Fara Dabhoiwala at The Guardian:
Everything Must Go is about how, over the past 200 years, writers and artists have built on this inheritance to create new kinds of non-Christian eschatology. Ever since Lord Byron’s poem Darkness (1816), which dispensed with God, people have been creating secular fictions about the three main non-divine ways in which things might end – the annihilation of the planet, the extinction of humankind or the collapse of civilisation. Movies, radio broadcasts, comic books, pop songs, plays, novels, paintings, television shows, video games – it turns out that these scenarios have inspired a huge amount of detailed invention, mainly for entertainment. We love to wallow in our worst nightmares.
The form that such stories take is always influenced by the scientific and environmental events and concerns of their time. In May 1941, months before the start of the top-secret Manhattan Project, author Robert Heinlein published a story about a clandestine scheme to build a weapon from uranium-235.
more here.