The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters

I wrote a book! It’s called The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters and was published by 404 Ink in 2021 as part of their “Inklings” non-fiction series.

The Big Issue listed it as a 2021 Book Of The Year and described it as “Beautifully argued and deeply perceptive… It made me think differently about how society and the psyche function, the crowning glory of a very impressive series.”

The End received press coverage in and on The Bookseller, The Face, gal-dem, The Quietus, The Skinny, Pipewrench, Books From Scotland, Continue the Voice, tmrw, BBC Radio Scotland, EHFM’s Feeling My Shelf, EHFM’s Cocoon Radio and the Wigtown Book Festival podcast. To promote The End, I curated film programmes for Glasgow Short Film Festival and Summerhall, and did readings and events at Lighthouse Book’s Radical Book Fair, Neu Reekie, Wigtown Book Festival, Aye Write and Granite Noir.

In 2022, The End was shortlisted for the inaugural Kavya Prize.

This is its blurb:

Throughout history, apocalypse fiction has explored social injustice through fantasy, sci-fi and religious imagery, but what can we learn from it? Why do we escape very real disaster via dystopia? Why do we fantasise about the end of the world?

The word “apocalypse” has roots in ancient Greek, with apo (“off”) and kalýptein (“cover”) combining to form apokálypsis, meaning to uncover or reveal. In considering apocalypse fiction across culture and its role in how we manage, manifest and imagine social, economic and political crises, Goh navigates what this genre reveals about our contemporary anxieties, and why we turn to disaster time and again.

From blockbusters like War of the Worlds to The Handmaid’s Tale and far beyond, we venture through global pandemics to the climate crisis, seeking real answers in the midst of our fictional destruction.

Let’s journey to the end.