When will the world end?
In Paul Kingsnorth’s reckoning, it already has lots of times, in fact. “Worlds are always ending — that, it turns out, is one of my themes, or tics, or obsessions” — he confessed that in his 2017 collection Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist.[1] It’s easy enough to see from the outside. His 2003 debut, One No, Many Yeses was a piece of frontline reporting on different communities around the world who felt that their worlds were dissolving in the homogenising acid of global capitalism. His most recent book, Alexandria, is a venerable entry in the canon of dystopian novels. The years between those books took in the 2008 financial crash, the populist ructions of 2016, and COVID-19 — all, in their own way, the ends of various worlds. Anyone you meet at the end of the world is at a funny time in their life. In either ushering in or attempting to prevent armageddon, people will do all sorts of queer things. If we were to cast Kingsnorth’s apocalyptic obsession in the form of a question, it may be this: what happens to people when they feel their world is ending?
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