EXCERPT We’re all doomed. Every morning it looks more certain that the world will end badly in one way or another, and imminently so. Once in thrall to the cackling fanatic who unwound dusty scrolls to disclose portents and prophecies, we now furtively peer into our private scrying tablets where ceaseless foretellings silently unfurl, personalised to our own predilections yet expressive of a collective malaise of apprehension. Terminal catastrophes that were once the purview of bombastic prophets have been brought under the regime of probability and management, existential risk is now the business of expert panels, thinktanks, and mitigative public policy. Their relentlessly pessimistic findings are transmitted daily, and still the feeds only stimulate our appetite for the end. Omnicide II challenges this terminal mode of Western contemporaneity by opposing to the generalised dread and despair induced by ‘doomscrolling’ a hyperfocalised mania, by setting against the dull paralysis of a condemned present the unbearable lightness of no future.…