47:36

to try and spur people into action

47:38

is that most people cannot live like

47:40

that. They cannot live every day as

47:42

if they are on the sort of

47:44

cusp of apocalypse and they must do

47:46

everything they can to prevent it. It's

47:48

sort of not psychically tenable. So I

47:50

feel that probably, it's all what happened

47:52

with COVID. You would hope that the

47:54

people, you know, in charge of pandemic

47:56

preparedness, feel differently. on it, but I

47:58

can understand why normal people are just

48:00

like, you know, you just want to

48:02

get back to some kind of normality.

48:04

I guess with things like, you know,

48:06

the sort of, let's say the, and

48:08

I'm going to be a zombie denier

48:10

again, like the kind of the, the

48:13

kind of fictional apocalypse is a site,

48:15

if you think of the sort of

48:17

things like the bomb, like AI, like

48:19

climate change, like pandemic. like

48:21

I guess possible impact movies. Did

48:23

you have a sense after doing

48:26

all of this reading and watching

48:28

all this stuff that there's one

48:30

particular type of catastrophe which lends

48:32

itself to higher quality art in

48:35

some way? Oh, that's interesting. Now

48:37

I think maybe the good and

48:39

the bad is It's

48:43

sort of quite evenly spread

48:45

because even something you feel

48:47

quite schlocky like the comet

48:49

slash asteroid move. I take

48:51

pains to spell out the

48:53

difference between commerce and asteroids

48:56

in the book, but we

48:58

don't need to see that

49:00

now. There's actually some really

49:02

wonderful stuff in that genre.

49:04

There's some incredibly sort of

49:06

profound and haunting zombie stories.

49:10

Yeah, so it's sort of like

49:12

the best of everything, which is

49:14

good because I did feel that

49:17

in every section, because it's broken

49:19

into these seven sections, one for

49:22

each kind of existential peril, and

49:24

I always felt like there were

49:26

some really great works that I

49:29

could kind of like hang on

49:31

to, but it was just the

49:34

challenges were different. Yeah. the genres

49:36

have sort of different rules. Now

49:38

let's let's talk a little bit

49:41

about AI because obviously it's certainly

49:43

probably of all of the subject

49:46

you talk on even more even

49:48

more so than climate change which

49:50

is kind of occupying public oxygen

49:53

I guess at the moment and

49:55

again this is amazingly can be

49:58

traced back to that summer in

50:00

was 1816. one sense in that

50:02

Byron's illegitimate daughter Ada Lovelace was

50:05

one of the kind of founders

50:07

of early computing and of course

50:10

Mary Shelley also went on to

50:12

write Frankenstein which is again this

50:14

idea of the kind of yeah

50:17

creating creating these beasts but do

50:19

you get a sense that It's

50:23

sort of the, do you feel

50:25

it is a threat, an apocalyptic

50:27

threat, having done, I reading both

50:29

of the kind of the fiction,

50:31

watch all the movies, and also

50:33

sort of read around it as

50:35

a scientific, you know, sort of

50:37

existing product or creation? Yeah, no,

50:39

I had to do a lot

50:41

of science. I had to do

50:43

a lot of science. There was

50:45

a bit, you know, where you

50:47

were just suddenly going, uh-oh, like

50:49

I need to understand the history

50:51

of AI now. I

50:55

mean I kind of feel

50:57

like that the sort of

50:59

the the downsides of AI

51:01

are much more immediate and

51:03

I think that's what most

51:05

people think in terms of

51:07

like well it uses vast

51:09

amounts of energy so it's

51:11

a absolute disaster on that

51:13

front it takes jobs in

51:15

what way to what extent

51:17

we don't yet know it

51:20

enables disinformation to spread it

51:22

will generally benefit I think

51:24

probably the wealthy and you

51:26

know so it's all of

51:28

those kind of more like

51:30

tangible immediate problems a lot

51:32

would have to happen for

51:34

it to end the world

51:36

so the where I think

51:38

when the optimism comes in

51:40

there from this whole experience

51:42

for me was the end

51:44

of the world is like

51:46

it's the ultimate like a

51:48

lot of things can go

51:50

wrong. without actually being the

51:52

end of the world. So

51:54

when you're talking about the

51:57

existential like annihilation scenario of

51:59

AI, it's really extreme. not

52:01

really spelled out how that

52:03

would happen. So again, I

52:05

suppose one of those things,

52:07

I'm glad some people are

52:09

worrying about it, but it's

52:11

been pointed out that the

52:13

people that worry about that,

52:15

you know, like Elon Musk

52:17

was one of them, and

52:19

not necessarily the people you

52:21

trust to save the world.

52:24

and that they are quite carried

52:26

away with this sort of sense

52:28

that they are almost the heroes

52:30

in a disaster movie and that

52:33

they're going to save everybody and

52:35

that the real sort of dangers

52:37

of technology a lot of time

52:39

are you know they're sort of

52:41

they're smaller than the end of

52:44

the world but they're also kind

52:46

of more they're more urgent and

52:48

perhaps easier to work to sort

52:50

of comprehend and nail down. Yeah

52:52

so no I'm not I'm not

52:54

super worried about super intelligent AI

52:57

killing everyone. Okay. But lots of

52:59

serious people are. Yeah. And I'm

53:01

not dismissing, you know, their concerns.

53:03

I kind of get where they're

53:05

coming from. And I guess where

53:08

I'd like to finish, then I'll

53:10

open up to a few questions

53:12

from the audience, but we've mentioned

53:14

climate change a few times, and

53:16

you've already kind of alluded to

53:18

the fact that it's really hard.

53:21

to create to tell good stories

53:23

I guess about climate change and

53:25

to create good art like I

53:27

know there are certain writers who

53:29

are really trying to and I

53:32

think from a very kind of

53:34

almost activist perspective and I think

53:36

with quite mixed results like there's

53:38

someone like for example like Richard

53:40

Powers for his last like three

53:42

or four novels has been engaging

53:45

with the subject from from different

53:47

directions but Do you

53:49

think novels or films or art

53:51

about climate change can help? I

53:54

guess. Do you think they're sort

53:56

of, is it a, is it

53:58

a in a notion? Are we

54:01

sort of overstating the importance that

54:03

these kind of narratives can have

54:05

on the world? Right. Yeah, because

54:08

sometimes they do, you know, these

54:10

works do have an effect. I

54:12

think anybody who's worried about, for

54:15

example, so to go back to

54:17

the risk of AI, is aware

54:20

of the terminator, is aware of

54:22

Frankenstein, is aware of you know,

54:24

various stories like that. The Arthur

54:27

C. Clark wrote a book about

54:29

threat of asteroids, which inspired NASA's

54:31

actual asteroid detection program, which took

54:34

its name from the Arthur C.

54:36

Clark, but Ronald Reagan was really

54:38

spooked by a couple of films

54:41

about nuclear war, and that kind

54:43

of informed his own kind of

54:45

changing attitudes. So, like it can

54:48

be influential. I think with climate

54:50

change, the bigger problem is that

54:52

if you cannot tell that story

54:55

in fiction, can you tell it

54:57

in activism? Right. And that is

54:59

a hard story to tell. And

55:02

it's quite interesting if you look

55:04

at say extinction rebellion, sort of

55:07

clues in the name or just

55:09

a boil. They are essentially apocalyptic

55:11

storytellers. And I think the question

55:14

is, does that work? like

55:17

are people scared into action or do

55:19

people shut down and that's and actually

55:21

campaigners against nuclear weapons in the 50s

55:23

and 60s found the same thing that

55:25

if you kind of ramp up the

55:27

threat the idea is that it will

55:30

galvanize people. But often what it does

55:32

is paralyze them, turn them off. They

55:34

go into apathy or despair or denial

55:36

or whatever. So the reason that I

55:38

called it, the stories we tell them

55:40

at the end of the world, is

55:43

not just about fiction. It's also about

55:45

fictional narratives. You know, and climate deniers

55:47

have their own narrative, which is very

55:49

uplifting, which is like, don't worry. know

55:51

you know. is quite potent

55:54

for a quite potent

55:56

for a lot of

55:58

people doesn't doesn't

56:00

everybody want to be

56:02

told that, even

56:04

if it's not true.

56:07

so yeah no I think I think it is a

56:09

no, I think it is a

56:11

real challenge. I think the challenge

56:13

of the novelists the filmmakers really mirrors the

56:15

challenge of the scientists and and activists

56:17

yeah finish, finish the I said in the

56:19

introduction that it was it uplifting

56:22

book. uplifting and once we get through all of these these

56:24

seven chapters and chapters and of of iteration

56:26

of the end of the of of the

56:28

world is in our in our We're kind of,

56:30

I don't think we're, we're I

56:33

don't think find to find

56:35

you kind of relatively

56:37

upbeat in your your, in your conclusion,

56:39

but like this, because. in a in

56:41

a weird kind of way, I think, in spending the

56:43

time. time with these with these it

56:46

doesn't necessarily - have the kind of the

56:48

effect that one might have expected. that one might

56:50

have out. Well, mean, I hope it

56:52

doesn't for the reader, out. for sure.

56:54

hope it doesn't no, it didn't for me,

56:56

because no, it didn't for me the basic fact

56:58

about the end of the world

57:00

is that it hasn't happened of the world is

57:02

that it hasn't happened yet. And reading like, I

57:04

think I I them like I call them like expired

57:06

terrors, you know, you know? were so so many

57:08

people who very, very sincerely believed it

57:10

was gonna be over. be over. within,

57:13

for for religious or secular reasons,

57:15

you know, within a year, within

57:17

a years, within ten years. within

57:20

ten years, endless predictions of, if not the

57:22

end of the whole world, the

57:24

collapse of your country or whatever, of your

57:26

and it didn't happen. And it Now, lots

57:28

of, you know, bad things have happened, but. bad

57:30

things have not but not that.

57:32

And so I wanted I it

57:34

to end it, actually, with the emotion

57:37

of it or like, do do people... because

57:40

there is an emotional component. component

57:42

And it's like, what is the point of

57:44

thinking about this? if If you're not an activist

57:46

or a scientist or or then what's the

57:48

point of thinking about it? point of thinking about it One

57:50

of the points the to appreciate, points was just

57:53

know, what. you know what what life is life

57:55

is, what you value, I think it comes

57:57

across really well in a particular book, book like station 11

57:59

I think is... is beautifully deals with what

58:01

we would miss, what we would lose.

58:03

And so I kind of really wanted

58:06

to end it in this much more,

58:08

always to go back with Mary Shelley,

58:10

to end it on that personal, emotional,

58:13

sort of reckoning with life and death,

58:15

because that's sort of at the heart

58:17

of it, despite all the kind of,

58:19

yeah, all the sort of complexities around

58:22

it. That's really what we're thinking about.

58:24

Thank you. Thank you. If you have

58:26

a question for Dorian, raise your hand.

58:29

We'll get a microphone to you just

58:31

so it can be recorded for the

58:33

podcast and so if I can hear

58:35

you say. There you go. Hello,

58:39

thank you. This was very interesting.

58:41

So I understand that we learn

58:43

about the idea of the end

58:46

of the world in the Bible,

58:48

and we have all this fiction

58:50

around it, and I'm curious if

58:52

in your research you found that

58:55

other religions and other cultures, they

58:57

have their own end of the

58:59

world, and how does it translate

59:01

to their art and fiction? Yeah,

59:05

well basically what you what is

59:07

required is a sense of history

59:09

as a as a sort of

59:11

I think it's an arrow versus

59:13

a wheel like it's a it's

59:15

a straight line there is a

59:17

within you know beginning a middle

59:19

and an end essentially rather than

59:21

a cycle so religions where they

59:23

have a cycle they'll have things

59:25

that seem apocalyptic like the the

59:28

Kaleuga, I think, in Hinduism, which

59:30

is the worst part of the

59:32

cycle. And everybody, every religion that

59:34

believes that we are living, the

59:36

entirety of human history has been

59:39

the worst part of the cycle.

59:41

This is very revealing. Nobody thinks

59:43

we're living in the best bit

59:45

ever. So there's that, and I

59:47

actually spoke to, I was on

59:49

a panel with this Japanese philosophy

59:51

professor, and he was going, even

59:53

though there are apocalyptic movies that

59:55

come out of Japan. sort

59:58

of Japanese. know, religion

1:00:00

and tradition has just

1:00:02

a different sense of

1:00:04

history in times. You

1:00:06

don't have that. And

1:00:09

so a lot of

1:00:11

the time, obviously Judaism

1:00:13

has it, has that

1:00:15

linear history, Zoroastrianism is

1:00:17

where it starts, it

1:00:19

seems. And then things

1:00:21

that sort of post-date

1:00:23

that, so Islam, Norse

1:00:25

mythology, Ragnarok. But

1:00:27

those are definitely kind

1:00:30

of, they're post revelation

1:00:32

and they use elements

1:00:34

of revelation. So I

1:00:37

can find one where

1:00:39

there was a completely

1:00:41

distinct tradition. But yeah,

1:00:43

I believe that's a

1:00:46

similar sort of situation

1:00:48

where Yeah,

1:00:51

the apocalypticism is just not

1:00:53

a big feature of the

1:00:55

culture. As I understand, I

1:00:57

certainly couldn't come across them.

1:01:00

I couldn't say I'm an

1:01:02

expert on, you know, sort

1:01:04

of the comparative religions. But

1:01:06

I was definitely looking for

1:01:08

ones where they had that

1:01:10

tradition and large parts of

1:01:12

the world simply don't. They

1:01:14

have other ways of processing

1:01:17

those anxieties in terms of

1:01:19

the cycle. You

1:01:24

reference revelations sort of being sort

1:01:26

of like the first concept of

1:01:28

end of everything. Would you not,

1:01:30

would you put Noah's Flood or

1:01:32

the Flood story which exists in

1:01:34

a lot of other cultures in

1:01:36

there as a type of apocalypse

1:01:38

or because there's a rebuilding more

1:01:40

of an optimistic viewpoint of it's

1:01:42

all about? you know reshaping the

1:01:45

world after the flood yeah no

1:01:47

that's a that's a really good

1:01:49

point yeah so basically when I

1:01:51

say revelation it's not that I

1:01:53

think it's not revelation is not

1:01:55

the first bit because actually there's

1:01:57

you know there's a book of

1:01:59

Daniel in the Old Testament what

1:02:01

because what I was interested in

1:02:03

basically telling of the secular end

1:02:05

of the world beginning you know

1:02:07

1816 and and how religion was

1:02:10

important as the backdrop to that

1:02:12

like in which way what you

1:02:14

needed to know about you know

1:02:16

revelation and so on that informs

1:02:18

the narratives that we come across

1:02:20

now and so in religious sense

1:02:22

Noah's flood is not an apocalypse.

1:02:26

If you were living through it,

1:02:28

you would think it was. Like

1:02:30

it's, you know, you wouldn't say

1:02:32

this is the wrong genre, like

1:02:34

you go, yeah. And so the

1:02:36

Noah thing comes up again and

1:02:38

again and again, sometimes in the

1:02:40

most obvious ways where comets are

1:02:42

going to come down and they

1:02:44

build a spaceship and they literally

1:02:46

call it Noah's Ark. They're not

1:02:48

being subtle about it. And that

1:02:50

idea even feeds into survivalism now,

1:02:52

this idea that with various people

1:02:54

that are building militarized bunkers for

1:02:56

when everything goes down, and they

1:02:58

do see themselves as the people

1:03:00

who are going to resettle the

1:03:02

world, happens at the end, I

1:03:04

think, of a disaster movie 2012,

1:03:06

his very Noah's Ark. So yeah,

1:03:08

it pops up quite a lot,

1:03:10

and it's really important. but

1:03:13

it's not, it's not in

1:03:15

the technical sense of apocalyptic,

1:03:17

but it's been used so

1:03:19

many times in fiction that

1:03:22

we recognize as apocalyptic. So

1:03:24

I'm thinking of like as

1:03:26

you're talking all the all

1:03:28

the species that have already

1:03:30

gone extinct, the countless languages

1:03:33

and cultures that have you

1:03:35

know Palestine Ukraine Lebanon Afghanistan

1:03:37

so when do you know

1:03:39

that it's the end of

1:03:41

the world how do you

1:03:43

what does that look like

1:03:46

well there was so the

1:03:48

distinctions is so it there's

1:03:50

basically what's it mean with

1:03:52

the end of the world.

1:03:54

So one is like the

1:03:57

literal end of the planet

1:03:59

explodes, right? You'd know. That

1:04:01

one's clear. Then it would

1:04:03

be like everyone on earth

1:04:05

dies, like in the last

1:04:07

man or something. And then

1:04:10

there would be the more

1:04:12

common thing almost at the

1:04:14

end of the world as

1:04:16

we know it, which means

1:04:18

the collapse of a society.

1:04:22

There's a book from the

1:04:24

1890s that can be flamarian

1:04:26

called the Fandemond and he

1:04:28

says, look, if you were

1:04:30

at Pompeii or Krakatoa and

1:04:32

you were caught in that,

1:04:34

he says for you that's

1:04:36

the end of the world,

1:04:39

if you were in the

1:04:41

Lisbon earthquake. To

1:04:43

you that would essentially feel

1:04:46

like the end of the

1:04:48

world. The, you know, people

1:04:50

had said that, you know,

1:04:52

the Holocaust felt like effectively

1:04:54

was the end of the

1:04:56

world for, you know, the

1:04:58

Jewish community in Europe. You've

1:05:00

talked about AIDS as feeling

1:05:03

apocalyptic for the gay community

1:05:05

in New York. So the

1:05:07

phrase is very, very malleable.

1:05:09

And so in the book,

1:05:11

I'm exploring like the different

1:05:13

kinds because certainly, you know,

1:05:15

you can't just have a

1:05:17

strict. Most stories are not

1:05:20

about the entire planet ending.

1:05:22

So there is a sense

1:05:24

of the apocalyptic in real

1:05:26

life all the time through

1:05:28

war, through pandemic. People felt

1:05:30

the First World War. They

1:05:33

would say that felt like

1:05:35

Armageddon. So in the figurative

1:05:37

sense, or you know, Native

1:05:40

Americans, they're being wiped out,

1:05:42

those kind of ideas, that

1:05:44

language, crops up again and

1:05:46

again throughout history for sure.

1:05:48

I think we've got time

1:05:50

for one more question if

1:05:52

anybody would like to conclude.

1:05:54

Well, let me ask then.

1:05:56

do you go after the

1:05:58

end of the world? So

1:06:01

you've gone from George Orwell,

1:06:03

you've gone through all of

1:06:05

these apocryphaluses. Are you orienting

1:06:07

your interest in any particular

1:06:09

direction at the moment? So

1:06:11

even though I did manage

1:06:13

to find some optimism in

1:06:15

that, I would like to

1:06:17

write something that was more

1:06:19

explicitly optimistic. And because I

1:06:21

feel like I've really gone

1:06:24

through all the fears. all

1:06:26

the anxieties and I've been

1:06:28

reading like people's how people

1:06:30

manifest their worst fears in

1:06:32

fiction and I would quite

1:06:34

like to look at how

1:06:36

people manifest like their hopes

1:06:38

and visions of you know

1:06:40

a sort of better world

1:06:42

and uniting the world I

1:06:44

was really struck recently by

1:06:47

researching about the early days

1:06:49

of radio and how utopian

1:06:51

everybody felt that this would

1:06:53

sort of bring the world

1:06:55

together. And even though these

1:06:57

utopian dreams are never quite met, I'm kind

1:06:59

of drawn to that. I'm kind of drawn maybe

1:07:01

towards the optimists and the idealists as a counterbalance.

1:07:04

I look forward to reading it. That is

1:07:06

all we've got time for, at least for the

1:07:08

formal part of the conversation. Do stick around, continue

1:07:10

the conversation with Dorian, continue the conversation with

1:07:12

each other. wine at the back there, so do

1:07:14

go and help yourself to glass. Of course

1:07:16

we have plenty of copies of Everything Must Go.

1:07:19

Pick up a copy for yourself, we're getting close

1:07:21

to the holidays, so pick up copies as

1:07:23

well for everyone in your family getting signed by

1:07:25

Dorian who will be here, signing them for

1:07:27

you. Because the tills are downstairs and because we

1:07:29

are giving you a glass of wine, please don't

1:07:32

forget to pay for the book on your

1:07:34

way out. That would be very much appreciated. And

1:07:36

just to let you know our team will be

1:07:38

coming around and folding the chairs up quickly

1:07:40

afterwards to give you a chance to circulate and

1:07:42

hang out and have a pleasant time in

1:07:44

the books up so don't be surprised if the

1:07:47

chair beneath you. beneath that

1:07:49

remains for me to

1:07:51

say is please join me

1:07:53

in giving a great

1:07:55

big thank you to me in

1:07:58

giving a great big thank you to Dorianinsky. Thank

1:08:00

you so much for coming much

1:08:02

for coming and listening. lovely, lovely

1:08:04

audience. Cheers. Thank you for listening

1:08:06

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1:08:39

notes to this episode. to this episode.

1:08:41

Production of this podcast is all

1:08:43

done all done here at Shakespeare Shakespeare and

1:08:45

All music is by Alex by Alex

1:08:47

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1:08:49

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1:08:51

We'll be back soon. soon. Until then

1:08:53

take care thanks thanks again for listening.