Tom Phillips (Wildfire)
In 1950s Chicago, aliens from the planet Clarion made contact with Dorothy Martin. They warned her of a “holocaust of the coming events” that would begin on 21 December, 1954. Lake Michigan would subsume Chicago, and the rest of the world would follow into oblivion. Martin and her followers would be airlifted to safety on Clarion via flying saucers – but only if they first removed all metal fixtures from their clothing.
The fact that you are reading this at all confirms that the prophecy was inaccurate. But despite the frustration for Martin’s followers – some of whom were undercover psychologists researching fundamentalism – she isn’t the only layperson to receive such a vision.
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Tom Phillips tells many such stories in A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World, detailing our fascination with the end times. This ranges from theological warnings by Zoroaster – an Iranian prophet who in about 1000 BC imagined a good-versus-evil final battle – to film directors and video game developers who variously feed our hunger for cataclysms. Hollywood director Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow and 2012), he writes, “has killed more people than almost anyone else in history”.
Phillips reprises the same genial tone as in his bestseller Humans: A brief history of how we f*cked it all up. It’s a great read. He fills his timeline of unfulfilled apocalypses with wry humour and keeps the queue of plagues and judgements accessible. He jokes about unoriginal doomsday scenarios, reimagining, for example, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as Death, Inflation, War and War Again.
He identifies the gear change in eschatology during the 19th century when art and science began to compete with religion, foretelling disasters that weren’t just the work of a wrathful god. Phillips moves us through a calendar of judgement days including the return of Halley’s Comet (whose tail of toxic cyanogen was hyped into headlines about doom in 1910) to current QAnon conspiracies.
Modern apocalypses are legion: something to be expected since, as he writes, “ours is the age of doomscrolling”, with one British tabloid apparently publishing 87 killer asteroid stories in a single month. Imminent wipe-out, says Phillips, plays into online journalism’s feedback loop.
So, which predictions were made in scientific earnest, and which belong in the gag reel? Among the less credible Armageddons is the case of the Triune Immersionists of Massachusetts, whose followers gave away their livelihoods in 1909 because they believed Earth’s crust was about to peel off. Others have deeper roots, as people react to real predicaments. Take the significant spike in apocalyptic thinking following the Black Death (bubonic plague) in the 14th century.
Phillips also argues that two doomsday scenarios are playing out now. First, militant conspiracism, which he traces via the 1990s Ruby Ridge and Waco stand-offs in the US. Both conflicts saw federal agents face down cult groups with fatal consequences; both hinted at an extremism that today is more visible and arguably loaded with stronger rhetoric.
The other is climate change. Here, Phillips cites markers such as the shift of Vermont’s thaw by a , and Greenland’s unsynchronised plant bloomings. This is no fantasy designed to fill an “apocalypse-shaped hole in our souls”.
He warns that any future is best approached with rational analysis and a sharp eye for charlatans. As he writes: “The world is impermanent, but the grift is eternal.”
George Bass is a writer based in Kent, UK
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