What's the book that talks about all the different ways humanity can destroy itself?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50485582-the-precipice?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=BUzsAMvaKM&rank=3
The Precipice
2020-03-05
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 The Precipice

 Toby Ord

 4.02
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 This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time.

 If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late.

 Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity.

 An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last.
 Genres Philosophy Nonfiction Science Politics Futurism Society History
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 480 pages, Hardcover

 First published March 5, 2020

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 Toby Ord

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 Stefan Schubert
 19 reviews 93 followers
 February 17, 2020
 This book conveys the Future of Humanity Institute world-view; the result of 15 years of research. It's a whole new way of looking at the world and what our priorities should be. The book is meticulously argued, rich in facts and ideas, surprisingly accessible, and beautifully written.
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 Matthew
 Author 1 book 41 followers
 March 14, 2021
 I think I missed the point of this book. For a book that seems to take itself seriously and is on a serious topic - existential risk - there’s no science behind any of it, and all of it could be re-written as ‘problems humanity has to deal with or things may get bad.’ But we already know that. Nothing in here is new - literally not one page of it. Moreover, his solutions contradict themselves.

 He says nukes are scary and we should have fewer of them - every kid over the age of 10 agrees. He says climate change is an existential risk, which all serious people know. He says AI might be a risk in the future. Thank you, I’ve read the news more than once in the last 10 years so I am well aware. That’s it - literally, those are the three risks, with some pandemic stuff and others thrown in for seasoning. He then jumps around across timelines ranging from centuries out to hundreds of thousands of years out. So... ?

 There’s tons of fluff. Try this sentence out for size on page 45: “People matter equally regardless of their temporal location.” I can’t help but ask: how and why? Under what philosophical approach? Do we value the living more than dead, or do we live for those still to come? And what is that concept rooted in, and how does that define good and bad across time? I’d say I’m being dense but you’re the Oxford philosophy professor, so if you don’t know, I don’t know who else to ask.

 Every sentence that does seem profound starts with ‘suppose there is a 20% chance of X’ (say, the sun exploding). Ok - but how was that 20% number calculated? Never explained. But that doesn’t stop him from doing some basic math along the lines of ‘if that risk increases threefold, now we have higher risk.’ Again - what?

 Even the math he does include (finally) on a single page (178) is not helpful at all. “Suppose F(sq) = a status quo value of great power competition.” I’ll pay anyone $100 if you can send me a note with a value in that formula that is mathematically or logically deduced and can be defended.

 The entire book is devoid of units of measurement, so we get things that appear deep until you think about them for more than 10 seconds: “cost effectiveness = importance x tractability x neglectedness.” Mmm interesting. Wait, how can I actually apply that idea to anything at all? How much neglectedness is a lot? That doesn’t make sense, or is interesting as a purely theoretical idea in a classroom. He acknowledges as much: “even though it is very difficult to assign precise numbers to these dimensions...” One might say impossible with any sense of practical applicability. Which is the summary concept of this book.

 Lastly, what tipped from 2 star to 1 is his quip about Epicurus. One of my least favorite tics of intellectuals is coming up with one simple thing that they think proves the ancient minds were totally wrong. Page 48 - “Epicurus argued that your death cannot be bad for you, since you are not there to experience it. What this neglects is that if I step out into traffic and die, my life as a whole will be shorter and therefore worse.” Oh. Epicurus didn’t think about dying meaning a shorter life! Except he did, and you know it, as did all the Stoics who enjoin us to not think about life as time spanned, but experiences / life ‘lived’ (alternatively, they proposed a different unit of measurement than most of us use reflexively, something I desperately wish the author would do). Which is why every intelligent person throughout history has essentially said something along the lines of ‘a man may have lived long, yet lived little.’ But not this author - he proved those old people are silly with his traffic experiment.
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 Fin Moorhouse
 74 reviews 109 followers
 November 5, 2023
 The book discusses the risks of catastrophic events that destroy all or nearly all of humanity’s potential. There are many of them, including but not limited to the Hollywood scenarios that occur to most people: asteroids, supervolcanoes, pandemics (natural and human-engineered), dystopian political ‘lock-in’, runaway climate scenarios, and unaligned artificial general intelligence. The overall risk of an existential catastrophe this century? Roughly one in six, this author guesses: Russian roulette . Clearly, mitigating existential risk is not nearly treated like the overwhelmingly important global priority it is: not in our political institutions, nor in popular consciousness. Anyway, it’s excellent– highly recommended.

 It was also full of some fairly alarming and/or surprising facts. So in place of a full review, here are some highlights:

 The Biological Weapons Convention is the international body responsible for the continued prohibition of bioweapons, which on Toby’s estimate pose a greater existential risk by an order of magnitude than the combined risk from nuclear war, runaway climate change, asteroids, supervolcanoes, and naturally arising pandemics. Its annual budget is less than that of the average MacDonald’s restaurant. (p.57)

 Remember that quotation attributed to Einstein that “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left”? Firstly, it’s not true– a recent review found that the loss of all pollinators would create a 3 to 8 percent reduction in global crop production. Secondly, Einstein never said it. (p.118)

 Technological progress is really hard to predict – “One night in 1933, the world’s pre-eminent expert on atomic science, Ernest Rutherford, declared the idea of harnessing atomic energy to be ‘moonshine’. And the very next morning Leo Szilard discovered the idea of the chain reaction. In 1939, Enrico Fermi told Szilard the chain reaction was but a ‘remote possibility’, and four years later Fermi was personally overseeing the world’s first nuclear reactor.” Furthermore, at the start of the 20th century, many thought heavier-than-air human flight to be impossible. Wilbur Wright was somewhat more optimistic, guessing it to be at least 50 years away; 2 years before he invented it. (p.121)

 The UK has four levels of ‘biosafety’. The highest level, ‘BSL-4’, is reserved for research involving the most dangerous and infectious pathogens. The 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease caused economic damages totaling £8 billion and the slaughter of some 6 million animals to halt its spread. Six years later, a lab was researching the disease under BSL-4 security. Another outbreak that year was traced back to a *leaky pipe* in the lab, spreading the disease into the groundwater. “After an investigation, the lab’s license was renewed—only for another leak to occur two weeks later.” (p.130)

 Nuclear near misses have been *terrifyingly* frequent. The book lists more than ten examples. Here are a few:

 1958. “A B-47 bomber accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb over South Carolina, landing in someone’s garden and destroying their house.” (the warhead remained in the plane)

 27th October 1962. Four nuclear submarines had been sent by the Soviet Union to support their military operations in Cuba during the height of the Missile Crisis. A US warship detected one of these submarines and tried to force it to surface by using depth charges as ‘warning shots’. The submarine had been underwater for days and had lost radio contact for as long– and with it, information about the situation unfolding above. Moreover, being designed for the Arctic, the submarine was breaking down in the tropical waters. Temperatures ranged from 45°C to 60°C as carbon dioxide began to accumulate. Crew members were falling unconscious. The captain, Valentin Savitsky, guessed by the bombardment that war had broken out. He ordered his crew to prepare the submarine’s nuclear weapon. “On any of the other submarines, this would have sufficed to launch their nuclear weapon. But by the purest luck, submarine B-59 carried the commander of the entire flotilla… [who] refused to grant it. Instead, he talked Captain Savitsky down from his rage.” (p.4)

 28th October 1962. The very next day, a US base in and US-occupied Japanese island received by radio an order to launch its nuclear arsenal. “All three parts of the coded order matched the base’s own codes, confirming that it was a genuine order to launch their nuclear weapons.” Captain William Bassett took command and became responsible for executing the order. But he grew suspicious– a pre-emptive strike should already have hit them, and the threat level was set to DEFCON 2 rather than the highest level of DEFCON 1. Yet, he radioed the Missile Operations Centre to check, and received the very same order. A lieutenant in charge of a different launch site told Bassett he had no right to stop the launch given the order was repeated. “In response, Bassett ordered two airmen from an adjacent launch site to run through the underground tunnel to the site where the missiles were being launched, with orders to shoot the lieutenant if he continued without either Bassett’s agreement or a decleration of DEFCON 1”. Bassett then called the Missile Operations Centre again, who this time issued an order to stand down. This story is still disputed and was only made public in 2015.

 26 September 1983. Just after midnight, the Soviet early-warning system designed to indicate nuclear launches from the United States showed five ICBMs heading towards Russia. The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, was under orders to report such a warning to his superiors, who in turn were instructed to retaliate in kind with immediate effect. “For five tense minutes he considered the case, then despite his remaining uncertainty, reported it to his commanders as a false alarm.” (p.96)

 Norman Borlaug was an American agronomist who developed new high-yield and disease-resistant varieties of wheat during the so-called ‘Green Revolution’. He is often credited for having saved more lives than any person who ever lived. Estimates range from 260 million to over a billion lives saved. (p.97)

 Finally, the total amount of money expended annually on researching and mitigating existential risks is dwarfed by the amount of money spent annually on ice-cream by about two orders of magnitude.

 Again, strongly recommended; but not remotely comforting.

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 Alexander
 68 reviews 62 followers
 October 21, 2021
 A beautiful and profoundly inspiring book.

 Toby Ord is a philosopher who completed his graduate studies at Oxford under the supervision of Derek Parfit. Parfit is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Parfit's philosophical interests primarily centred around identity, rationality, and morality. Ord was a founding figure in Effective Altruism and currently serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute.

 Ord is interested in how we can do the most good. He started out being focused on alleviating poverty but then switched his focus to existential risk reduction out of a conviction that the latter is more impactful. He is nevertheless still involved with organisations working on poverty alleviation. In one of his interviews, Ord argued against "criticising each other for working on the second most important thing."

 Existential risk (x-risk) sounds like a guilty pleasure for philosophers to contemplate as they spend their lives up in the clouds, detached from the everyday worries of ordinary folk. The lives of those suffering elsewhere in the world today seem to matter very little to most of us, let alone the lives of yet-to-be-born future generations. However, with the right rhetoric and argument, this book compels the reader to take the x-risks facing humanity seriously. Ord's beautiful writing meticulously argues for our duty towards our ancestors and our heirs, the many lives not with us today.

 This book manages to achieve the goals it sets out for itself without resorting to fear-mongering, despite the nature of its subject matter. It is lucid and poetic. The Precipice continues to be formative in shaping my worldview.

 Morality is uncertain not only because our knowledge about the world is probabilistic and incomplete but also because we are uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do given the diversity of moral theories. Even with complete epistemic and ontological certainty about the world, moral uncertainty would still remain.

 Despite a high degree of moral uncertainty and a wide range of possible moral theories, there are still certain actions that seem highly valuable in any theory. X-risk reduction is one such action. X-risk reduction has the potential of becoming a uniting common cause. No matter what one values, one ought to want that value to continue being realised than come to a complete halt. (This argument doesn't work for everyone; e.g., an antinatalist would disagree.)

 Toby Ord draws insights from various fields other than philosophy to construct his arguments—the sciences, computing, history, law. Ord argues that we live in an age of heightened x-risk due to such powerful technologies as artificial intelligence, biotechnology and biowarfare, nuclear weapons, as well as climate change. These anthropogenic risks are on top of the natural risks that exist regardless of technology such as naturally arising pandemics, super volcanos, asteroids and comets.

 Ord assigns best guesses to the likelihood of certain risks resulting in an existential catastrophe in the next 100 years. He sets a probability of 1 in 10 to artificial intelligence, 1 in 30 to engineered pandemics, 1 in 1000 to climate change, and 1 in 1000 to nuclear war. Total x-risk is estimated with a probability of 1 in 6, which accounts for both anthropogenic, natural risks as well as unknown unknowns.

 Despite these high probabilities, Ord is not alarmist in his writing. He is calm and reassuring. Ord spends a fair portion of the book refuting bad arguments for extinction. He argues that it would be difficult for complete extinction to occur because research scientists in Antarctica and military personnel aboard nuclear submarines will likely survive even in the most apocalyptic scenarios we can imagine.

 International cooperation is a major theme in this book and I see it as a centrepiece of x-risk reduction. How will we get such culturally diverse groups of tribalistic mammals to listen to one another, seek to understand and agree on a common cause and work together towards its achievement?

 Ord speaks of The Long Reflection . Once we’ve made it past The Precipice , where will we want humanity to go? What will we want to accomplish in the cosmos? How do we want to go about continuing the story?

 Ord argues that if we wanted to work on reducing x-risks, then we shouldn't try to be too "meta" about it. He argues that it is more effective to work on x-risk reduction directly. If one wants to help but cannot work on x-risk reduction directly, then the next best alternative is to donate to organisations that are working on x-risk reduction. Note that Ord is not saying that you ought to work on x-risk reduction. He is simply offering his views on how to do it effectively if you do want to work on the problem.

 The book has 480 pages, but the main text is only about 250 pages, and the rest is notes, references, and appendices. I appreciated this and found that this decision made the book easier to read. If I wanted to get into the gnarly logical arguments, then I could refer to the notes at the end of the book. Ord doesn't burden the reader with overwhelming detail.

 I am hopeful. Life will do its very best to continue its existence in the universe.
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 Jan
 3 reviews 24 followers
 March 5, 2020
 The idea of the whole existence of humanity being threatened got so much attention in sci-fi that for many people it's somewhere in the vicinity of "aliens landing", if not "zombie apocalypse".

 Toby Ord convincingly argues that this is not the case, the chances that humanity may go extinct in near future are not that small. Actually I think the likelihood of dying because of some global catastrophe is larger than e.g. the risk of dying because of a traffic accident. Taking this seriously could be quite a perspective-changing event.

 What's also striking is how tractable is it to do something about some of the risk scenarios.

 Overall highly recommended.
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 Jake
 239 reviews 48 followers
 April 26, 2020
 The following excerpt from Toby Orb's book is from his estimated probabilities that within the next 100 years our entire species will go extinct, or our civilization will collapse to irreparable degree:

 “Existential catastrophe via: Asteroid or comet impact
 ∼ 1 in 1,000,000

 Existential catastrophe via: Supervolcanic eruption
 ∼ 1 in 10,000

 Existential catastrophe via: Stellar explosion
 ∼ 1 in 1,000,000,000

 Existential catastrophe via: Total natural risk
 ∼ 1 in 10,000

 Existential catastrophe via: Nuclear war
 ∼ 1 in 1,000

 Existential catastrophe via: Climate change
 ∼ 1 in 1,000

 Existential catastrophe via: Other environmental damage
 ∼ 1 in 1,000

 Existential catastrophe via: “Naturally” arising pandemics
 ∼ 1 in 10,000

 Existential catastrophe via: Engineered pandemics
 ∼ 1 in 30

 Existential catastrophe via: Unaligned artificial intelligence
 ∼ 1 in 10

 Existential catastrophe via: Unforeseen anthropogenic risks
 ∼ 1 in 30

 Existential catastrophe via: Other anthropogenic risks
 ∼ 1 in 50

 Existential catastrophe via: Total anthropogenic risk
 ∼ 1 in 6

 Existential catastrophe via: Total existential risk
 ∼ 1 in 6”

 Toby Ord. “The Precipice.”


 The appearance of covid-19 is the first time in my living memory that a single event has created massive seismic ripples across the world stage. It has, stunted economies, led to massive political fights, misinformation campaigns, a rise of an appreciation of authoritarianism, and at this time of this writing, it has taken nearly a quarter million lives. We, are, as can be seen here, still vulnerable to pestilence. Of course, though, we must be aware, that these vulnerabilities, this unprotected underbelly of our global societies as susceptible to many more dangers than covid-19. The book "The precipice” is a great study of these dangers.
 This book continues the tradition of viewing humanity in its history of deep time- that being the history since its inception something 200,000 years ago in Africa from arboreal apes and other hominoids to the future. This carried on the tradition popularly expressed in the books of Yuval Harari and others arguably like Sagan, Tyson, Asimov, and at times smil, who take a grand cosmic view of our species. Ord describes a bit of our history and soon moves into an explanation of our potential futures. These futures range from the total annihilation of the species, to one of his musings early on in the book where he said : “The future of a prosperous humanity is extraordinarily bright”. This schizoid perspective stems from his reflection as to what he sees as our prospects. Joining of course the popular trend these days of futurists of whose ideas are that now is the most important times in history. This is because we are presently close temporally to a massive list of breakthrough innovations, from biotech in CRISPR, deep brain stimulation and prosthetics, to robotics and A.I. We are at the infancies of these technologies, but further we are at the infancy of our wisdom with the possibility with very advanced tech. He further advances his thesis by discussing our ever increasing ability to harness power which naturally brings to mind Smil’s grand text : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3... .
 All in all the thesis stands, we are at a point in history that he refers to as the precipice- this is where we are at a point where given our technological progress we can choose to prevent our selves from falling into massive disaster, or we can trudge forward ignoring all possible signs of danger. If you look at the quotation form the book above, you will seen the many possible ways in which we as a species can reach an existential risk which can strictly be defined as either our extinction or by a disaster which sends the few surviving members of our species in the technological equivalent of a dark age.
 Now of course, one may say that is a bit melodramatic but he makes the case powerfully. The story of when our cosmologically young species reached this point in history was shy after Rutherford called the liberation of energy from an atom moonshine, and Einstein and Szilard sent out the famous letter to Roosevelt . It was at the first testing of the atomic bomb. At this point in history it became clear that we as a species had given ourselves a distinct ability to bring about our destruction . Or to quote the oft mentioned line mumbled by the late leader of the manhattan project - Oppenheimer - upon reflecting on the bomb’s creation : “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. The proverbial doomsday clock moved closer to midnight at that moment of its testing. And of course, beyond Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when nuclear information not only spread, but the curbing of nuclear proliferation failed, certain moments made it clear that our species was in danger. First the story the book opened up with :
 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_...

 And of course, the cuban missile crisis, which some have said we only survived, not by the genius of Kennedy, nor the theory of MAD being a deference but by dumb luck.
 Sadly though, it is not only nuclear missiles which could cause an issue, but in his eyes, the possibility of an engineered pandemic (no I’m not standing by the idea that covid -19 was built in a lab.), climate change, a great war between nations, and possibly most frighteningly: A.I alignment. Which in short, is the idea that A.I may be build with the wrong initial programs to function well with humanity. This is best expressed in the following book from Stuart Russell : https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/sho...
 Overall, in his assumption our greatest danger is ourselves.

 I should end this review with admitting that despite the nature of the grim topic, Ord was actually quite optimistic. Like in the following two books written by pinker:
 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
 …Ord discusses what appears to almost be a moral compass of humanities improvement and that by most metrics humanity has improved. He then extends the same idea forward saying, perhaps we can save ourselves when it is not to late, and come up with the social infrastructure to handle all risks to our species natural and artificial, nuke, and astroid, by simply working together and focusing on the right things, just has , in his eyes, we have worked together and abolished a great deal of violence, infectious disease, increased drinking water, decreased child mortality ect.
 He states that existential risk is a fairly new issue, and that for most of human history this was not a thing people had to worry about. It is in his eyes, that its study began with early letters such as from Betrand Russell and Einstein warning about nuclear missiles : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell... .
 He hopes that at some point humanity may gain wisdom to the level of our great intellect and perhaps we can save ourselves from the oncoming peril.
 I should add that this is quite a weird book, in that he does not make this hypothetical but recommends exact websites to help humanity prepare for a possible hellish storm:
 Effectivealtruism.com and 80,000 hours.com
 He further even mentions possible solutions. Here are some:

 Better communication across great nations may decrease nuclear war (like the red telephone in the cold war)
 create a world government? Or a 3rd party to be a watch dog for threats.
 Fix institutions related to risk
 we can fix The Who and it’s ability to respond to pandemics (Yes he said this before covid.)
 DNA synthesis screened for dangerous pathogens

 He then continues to even mention jobs that the reader can go for. If you’re into computer science, you can study A.I to make sure things don’t go to shit, and if you are in Bio/medicine you can switch over to studying pandemics (I know..).

 Overall, this was a brilliantly researched book, and I highly recommend everyone read it.
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 Ryan Boissonneault
 201 reviews 2,160 followers
 January 8, 2021
 Humanity is currently living in its infancy; barely 200,000 years old, our brief span of time on earth pales in comparison to both the billion-year history of the earth and universe that came before us and to the hundreds of millions of years (or longer) that potentially lie ahead of us.

 At the same time, while humanity is relatively young—with the potential for its greatest discoveries, inventions, and moral progress ahead of it—we have also reached a threshold where we have achieved the potential to both cause—and prevent—our own extinction.

 In The Precipice, Oxford philosopher Toby Ord synthesizes over a decade of research to argue for the urgency of preparing for and reducing the risk of existential catastrophe, defined as any event—natural or human—that stands to wipe out humanity’s long-term future potential either through the extinction of the species or through unrecoverable civilizational collapse. These existential catastrophes include events such as asteroid/comet strikes, volcanic eruptions, climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, unaligned artificial intelligence (AI), and more.

 We predictably underestimate these risks, because, by definition, they have never occurred and can never have occurred if we find ourselves in a position to be discussing them (survivorship bias). This creates the impression that they will never happen, or that the probability of them happening is close to zero. But according to Ord, not only are existential catastrophes less remote than we might think, we’ve actually been close to facing them in the recent past. The various close calls of either deliberate or accidental nuclear war—during the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance—remind us just how close we actually came.

 So these risks, while seemingly remote, are nevertheless real and deserve far more attention than they are given. As Ord points out, the world is currently so oblivious to these risks that it spends more money every year on things like ice cream than on the research that could help us understand the events that could end our very existence (e.g., the Biological Weapons Convention has four employees and an annual budget of 1.4 million, which is less than the average McDonald’s restaurant). This general underestimation of risk—along with the undervaluation of public goods by the market—could very well be our undoing.

 Having outlined the risks and describing what’s at stake, Ord proceeds to present the moral case for the prevention of existential catastrophe, which should be fairly clear—the prevention of billions of deaths and the protection of the future potential of humanity. Although this is difficult to argue against, it does raise the following question: Why should we care about future generations?

 As Ord points out, we should care about those separated by time in the same way we care about those separated by space: just as geographical location does not make a human life more or less valuable, neither should location in time. Additionally, we have benefited in numerous ways from the work, dedication, and innovations of our ancestors and we stand in a position to pass this on to future generations without causing undue harm and destruction. This is our obligation to the continuation of the human project.

 Of course, the philosophy of moral obligation is complex, but to me, the case for our obligation to protect the future potential of humanity is far stronger than the case against it, which ultimately betrays a fundamental lack of gratitude, basic decency, and respect for the overall human project. Since we have benefited in countless ways from the inherited culture and discoveries of past generations, we can fulfill our duty by “paying it forward” to future generations by using our scientific knowledge to protect them from existential risk.

 The moral case is further solidified by its asymmetrical nature. As Ord wrote:

 “The case for making existential risk a global priority does not require certainty, for the stakes aren’t balanced. If we make serious investments to protect humanity when we had no real duty to do so, we would err, wasting resources we could have spent on other noble causes. But if we neglect our future when we had a real duty to protect it, we would do something far worse—failing forever in what could well be our most important duty. So long as we find the case for safeguarding our future quite plausible, it would be extremely reckless to neglect it.”

 Having established the moral case for the prevention of existential catastrophes, Ord proceeds to analyze the existential risks themselves, what the science tells us about them, the probability of each catastrophe actually occurring, and what our short- and long-term plan of action should be.

 Admittedly, it’s in this part of the book that Ord seems (at times) to be arguing against his prior points by showing us how unlikely the risks really are and how improbable it would be for many catastrophes—even nuclear winter and extreme climate change—to actually wipe out all of humanity. (Even the Black Death, which killed half the population of Europe, didn’t wipe out humanity’s future potential.) And so you’re left with the impression that existential risk, while entirely possible and worthy of our attention, is in fact a fairly remote possibility.

 That is, until Ord greatly exaggerates the dangers of AI, which he takes to represent the single greatest risk humanity faces. If this is true, this is actually good news, because the prospect of general AI enslaving humanity is far lower, in my estimation, than an asteroid strike.

 Let’s review some of the risks in a little more detail.

 Starting with natural risks, Ord shows us that even though our scientific understanding is incomplete, our best science—along with our understanding of mass extinction events through an analysis of the fossil record—shows us that natural events that have the potential to cause mass extinction (asteroid/comet impacts and supervolcanic eruptions) occur only once every million or hundreds of millions of years. The probability of humanity facing an existential crisis of this sort over the next hundred years is therefore estimated to be maybe 1 in 10,000—in other words, very remote. This does not mean that unforeseen risks do not exist, or that we should stop studying volcanoes or asteroids; it only means that we can safely assume that humanity will not go extinct or suffer civilizational collapse from natural causes in the next 100 years.

 Ord next considers anthropogenic existential risks, including nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, and unaligned general AI. Again, it should be pointed out that Ord is considering only existential risk—the permanent wiping out of humanity or civilization. While the consequences of climate change are likely to be disastrous, Ord is only concerned with the question of whether it would end humanity’s future potential. In this respect, climate change likely falls short, as Ord himself details. While there is a possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect, the science seems to suggest that this effect—the only likely climate scenario to truly present an existential risk—is unlikely to happen.

 This does make you wonder why Ord decided to take this particular perspective. By setting the bar at the end of humanity, very serious risks are seemingly downplayed. Wouldn’t it be more preferable to view these risks as global risks, catastrophes that could affect the entire planet or very large segments of the human population? I’m not sure what you gain by setting the bar so high. We should be paying attention to all global problems, not just the ones that will permanently wipe us out. Nevertheless, Ord insists, for the purposes of this book, to view only the risks that could end humanity’s entire potential, and climate change and nuclear war are not likely candidates. But then again, neither are engineered pandemics or artificial intelligence, as far as I can tell.

 Of course others will disagree, and the reader can make their own decisions. But when Ord starts describing AI systems that will use the internet to accumulate power and financial resources for the purposes of enslaving humanity, he has lost me. I’m not interested in reading about highly speculative risks, especially when it overshadows the discussion of more immediate risks like the elimination of jobs by AI and automation. AI, climate change, and nuclear war may not wipe out humanity, but there are plenty of other disastrous scenarios that fall short of this that are not discussed because they don’t meet Ord’s end-of-the-world criteria.

 The other issue with the book is the assignment of probabilities. With natural risks, this is less of a problem. Since the world has experienced comet strikes, volcanic eruptions, and mass extinction events in the past, we can get a rough estimation of the frequency of such occurrences. And so Ord’s claim that there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of humanity suffering a natural existential catastrophe in the next hundred years is reasonable.

 But what about events that have never occurred? Ord tells us that there is a 1 in 6 chance that unaligned or malicious AI wipes out humanity or causes civilizational collapse in the next century (this is a 16 percent chance!). But where is this number really coming from? While it’s important to be precise, you can’t achieve this level of precision simply by assigning a specific number to what you subjectively believe to be the case.

 Since we are so far away from any scenario where AI takes control over humanity, it’s impossible to tell what the actual probability is: maybe it’s 1 in 6, maybe it’s 1 in 10,000, but there are many reasons to think the risk is lower than Ord is claiming. It’s highly likely that when we develop the capability to build a general AI system (if we ever can; see Steven Pinker’s analysis in his book Enlightenment Now), we will be prudent and capable enough to also build in the appropriate safeguards. Further, there is no more reason to think the AI systems we create will be malicious than there is to think they will be benevolent. After all, computer code does not have consciousness or inherent evil motivations, outside of the film industry. So there is very little reason for me to give this number any kind of credence at all, even if some AI researchers happen to agree with it.

 But AI does not need to enslave humanity for us to be worried about it. And that’s what’s frustrating about this book. We should be discussing the more immediate effects of AI on things like the elimination of jobs, or the effects of climate change on the poorest regions of the world. By setting the bar at extinction-level events that are truly remote, we avoid the conversations about the things that matter now. We should instead re-frame these existential risks as global risks and set out to solve them using global solutions. As we learn more about these risks and solve the more immediate and localized problems, the existential risks associated with these areas should be automatically reduced.
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 Otto Lehto
 457 reviews 174 followers
 May 13, 2020
 From the opening words to the closing paragraphs, you can sense the urgency at the tip of the author's tongue. Mild mannered though his philosophical style may be, there is a sense of apocalyptic poetry in the channeled desperation that drips from the pages like molten candle wax. Even in good times the feeling of existential anguish is no stranger to any sane persons' sensibility. Bad times all the more weigh heavily on our hearts. The extra blanket of terror that has settled down on humanity as a side product of globalization and the nuclear age has permeated our awful nightmares. What will a human future look like? Do we even HAVE a future? Contemplating our demise, the eternal darkness of humanity, can be paralyzing, senseless, and necessary.

 Toby Ord's greatest achievement in The Precipice is to play the "existential dread" card tactfully. You can see that the author is a philosopher who prefers reason to passions. He allows the feeling of anguish to momentarily tug on our terrified heart strings in order to motivate our passions sufficiently to get the reasoning going (following the sentimentalism of David Hume). But he then forces the passions to abscond while he rolls out the red carpet for calculating reason as soon as the analysis demands it. As a result, the analysis is mostly confined to a "safe space INSIDE terror," a space of statistics and numbers, a court of motivated reasoning surrounded by a sea of terror.

 The book does not shy away from controversial but empirically supported positions. For example, Ord emphasizes that global warming is only one among many threats that we face and that it has only limited capacity to pose an existential threat to humanity (as opposed to a severe but nonlethal economic, social, and environmental threat of the kind that is already clearly does). He does not shy away from showcasing the irrationality of the opposition to civilian nuclear power while highlighting the pervasive and lingering threat of nuclear genocide through war. He uses credible statistics to show that an asteroid impact, although a real existential threat in the long run, is not an imminent one, so we should be more urgently worried about other threats. He ends up emphasizing the existential threat of A.I. and technological development as perhaps the most potent threat that humanity faces in a time when few people seem to care about it much.

 Powerfully, to motivate long term survival, the author sings sweet songs about the untapped potential of human evolution throughout the book, and especially at the final chapters. There is a surprising amount of visionary thinking going on, not only in terms of dystopian futures and species extinction, but also about potential lands of milk and honey at the end of history. This hammers home the real opportunity cost of extinction: the negation of future utopias. And I agree: unimaginable utopias have the potential of being realized if only we play our cards right. Preventing the extinction of human potential as the fountainhead of future development is a much greater reason to keep on the straight and narrow than the survival of the flawed present. This, however, is a realization that does not come naturally to most people without extensive motivation.

 Following from the above, I have my disagreements with Ord's methodology and conclusions. For example, Ord attempts to show that we should care about future generations (almost) as much as we care about today's generations. I think that this is practically hard to motivate. Most people simply cannot be bothered to think about future generations or to know what to make of it. Furthermore, if we really took unborn lives to be worth so much, how can we justify abortion or even contraception? Even abstinence would be equivalent to a minor genocide, it seems. It is not obvious that we should care about potential people who do not exist and may never exist. He also takes some cheap shots at Epicurus's arguments about why we shouldn't worry about death without bothering to argue against it. As a philosopher himself, I would have expected more of him.

 Secondly, the category of existential risk downplays all risks that fall short of it but seem to be something we should worry about. This means that the category is perhaps too strict and not very illuminating. It says little about threats that allow humanity to survive but in a crippled or miserable state. Thinking about existential risk as a separate category from ordinary risks that annihilates the very possibility of humanity is certainly a useful distinction to make. But I feel that, for many people, there isn't much of a difference between, say, a nuclear winter that annihilates 95% of humanity and an existential catastrophe that wipes out 100% of us. If people could avert the latter by bringing about the former (especially if they themselves and all their loved ones would be wiped out in the process), I feel that it wouldn't be much of a consolation. So, I think that existential risks and near-apocalyptic catastrophes are pretty much in the same ballpark of "super awful". It is going to be hard to convince many people, myself included, otherwise.

 All that said, Ord's book shines as a warning beacon AND a Promethean torch. The book's ambiguous message combines techno-utopian hope with techno-dystopian terror. It challenges our common assumptions about which particular categories of risk should we most worry about by laying down some facts and figures that are bound to be instructive. And it contains a criticism of our short-sighted institutions. Markets are driven by quarterly capitalism and politics is driven by the electoral cycle. None of this is capable of thinking decades, let alone centuries, ahead. But the lessons are crucial. Some of the math about expected costs and benefits is hard to compute, and we can debate the normative dimension of caring about future generations, but we should learn to recognize the category of existential risk as a separate policy task that demands care.
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 Vidur Kapur
 131 reviews 49 followers
 May 16, 2020
 This is a beautifully written work that calls on humanity to secure its longterm future, reflect on what it wants to achieve once secure, and then go on to fulfil its potential. It's rigorous and well-sourced, with a huge proportion of the book being taken up by appendices and endnotes. It contains mathematics, but it's accessible to an educated non-specialist.

 Overall, it makes a strong case for the proposition that there are "possible heights of flourishing far beyond the status quo", and that "our descendants could have aeons to explore these heights". It is therefore urgent, Ord argues, that we direct more of our resources to tackling risks that could jeopardise this future. Many of these risks have only arisen relatively recently; as a species, we've acquired tremendous power, without commensurate wisdom.

 My only quibble is that the book could have explored in more detail why it is that many think the future will be net-positive, and more explicitly answered some of the objections to focusing on existential risk reduction as opposed to, say, moral circle expansion. That is, should we focus on securing humanity's future, or on making it better conditional on it continuing?

 Ord does make some arguments in this space, looking at historical trends which suggest that humanity has made moral progress; talking about the idea of preserving option value; distinguishing between broad interventions and narrow interventions; and making the case for a "Long Reflection" on our values and goals after we've achieved existential security.

 For example, if humanity's longterm potential is destroyed, it's irrevocable. Surely it is better, Ord argues, to let our descendants make judgments that we're not in a position, epistemically, to make.

 And to take the third example, Ord doesn't advocate solely focusing on "narrowly targeted interventions"; as he notes, existential risk "can also be reduced by broader interventions aimed at generally improving wisdom, decision-making or international cooperation", and that "it is an open question which of these approaches is more effective".

 Indeed, because Ord doesn't narrowly focus on extinction risk, but rather on existential catastrophe as a whole, which includes scenarios involving an unrecoverable collapse or an unrecoverable dystopia, there may be more overlap between existential risk reduction and moral circle expansion than has sometimes been assumed.

 Overall, this is a book packed with interesting information, with insights from physics, economics, and moral philosophy that the reader won't have encountered before. Highly recommended.
 philosophy science
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 Tony Milani
 47 reviews
 November 18, 2022
 This book is generally optimistic about the future potential of humanity, and provides some useful historical context on past events that represented possible existential risks that turned out (obviously) to not fully materialize. If this weren't published and read at a time of global crisis where institutions around the world, including those Ord places as central to the safeguarding of humanity's future, are collapsing or otherwise revealing their lack of concern for knock-on effects related to greed and political expediency, I might not be so down on it. The prescriptive roadmap he lays out is sensible but comes with the huge caveat of requiring international cooperation and goal alignment to a degree that appears more and more unattainable in the current political climate.

 The writing is also very dry. This book was not an engaging read, and only a little more than
 half of the physical real estate in the book is actually "the book," with the remainder being appendices, notes, and citations.


 November 2022 addendum: lol @ "effective altruism" and crypto freaks. Bumping this down to 1 star from 2 because the world is so, so much worse than it was in April 2020. I'm running for President on a platform to drone strike all philosophers on knife crime island.
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 Nilesh Jasani
 1,057 reviews 191 followers
 May 22, 2020
 Precipice nicely catalogs existential risks. It does a commendable job in separating the genuine extermination events from others that could be catastrophic but won't result in our complete annihilation.

 That said, neither of the two things that the author attempts results in a lasting impression or change for ordinary readers:

 The author lists about a dozen different things that could wipe out humanity. Expectedly, most readers are likely to be well aware of all these nightmares. The individual sections are brief and with hardly any new details compared to what one may know from general newspaper articles on those subjects or even from Hollywood movies (almost every one of those risks have had movies made on them).
 The section quantifying the risk is not only extraordinarily subjective but nihilistically pointless to a degree. The author is right in explaining why the subjective nature of the quantification should not become a reason for not doing the exercise. Yet, this does not remove the fact that these probabilities are not of much use to ordinary readers. And, it also does not eliminate the need for the theoreticians to find a way to agree on the ranges rather than each one espousing his or her own set.

 It is sensible for the author to appeal for far more resources to prepare us against the worst of these risks. Yet, the fight against these is unlikely to be top-down with some big global institution fighting all of them centrally. The work will be bottom-up, decentralized in various nations and regions, in different set-ups for different risks and continually evolving. For example, it is fanciful to assume that those protecting against volcanic threats should also work under the same umbrella as those highlighting the need for environmental clean-up or monitoring asteroids.

 When one looks at the bottom-up work being done in the fields mentioned, the resources devoted are nowhere as pitiful as the author makes them out to be. Undoubtedly, a lot more needs to be done on larger existential threats - most of which are anthropogenic - like in the climate change arena, the pandemic threats, containing the AI and global disarmament.

 Like every individual human, every life form or specie, just life the stars and the galaxies or even the universe will end one day. We still need to ensure - as the author says - that most of our race's evolution is in the future and not behind. The book should be commended for picking up on this critical point.
 non-fiction
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 Ben Chugg
 11 reviews 33 followers
 August 17, 2020
 It has taken me some time to sort through my feelings on this book. Toby Ord is smart, articulate, and makes a compelling case for longtermism : The thesis that future generations deserve moral patienthood and that they should be factored into our moral calculus; that we should take their welfare seriously, and ensuring that the future goes as well as possible should be one (if not the largest) of our moral concerns. Clearly, the consequences of adopting this worldview could result in a reshuffling of our priorities. It is thus a thesis worth examining, and one of which everyone should be made aware.

 Future generations are certainly neglected in many, perhaps most, of our institutions and decision making processes. While they inherit the status quo, they have no say in creating it. They have no representation in government, no power to protest, no ability to vote. While this situation is difficult to remedy, one way in which we can help future generations is to ensure their existence by not destroying humanity; i.e., we should mitigate existential risks. Cataloguing such risks and ordering them by their likelihood is the theme of the book.

 However, some of the reasoning style and the underlying logic is … odd. The book is steeped in Bayesian epistemology (unapologetically, I believe, for this seems to be the implicit philosophy in effective altruism circles), and draws no distinction between objective and subjective probability. Ord begins by examining “natural existential risks” (e.g., super-volcanoes, asteroids). To get a handle on their likelihood, he uses data based on previous frequencies (how volcanoes erupt, how many asteroids hit earth, etc). Upon switching to “anthropogenic risks” he ditches frequentism (there are no data points for nuclear armageddon) and adopts subjectivism: he tries to quantify his belief that the world will end in one of several ways. This switch is subtle and is left unacknowledged. Indeed, both kinds of probabilities are expected to be treated in the same way by the reader (as exemplified by Table 6.1, in which all of these numbers are compared).

 Bayesians will undoubtedly respond that there is no other way to reason about such one-off-events; subjective probability is all we have. I am becoming increasingly convinced that this is wrong, and moreover, quite dangerous. The alternative, I think, is to acknowledge that some future scenarios are steeped in so much uncertainty that attempting to generate the most accurate number to capture the future (i.e., a prior), is quite pointless. Numbers are not primitive; ideas and arguments are. Knowing Ord’s subjective belief that AI will take over the world is unhelpful; knowing his best argument is. At times the book is filled with such arguments; at others arguments are replaced by priors, a move I find unprofitable.

 (I should say that I was once sympathetic with Bayesian reasoning, but have been slowly beaten over the head with alternatives . Many of the above criticisms come directly from those conversations.)

 In sum, the book expounds an important idea, but analyzes it in worrying ways.
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 Tobias Leenaert
 Author 2 books 149 followers
 July 27, 2021
 4 stars just for bringing this important topic to another level.
 Writing style is clear and very accessible but at the same time kind of dry, though in the last part ("our potential") it gets a bit more lyrical and nicer.

 As someone who's concerned also about the plight of non-human animals on this planet, the book felt quite anthropocentric (there is a line here and there about taking care of nature and other animals, but you have to look hard). Maybe that's for pragmatic reasons.

 Philosophically, after reading the book I still don't see the problem with non-existence (at least after a painless exit), and I found Ord's arguments to counter that not very convincing. I share the idea quoted in the addendum on population ethics by Jan Narveson: "We are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people." So I find the idea of an eternal dystopia more problematic than extinction.


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 Ryan
 1,048 reviews
 April 7, 2021
 We talk a lot about the Anthropocene, but Toby Ord thinks this time might be remembered as "the Precipice," an age in which we suddenly began creating things that would allow us to off ourselves altogether. The watershed moment is nuclear weapons, but Ord considers a variety of threats to longterm human flourishing ranging from catastrophic climate change to unaligned AI to asteroid impact to a perpetual dystopia like 1984 . Although I've read and watched my fair share of dystopian fiction, I was surprised by how little I knew about some of these scenarios, and especially the AI scenarios. (I guess we should take the idea of William Gibson's Neuromancer working behind the scenes a bit more seriously.) I see a few valuable ideas here. First, there is an obvious value in outlining these threats and risks for readers. Second, Ord also attempts to clarify what we should think about when we think about collapse or extinction. Both have become rhetorically useful in a way that is maybe not altogether helpful. Third, Ord nudges us to think about the longterm future. Finally, there are some policy recommendations to set up a broader policy and popular discourse around existential risk.

 Recommended, and especially since this one was released just as the coronavirus pandemic started and took up all of our collective attention span. The Precipice seems a bit under read by a group that I think would otherwise have embraced the work more broadly.
 eco
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 Peter
 6 reviews 16 followers
 April 4, 2020
 This is one of my favorite books. Delightfully written, inspiring, and lots to learn even for folks well-read around the incredibly important issue of longtermism - how civilisation can not only make it through the 21st century but go on to flourish.
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 Allison
 57 reviews 10 followers
 November 24, 2022
 very dark. very pessimistic. had to read this for a class that i’m indifferent to. will not be reading again and am now worried about the end of humanity every day. would not recommend for someone with anxiety.
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 Dan Elton
 36 reviews 20 followers
 January 2, 2021
 I'm not sure what I can add beyond what many other reviewers have said - but I wanted to give this 5 stars and weigh in.

 There are shockingly few books that tackle this important subject. My friend Phil Torres has a book (called "The End") but it's outdated, isn't as extensive, contains many tangents into religious eschatology, and doesn't lay out the moral argument as clearly as Ord.

 The book is not as long as you might think (I've encountered people put off by the apparently long size). It is only 241 pages, but then contains 180 pages of footnotes and 39 pages of references! As the author states, the footnotes are almost like a second book.

 I'm happy to see how much traction this book is getting. Everyone I know who has read this book got something out of it. I even know someone who changed their entire career path after reading this. This is a book I wish all of our political leaders and people in positions of power would read! If only we could get a few million dollars invested in x-risk mitigation technology (in particular for bio-risk and AI risk) we could really help safeguard the future of trillions of sentient beings! The expected ROI is huge and x-risk mitigation tech is severely under researched, both in terms of dollars and numbers of people working on it. Having a hard time fully believing what I just said? Read the book!
 existential_risk_studies
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 TheBookWarren
 475 reviews 128 followers
 August 16, 2020
 4.25 Stars - This really is a cracker of a book!!! From the moment I picked up Toby Ord’s nonfiction on the state and future of humanity, I knew full well it was going to be something to sink your teeth into.. But was I wrong.. because it’s more than that, it’s to behold, to intrigue, to ponder and cogitate with at nights & then most of all it gives the urge for one to immediately share, share with as many as you possibly can, as the more that read this modern literally stunner the more that see the same “Precipice” the same signs that we’ve indeed reached that precipice, So what are we going to do about it? There are components of Ord’s premise that I disagree with, no doubt and I for one feel the world is in nowhere near as grim a state as many believe, but it’s vital a guiding coalition is built toward correcting a number of environmental and social challenges before it is too late!
 non-fiction top-shelf-reads
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 Connor Charchuk
 15 reviews 1 follower
 January 12, 2021
 Lots of redundancy and repetitiveness. Felt like it should have been a 10,000 word essay, not a book.
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 Oliver Kim
 176 reviews 48 followers
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 July 11, 2022
 Toby Ord's The Precipice was recommended to me at a vegan Effective Altruist dinner in Berkeley, California -- several times, in fact, by different people, and always with a frothy quasi-religious fervor. More than a few men (there were only three women at the event) had changed their careers because of it.

 I'd consider myself sympathetic to Effective Altruism -- I spend my career researching ways to end global poverty in part because of the strength of its arguments -- but I've always found the movement's recent turn to existential risk somewhat odd. Somewhere along the way it felt like a social project about ending malaria and global poverty had turned into a Silicon Valley offshoot where everyone was fretting about neural networks going Skynet. So I picked up this book to find out what the fuss was all about.

 The Precipice is clearly argued and blessedly well-organized, and probably deserves more than the scattered reactions I'm about to offer. I appreciated its serious statistical attempt to quantify the different risks to humanity, while still acknowledging the uncertainties involved. To summarize, in the final accounting, anthropogenic risks like a bioengineered pandemic (risk of existential catastrophe: 1/30) or nuclear war (1/1,000) far outstrip those of natural disasters, like an asteroid/comet impact (1/1,000,000) or a supervolcano eruption (10,000). The evidence Ord offers for these numbers struck me as fundamentally reasonable.

 But the biggest risk of all remains artificial intelligence unaligned with human interests, with an existential risk of 1 in 10! Climate change clocks in at a mere 1/1000, Ord argues, since while it will disrupt our industrial way of life, it is unlikely to wipe civilization out entirely. It follows naturally that AI risk demands our fullest attention.

 And yet I'm still not convinced. I have two main concerns.

 The first is that our grasp of AI risk remains frustratingly vague. AI's risk of causing humanity's extinction seems a function of (1) its development of superior intelligence (so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI), (2) misalignment of its objectives with human values, and (3) the successful use of its intelligence to end humanity. Given recent acceleration in AI development, (1) seems reasonable. Given our history with technology, (2) is also not much of a stretch. Since AI specialists predict that AGI will come about in the next century or so with 50% probability, Ord comes up with an existential risk of 1 in 10.

 But, crucially, (3) is basically assumed to be true. And yet every EA account of how AI might end humanity is fuzzy on the details -- Ord speculates that an AI could amass illicit wealth, then somehow bribe politicians into exterminating humanity with WMDs. The problem is that advanced intelligence is conflated with a kind of villainous omnipotence. If AI seeks our extinction, it will likely have to be intermediated through human hands -- and I think Ord drastically underestimates how hard it is to organize human beings to exterminate ourselves. We may be manipulable and often stupid, but we are also unpredictable, independent actors interested in our own survival. No amount of advanced intelligence can convince some people to act against what they believe to be their interests. (Just look at our current politics.) Countermeasures can be put into place to insulate our weapons and institutions from AI manipulation. No doubt evil AGI can make human life miserable, but ending the possibility of civilization when there are human beings who would like it to continue seems another task entirely. The thorniness of politics remains in my view a general blind spot for EA.

 Which leads me to my second, meta-critique: are the "existential" priorities Ord lays out truly reflections of universal human interests, or are they the result of specific quirks of the EA community?

 From his utilitarian perch, Ord treats humanity as a monolithic unit with united interests. But many of these existential risks will hit different parts of humanity quite differently. Consider climate change. Sure, warming of 2-3 C may not exterminate humanity as a whole -- but it could very well render life in Sub-Saharan Africa, where much agriculture remains rain-fed, basically untenable. Are we willing to accept the extinction of the cultures and peoples who live there? And, for that matter, who is the "we" in that question? If my Berkeley EA dinner had a guest list more representative of humanity -- with at least a few more Africans and women, instead of its coterie of white and Asian tech-adjacent males -- would our decisions about what to prioritize change?

 As an Asian, tech-adjacent male, I can't really answer that question. But I suspect that if the community of those who fear existential risk want to persuade others that their priorities are truly universal (and this is a critique less of Ord than EA more broadly), it should make more of an effort.
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 Wendelle
 1,738 reviews 50 followers
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 January 18, 2023
 The author, an Oxford philosophy professor, proposes a shift in our mindset, our priorities, and our ethical frameworks to focus on maximizing humanity as a whole's chances of survival, and thwarting our causes of existential demise, which may either arrive due to complete extinction, unrecoverable collapse, or unrecoverable dystopia. The author enumerates some possible inflection points in our existence that may mark the point of no return: nuclear winter, climate change crisis, unbounded artificial intelligence, global totalitarian regimes that crystallize their omnipotence irrevocably through ever-present surveillance machines. He explains by turns each existential risk and tries to assign a ballpark figure for their likelihood. In Prof Ord's view, we are a species on the cusp: 200 000 years old, when our mammalian ancestors lived for 1 to 2 million years. Thus, he emphasizes what we stand to gain with a successful shepherding of our species through these critical junctures: an unbounded human flourishing, of our future generations, defying what we can currently imagine, in all the matters that are valuable to us: science, knowledge, art, culture, joy, prosperity, morality, quality of life.
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 Luke Freeman
 2 reviews 26 followers
 March 10, 2020
 How will our species survive and thrive?

 This is one of my favourite non-fiction reads to date. I love how Toby Ord leaves hype behind and uses sound reasoning to lay out the case for existential risk reduction. He has very strong arguments and a enjoyable writing style. He makes the case that existential risks are some of the the most important and neglected problems we face.

 He covers major risks from nuclear and biological weapons to climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence, asteroid impacts, and more.
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 David Jinkins
 52 reviews 2 followers
 February 25, 2021
 Steven Pinker quipped that when writing a book for non-experts, the tone should be what you would use explaining what you just learned to your college roommate, who went into a different field. Someone just as intellectually curious as you, but who just doesn’t yet know about the things you are explaining. Popularizers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson are criticized for oversimplifying or waving their hands, but that is inevitable in the sort of television documentary length pieces he does on broad topics. In book-length treatments of a particular subject, an expert has plenty of space to lay out the subject correctly and to point out where she is simplifying, pointing to resources for the interested reader. Books like Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Guns, Germs, and Steel come to mind as well-executed examples of this genre.

 It is particularly important to get the facts straight if the author wants to convince the reader to make far-reaching changes in her intuitions and behavior. I was excited to start The Precipice by Toby Ord, as I knew it was about our obligations to future generations, and in particular about the probability that some some catastrophe will wipe out humanity. This is a topic that I knew very little about, and it might have convinced me that I should do more to help prevent such a catastrophe.

 Unfortunately, the book convinced me of very little. The tone of the book felt less like an honest survey of issues surrounding existential catastrophes for the non-expert, and rather a rhetorical pamphlet trying to convince me to donate to a particular charity.

 Future People

 There are a few well-known issues related to thinking about future people. The trickiest involve thinking about people who may or may not come into existence. Suppose that a couple plan on having a baby, but then one of them loses their job, and they decide to wait for a year or two. Has the baby who would have existed been harmed? My intuition says no. To me, something is only bad if it affects a person that exists. From this perspective, the extinction of the human race isn’t so bad per se, because the people that would have otherwise existed are not harmed. If I had never been born, there would be no me to regret it.

 This sounds like pie in the sky stuff, but it is actually critical to the idea that we should sacrifice our well-being today for generations of distant descendents. If extinction is not much worse than mere one-off catastrophes, then the sort of calculations which go into the risk-reward scenarios in the book are way off mark. Ord does talk a bit about this issue in a page in the body and in an appendix, but he just waves his hands and says that he doesn’t personally find the view I elaborated above plausible since it comes with other issues, and anyway he is also worried about the permanent collapse of civilization which we can all agree is bad.

 This sort of thing happened again and again in the book. The interesting, deep issues are brushed aside in order to make a case for decisive action on small probability existential risk. Another example is Ord’s frequent use of the concept of the ‘life of humanity’, or ‘securing our future’. Since the future of the human race could be very long indeed, we may be at the beginning of humanity’s life. We should be prepared to make sacrifices for humanity, then, just as a young adult might make sacrifices to secure a comfortable middle age. But the difference is that we will not see that future. The life of humanity is not my life or your life. That we are morally required to sacrifice for our distant descendants is nowhere argued for in the book, but simply assumed.

 What is to be done?

 Even if we are convinced that we should indeed be doing much more to protect distant future generations of people, it isn’t clear how we would go about doing this. Most of our actions have unpredictable consequences in the medium-run. A butterfly flapping its wings in China may cause a hurricane in the Atlantic. It isn’t clear what actions we could take to make humanity more or less likely to exist in 10,000 years. The effects of our actions at that time scale are just too unpredictable. I was waiting for this question to be addressed in the book, but it never was.

 In the 241 page body of the book, only 30 pages were devoted to practical ideas for reducing existential risk, and the ideas were fairly vague on details: more research should be done, and there should be more international cooperation. This is exactly the issue. Even if we believe that the risk of human extinction is high, that doesn’t mean we should live or lives differently. It is only if it is high and we have some way of reducing it that we should take action.

 Imagine we can do good in two ways. We can help someone who currently exists with certainty, or we can work on reducing existential risk, which potentially could benefit thousands of generations in the distant future. Within existential risk, of course, we would need to choose particular threats to focus on. Whatever set of threats we choose, whether it be AI alignment or preventing engineered pandemics, we cannot be certain that these will be relevant threats in the future. It may turn out that they are not as dangerous as we expected, or alternatively there may be an existential catastrophe which takes out the human race before the particular threat we focused on becomes important. Either way, by focusing on these risks we may devote our lives to solving an ex-post useless problem.

 Pinning down existential risk

 And how likely are each of the threats? In a chapter addressing this question, Ord chooses his own best guesses for the probabilities. He is careful to qualify them, emphasizing that the numbers are his professional opinion alone, and that they involve much uncertainty. He writes that the point is simply to get an idea of the order of magnitude. He comes up with the bottom line that there is around a one in six probability of an existential catastrophe in the next century.

 I don’t find this exercise very illuminating. Ord says his numbers could easily be off by an order of three. That is, the probability of a humanity ending disaster in the next century could easily be one in seventeen probability, or one half. Since Ord comes up with these numbers from simple professional judgment, I’m worried that there are too many ‘researcher degrees of freedom’. One in six is in the convenient zone of alarming, but not too high to be rejected out of hand.

 Killer computers

 The risk that Ord judges to be the most likely to end humanity is unaligned artificial intelligence. If you haven’t heard the argument, it is that it is hard to give artificial intelligence objectives which completely align with our own. You might ask an artificial intelligence to reduce carbon emissions, and it might accomplish the task by killing a large number of people. As others like Robin Hanson have pointed out, some writers, including Ord’s in the precipice, characterize AI of the future as having god-like powers to do whatever it wills. Of course we would not like our lives to be commanded by superhuman demons.

 Ord writes ‘Sceptics of [unaligned AI risk] sometimes quip that it relies on an AI system that is smart enough to take control of the world, yet too stupid to recognise that this isn’t what we want. But that misunderstands the scenario.’ He then writes how it is natural to imagine AI with goals different than people. Ord here is missing the point.

 Many philosophers believe in some idea of moral progress, that as time passes people are discovering moral truths in the universe. Ord both argues that more people will realize the correctness of caring about the distant future as we discover more moral truths, and that an important step in our future will be the Long Reflection, when humanity spends time figuring out the moral truths of the universe. Imagining a god-like superintelligence, it isn’t clear why this being wouldn’t be able to discover the moral truths of the universe better than we mere mortals. It is true that super powerful artificial intelligence may not share our goals, but why should we assume it won’t actually pursue even better ones. It can do everything else better.

 Our potential

 According to the final chapter, human potential is a lot more people over a long time, living lives much more pleasurable than our own, and exploring space. While none of these things are bad, they also don’t inspire me much. The book asks me to make sacrifices for these people who will have much richer lives than mine! The long future is nice, but it’s loss wouldn’t be worrying if the existing people today didn’t care about it. Ord deeply cares about the distant future of humanity. That is a great reason for him to write The Precipice . But I think it also reasonable for me to spend my charitable resources on reducing the suffering of people who actually exist.
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 Steven
 22 reviews
 October 11, 2022
 We are at a precipice, climate change, engineered pandemics, nuclear war and AI risk are only the known risks to our potentially vast and flourishing future. We are an adolescent, our physical capabilities outstripping our wisdom. The choices we make now will determine humanity's future.

 Great companion piece to What We Owe the Future. They share lingo but focus on different points. I appreciated this book's focus on global governance and technological caution. The final chapters were more appealing to me as I'm more of a sucker for hard sci-fi and the call to action called out doomerism is death by defeatism and that the future is brighter than imaginable.

 240 pages of content, definitely recommend reading the footnotes!
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 Kyran
 20 reviews 1 follower
 April 3, 2020
 Solid, scholarly work that provides a helpful framework for thinking about ‘existential risk’ – major and irreversible damage to humanity’s potential (ie extinction or permanent civilisational collapse). Covers topics like nuclear war, climate change, pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence. The book’s coverage of the last two are particularly interesting, and Ord believes the latter to be quite significantly the most dangerous of the risks presented (to an extent which surprised but mostly convinced me). This is an emerging cross-disciplinary field and The Precipice is a great introduction to the issues at stake.
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 Max
 70 reviews 14 followers
 May 3, 2020

 Interviewer: Suppose that your life's work ended up having a negative impact. What's the most likely scenario under which this might happen?

 Ord: [...] I think people underestimate how easy this can happen. [...] The easiest way this could happen is your work crowding out something that is better. I thought a lot about that when writing this book. I really wanted to make sure that there wasn't anyone else who should write this book instead of me, I talked to a lot of people about it. Because even though you produce something really good, if you crowd out something extremely good, your overall impact could be extremely negative.

 This should give you an idea about the level of care Toby Ord took with this phenomenal book. The only imaginable extremely good book that got crowded out by "The Precipice" is "The Precipice - Now with Improved Footnotes". There are so many of them. In the end I just read all the footnotes after finishing a chapter, as to avoid the disappointment of another source citation or "I owe this point to Nick Bostrom".

 I'm deeply impressed with Toby Ord and the research team behind him. This book does a great job at making the importance of our long-term future palpable and sketch out the risks that we have to overcome in the coming centuries. I think I'll leave it at that. Just another quote that I just "loved" and that's emblematic of the book, and also of the grace with which humanity is handling existential risks so far.

 A technician [at a bioweapons lab in one of the Soviet Union’s biggest cities, Sverdlovsk,] had removed a clogged air filter for cleaning. He left a note, but it didn’t get entered in the main logbook. So they turned the anthrax drying machines on at the start of the next shift and blew anthrax out over the city for several hours before someone noticed[, killing at least 66 citizens]. In a report on the accident, US microbiologist Raymond Zilinskas (1983) remarked: ‘No nation would be so stupid as to locate a biological warfare facility within an approachable distance from a major population center.’

 Humanity today showcases too much "No civilized species would be so stupid as to". Toby Ord did a great service to helping us make some smart corrections to our path going forward.
 philosophy
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 Kolumbina
 838 reviews 25 followers
 May 13, 2020
 A well written book by Australian researcher, Toby Ord (works and lives in England, in Oxford), about potential, existential risks which humanity could experience. Really interesting, a rich book, heaps of references and appendices, an easy read, I found it very disturbing. A useful book, everyone should read it, especially now, after coronavirus pandemic.
 3 likes
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 Jonas Vollmer
 1 review 2 followers
 December 9, 2021
 Most of this book is excellent – a lot of interesting analysis, a lot of inspirational value. But in some parts, the author tries to argue for the book's bottom line in ways that's just not supported by the arguments. Don't fall for it.
 4 likes
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 Julian Schrittwieser
 66 reviews 74 followers
 April 12, 2020
 Very timely book, chock full of appendices and notes if you want to dig deeper.
 4 likes
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 Patrick Kelly
 287 reviews 13 followers
 April 13, 2020
 The Precipice
 By Toby Ord

 - [ ] An effective altruism book
 - [ ] We have time but it is running out
 - [ ] Is there hope? Toby is optimistic but worried
 - [ ] In all areas literacy, life expectancy, quality of life, standard of living, etc. There have been dramatic improvements across the history of the human species. Each revolution (agricultural, scientific, industrial, technological) has brought about these improvements. Before the industrial revolution 19 out of 20 people lived in less than $2/day, now it is only 1 out of 10. Before the scientific revolution, few people knew how to read, now there are few that don’t. These revolutions have dramatically improved human life. (One could also make the argument that capitalism instead of communism/fascism has been a great driver of this improvement) We are destroying the planet and destroying ourselves, but our lives have gotten better.
 - [ ] The world changed when the atomic bomb was created and dropped. We have these weapons and the longer we live, the more likely that they will be used again.
 - [ ] I live in a post Cold War world, nuclear weapons have never been a big threat. I always laughed at Iran/North Korea getting them. But the more I read Sagan/Effective Altruism/foreign policy stuff, the greater I take the issue of nuclear weapons and nuclear nonproliferation
 - [ ] He thinks that in the 20th century there was a 1:20 chance of extinction. In the 21st century there is a 1:6.
 - [ ] A moral argument/awareness of future generations. An obligation to survive. There are far more people with potential to live then there are people that have lived. By destroying ourselves now, we are destroying the future. It is the future that we must think of and we owe it to our ancestors to pass it on
 - [ ] It is very spiritual/aware/beautiful
 - [ ] His parents tell him that he does not repay them, he just passes it on
 - [ ] We have to think about the collective, of the whole, the group, and not the individual survival
 - [ ] Existential event
 - [ ] Civilization collapse event: an event where civilization collapses, similar to the events described by Graham Hancock. Ord states that even with Europe losing 25-50% of its population due to the Black Death, civilization did not collapse and Europe recovered. It’s unlikely that civilization could completely collapse and not recover, if it did then extinction would follow. Based on what I have read from Hancock, I don’t fully support Ord here
 - [ ] Extinction event: humanity is lost and all or almost all humans die. This could come in a single event (nuclear war) or a combination of events (pandemic/economic collapse/climate change)
 - [ ] Ord believes that we have the potential for millions of future generations and to live for billions of years
 - [ ] Sagan and two others are mentioned for their work on global catastrophic risks/nuclear war/our cosmic significance. (I have to check who the other two people are)
 - [ ] Arguments about why global catastrophic risks (gcr) are not funded more/given enough attention/etc. Relevance, personal impact, politics, etc.
 - [ ] Now on to the issues
 - [ ] Asteroid/comet threats are the best addressed and studied issue. They are well funded, well understood, and given the proper attention. We have actually identified 95% of the 1km-10km objects and almost all of the 10km objects.
 - [ ] Super volcanos
 - [ ] The precipice began at the trinity test
 - [ ] Another big section on nuclear war/nuclear winter
 - [ ] Climate change: he does not see climate change being a direct cause for existential risk, because he believes that even in the worst case some humans will survive but believes that other factors around climate change could be a cause.
 - [ ] There is a thing about humans needs a proper temperature to regulate our body temperature with regards to sweat and our system. It has to do with a combination of humidity and temperature. There will be a point where certain parts of the world are uninhabitable with AC.
 - [ ] There is the possibility of 9-13 degree rise by 2300. The climate models are highly unpredictable and there are many factors to consider.
 - [ ] Runaway green house has effect. Permafrost will partially melt and that will be a factor in climate change. Will be at least produce double the emissions that we already have by 2100, with the possibility of producing 5-13 times more.
 - [ ] Biodiversity loss
 - [ ] Climate degradation
 - [ ] The climate stats and factors are extreme. I disagree with him and I believe it is an existential risk.
 - [ ] There is a big problem with climate change in that we could be currently locking ourselves into a situation where we can’t reverse and the situation will be existential and we are powerless to stop it

 - [ ] Pandemics: the Black Death killed 25-50% of the European population. Europeans coming to the new world could have killed up to 90% of native Americans and 10% of the world population.
 - [ ] Bio weapons have been used throughout human history
 - [ ] 15 countries have create biological weapons programs with Russia being the biggest and at one point employing over 9,000 scientists on it. Why the fuck is this not talked about more?!?!
 - [ ] Biological weapons, trying to make diseases more deadly and easier spread
 - [ ] Biosecurity is weak and in the past 50 years there have been multiple instances of small pox and anthrax getting out of the lab and infecting people. This is terrifying
 - [ ] There is little investment and weak accountability in biosecurity. The Biological Weapons Convention is weakly enforced and not well funded. This book has made me realize how big of an issue biological weapons are and how underserved they are.
 - [ ] Normal Borlock and his wheat may have saved billions of lives
 - [ ] AI: the people that are most worried about it are the AI experts. AI could effectively become immortal by hiding in computers around the world. It could access bank accounts, social media, government systems, and surveillance. It could then blackmail and pay off any one in the world. This sounds like Ultron. Fuck, I don’t understand AI but every time I learn about it, it sounds terrifying.
 - [ ] Most experts think it is decades away, no years. Many think that there is a 5% chance of existential risk from AI. That is an insanely high number, there is a 5% chance that the ultimate goal of AI is an existential risk
 - [ ] Anthropogenic caused risks
 - [ ] Totalitarian dystopian regimes
 - [ ] Unexpected risks caused by humans are a big threat. IE: the next nuclear bomb or a yet undeveloped technology

 - [ ] Here are the numbers:
 - [ ] The five biggest threats over the next century: nuclear war, climate change, environment degradation, unforeseen human created risk, AI
 - [ ] He puts AI at 1:10
 - [ ] Overall possibility of existential risk event by the end of this century - 1:6 but it can raise to 1:3
 - [ ] He does have hope and believes that humans can pull back from the brink but it will take effort. Currently we are playing a game of Russian Roulette
 - [ ] There is some simple math that he is using but I don’t have the details for that

 - [ ] Some effective altruism principles, mentions possible careers, and how to organize risk management/addressing risks

 - [ ] Our current goal is to prevent an existential event, once we do that then we can secure our long term future. But between them is something called ‘the great reflection’, a time when humanity can reflect and chart a collective path forward. Once we are secure, then we choose where we go.
 - [ ] This seems like philosophical idealistic babble. It sounds like an ideal world where humanity can come together and take steps forward. I don’t believe this will ever happen. I don’t believe that we will ever get rid of existential risks and I don’t believe that we will ever come together and chart a collective path forward. I only believe this can happen after a massive cataclysmic event that forces the remaining bits of human civilization to reckon with what it has done and then in solace move forward as it is crippled. Basically when the United States decided to go on the offense in the Zombie War and eventually rallied most of the world to do the same.
 - [ ] Tragedy of the commons and game theory Believes that the pace of technology is outpacing our ability to slow it down. Thus we must build altruistic/positive technology to prevent existential risks, instead of building those that cause it
 - [ ] Some 80,000 career stuff
 - [ ] We are a young species. The horseshoe crab has had an unbroken line for 400 million years. Blue green algae has been around for over two billion. Wait when did life first appear and when did complex life appear?
 - [ ] He starts to talk about the cosmos, exploring the universe, the massive potential long term survival of our species on hundreds of millions of years scale, he mentions Pioneer and Voyager, he sounds hopeful, he is writing like Sagan and even using similar phrases. This is the first time I have really seen Sagan’s writing/professional/non celebrity work directly influence another academic
 - [ ] The average life time of a species is 1-10 million years. Ord is saying we have the potential to live billions of years, almost as if our species can become effectively immortal (if we prevent existential risk) I have never heard these ideas seriously discussed
 - [ ] The observable universe is spread out over 46 billion years
 - [ ] Explore our entire galaxy in 100 million years
 - [ ] This is all fun to imagine/play with but the reality is that we have 1:6 chance in an existential event happening in the 21st century. Fuck the stars and exploring the universe, we have to make our stand now and fix/save/prevent existential risk now, here on earth

 - [ ] He does end on a hopeful note. He is cautiously optimistic about our future. He loves humanity and loves our potential. He loves what we can do and could do. He speaks about the love he has for his daughter and all of the beautiful moments that life has. That there can be and will be more. That if we prevent existential risks, there should be nothing stopping us. He even talks about our evolution, the possibility of biotechnology, a cognitive evolution. He is very aware of animals, different experiences, things that we don’t know but could, he thinks of the collective. In many ways he is a ‘cosmic humanist,’ similar to Sagan. I am a fan

 - [ ] I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to others. It is assessable, well written, direct, dire, clear, and hopeful. It is not arrogant, off putting, or highly academically written, in ways that other EA literature is. I would like to see the EA movement follow Toby’s lead
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The Precipice
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50485582-the-precipice?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=BUzsAMvaKM&rank=3
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The Precipice
1996-01-01
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<div><div>
<h3><em>“a book that seems made for the present moment … readers may find the sections that argue for why humanity deserves saving, and why we’re equipped to face the challenges, even more arresting than the array of potential cataclysms”</em></h3><p>— <strong>NEW YORKER</strong></p><h3><em>“Splendid …The Precipice is a powerful book, written with a philosopher's eye … Ord's love for humanity and hope for its future is infectious”</em></h3><p>— <strong>SPECTATOR</strong></p><h3><em>“Many people have recently found that they want to read books offering the grandest perspectives possible on human existence, such as Sapiens … Toby Ord's new book is a startling and rigorous contribution to this genre that deserves to be just as widely read”</em></h3><p>— <strong>EVENING STANDARD</strong></p><h3><em>“meticulous in how it goes through and breaks down these threats and forces itself not to stop on easy answers, and to be really rigorous”</em></h3><p>— <strong>NATE SILVER</strong>, founder of <em>FiveThirtyEight</em></p><h3><em>“The Precipice separates science from hype and will remain the definitive work on existential risk for a long time to come.”</em></h3><p>— <strong>MAX TEGMARK</strong>, author of <em>Life 3.0</em></p><h3><em>“This book is a wake-up call to the existential threats of nuclear and biological weapons, and the urgent need for action. A must-read that galvanizes us to play a role in addressing these risks.”</em></h3><p>— <strong>ANGELA KANE</strong>, former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs</p><h3><em>“A fascinating and persuasive guide to the most important topic of all: how our species will survive the risks we pose to our continued existence.”</em></h3><p>— <strong>STUART RUSSELL</strong>, author of <em>Human Compatible</em></p><h3><em>“I very much recommend it … a careful and comprehensive analysis of one of the most important questions: the existential risks that humanity is facing … I hope many will read this book and learn as much as I did.”</em></h3><p>— <strong>MAX ROSER</strong>, founder of Our World In Data</p><h3><em>“Toby Ord is today’s Carl Sagan. Clear and inspiring, this book leaves us hopeful for a flourishing human future.”</em></h3><p>— <strong>CHRISTINE PETERSON</strong>, cofounder of the Foresight Institute</p>
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 About

 “A powerfully argued book that alerts us to what is perhaps the most important — and yet also most neglected — problem we will ever face”

 — PETER SINGER   

 Buy the book

 Humanity stands at a precipice. 

 Our species could survive for millions of generations — enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice; to reach new heights of flourishing. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, gaining the power to destroy ourselves, without the wisdom to ensure we won’t. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it may soon be too late.

 The Precipice explores the science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points toward longtermism — to the actions and strategies we can take today to safeguard humanity’s long-run future.

 What People are Saying

 “a book that seems made for the present moment … readers may find the sections that argue for why humanity deserves saving, and why we’re equipped to face the challenges, even more arresting than the array of potential cataclysms”

 — NEW YORKER

 “Splendid …The Precipice is a powerful book, written with a philosopher's eye … Ord's love for humanity and hope for its future is infectious”

 — SPECTATOR

 “Many people have recently found that they want to read books offering the grandest perspectives possible on human existence, such as Sapiens … Toby Ord's new book is a startling and rigorous contribution to this genre that deserves to be just as widely read”

 — EVENING STANDARD

 “meticulous in how it goes through and breaks down these threats and forces itself not to stop on easy answers, and to be really rigorous”

 — NATE SILVER, founder of FiveThirtyEight

 “The Precipice separates science from hype and will remain the definitive work on existential risk for a long time to come.”

 — MAX TEGMARK, author of Life 3.0

 “This book is a wake-up call to the existential threats of nuclear and biological weapons, and the urgent need for action. A must-read that galvanizes us to play a role in addressing these risks.”

 — ANGELA KANE, former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs

 “A fascinating and persuasive guide to the most important topic of all: how our species will survive the risks we pose to our continued existence.”

 — STUART RUSSELL, author of Human Compatible

 “I very much recommend it … a careful and comprehensive analysis of one of the most important questions: the existential risks that humanity is facing … I hope many will read this book and learn as much as I did.”

 — MAX ROSER, founder of Our World In Data

 “Toby Ord is today’s Carl Sagan. Clear and inspiring, this book leaves us hopeful for a flourishing human future.”

 — CHRISTINE PETERSON, cofounder of the Foresight Institute

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“a book that seems made for the present moment … readers may find the sections that argue for why humanity deserves saving, and why we’re equipped to face the challenges, even more arresting than the array of potential cataclysms”  — NEW YORKER   “Splendid …The Precipice is a powerful book, written with a philosopher's eye … Ord's love for humanity and hope for its future is infectious”  — SPECTATOR   “Many people have recently found that they want to read books offering the grandest perspectives possible on human existence, such as Sapiens … Toby Ord's new book is a startling and rigorous contribution to this genre that deserves to be just as widely read”  — EVENING STANDARD   “meticulous in how it goes through and breaks down these threats and forces itself not to stop on easy answers, and to be really rigorous”  — NATE SILVER, founder of FiveThirtyEight   “The Precipice separates science from hype and will remain the definitive work on existential risk for a long time to come.”  — MAX TEGMARK, author of Life 3.0   “This book is a wake-up call to the existential threats of nuclear and biological weapons, and the urgent need for action. A must-read that galvanizes us to play a role in addressing these risks.”  — ANGELA KANE, former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs  “A fascinating and persuasive guide to the most important topic of all: how our species will survive the risks we pose to our continued existence.”  — STUART RUSSELL, author of Human Compatible   “I very much recommend it … a careful and comprehensive analysis of one of the most important questions: the existential risks that humanity is facing … I hope many will read this book and learn as much as I did.”  — MAX ROSER, founder of Our World In Data  “Toby Ord is today’s Carl Sagan. Clear and inspiring, this book leaves us hopeful for a flourishing human future.”  — CHRISTINE PETERSON, cofounder of the Foresight Institute
The Precipice
https://theprecipice.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity - Wikipedia
2020-03-06
None
<div><div>
	<p>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>
	</div><div>
<table><caption>The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity </caption><tbody><tr><td><a href="/wiki/File:The_Precipice_(Ord,_2020)_book_cover.jpg"></a><p>Hardcover edition</p></td></tr><tr><th>Author</th><td><a href="/wiki/Toby_Ord">Toby Ord</a></td></tr><tr><th>Country</th><td>United Kingdom</td></tr><tr><th>Language</th><td>English</td></tr><tr><th>Subject</th><td><a href="/wiki/Existential_risk">Existential risk</a></td></tr><tr><th>Genre</th><td>Philosophy, <a href="/wiki/Popular_science">popular science</a></td></tr><tr><th>Publisher</th><td><a href="/wiki/Bloomsbury_Publishing">Bloomsbury Publishing</a><sup><a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup><br /><a href="/wiki/Hachette_Book_Group">Hachette Book Group</a><sup><a href="#cite_note-2">[2]</a></sup></td></tr><tr><th><p>Publication date</p></th><td>5 March 2020 (UK)<br />24 March 2020 (US)</td></tr><tr><th>Media type</th><td>Print, e-book, audiobook</td></tr><tr><th>Pages</th><td>480</td></tr><tr><th><a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a></th><td><a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/1526600218">1526600218</a></td></tr><tr><th>Website</th><td><a href="https://www.theprecipice.com/">www.theprecipice.com</a></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p><i><b>The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity</b></i> is a 2020 non-fiction book by the Australian philosopher <a href="/wiki/Toby_Ord">Toby Ord</a>, a senior research fellow at the <a href="/wiki/Future_of_Humanity_Institute">Future of Humanity Institute</a> in <a href="/wiki/Oxford">Oxford</a>. It argues that humanity faces unprecedented risks over the next few centuries and examines the moral significance of safeguarding humanity's future.
</p>
<h2>Summary[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity&amp;action=edit&amp;section=1">edit</a>]</h2>
<h3>The Precipice[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity&amp;action=edit&amp;section=2">edit</a>]</h3>
<p>Ord argues that humanity is in a uniquely dangerous period in its development, which he calls the Precipice. Beginning with the <a href="/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)">first atomic bomb test</a> in 1945, the Precipice is characterized by unprecedented destructive capability paired with inadequate wisdom and restraint. Ord predicts that the Precipice is likely to last no more than a few centuries, as humanity will either quickly develop the necessary self-control or succumb to the rapidly accumulating risk of catastrophe. Ord estimates that the <a href="/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis">Cuban Missile Crisis</a> in 1962, which leaders at the time thought had a 10–50% chance of causing nuclear war, was the closest humanity has yet come to self-destruction in its 200,000-year history.
</p>
<h3>Existential catastrophe and existential risk[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity&amp;action=edit&amp;section=3">edit</a>]</h3>
<p>Ord uses the concepts of existential catastrophe and existential risk, citing their definitions by <a href="/wiki/Nick_Bostrom">Nick Bostrom</a>. Existential catastrophe refers to the realized destruction of humanity's long-term potential, whereas <a href="/wiki/Existential_risk">existential risk</a> refers to the probability that a given hazard will lead to existential catastrophe. Human extinction is one mechanism of existential catastrophe, but others can be imagined such as permanent totalitarian dystopia. This concept of existential catastrophe is strictly defined as a permanent, irreversible loss of potential; for example, even a disaster that killed a majority of humans would not be an existential catastrophe under this definition, provided that the survivors eventually recover and resume scientific and technological progress. Ord examines the immense moral implications of existential catastrophe from a variety of perspectives: existential catastrophe would simultaneously betray all that past humans have built, bring great harm upon humans existing at the time, and cut off the possibility of a vast future flourishing among the stars.
</p>
<h3>Risk landscape[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity&amp;action=edit&amp;section=4">edit</a>]</h3>
<p>Ord estimates a 1 in 6 total risk of existential catastrophe occurring in the next century. This includes a relatively negligible existential risk from natural catastrophes such as <a href="/wiki/Asteroid">asteroid</a> impacts but is overwhelmingly dominated by anthropogenic (human-caused) existential risk. Ord estimates the existential risk associated with <a href="/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artificial_general_intelligence">unaligned artificial general intelligence</a> to be 1 in 10 over the next century, higher than all other sources of existential risk combined. Other anthropogenic existential risks include <a href="/wiki/Nuclear_war">nuclear war</a>, engineered <a href="/wiki/Pandemics">pandemics</a>, and <a href="/wiki/Climate_change">climate change</a>.
</p>
<h3>Response[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity&amp;action=edit&amp;section=5">edit</a>]</h3>
<p>Ord states that humanity spends less than 0.001% of <a href="/wiki/Gross_world_product">gross world product</a> on targeted existential risk reduction interventions. He argues that motivation to fund such interventions is limited by insufficient global coordination, which could be improved via specialized global institutions. Moreover, interventions such as governance of dangerous <a href="/wiki/Emerging_technologies">emerging technologies</a> may inherently require increased global coordination. Ord outlines a number of policy and research recommendations intended to reduce existential risk. He also explores several ways individuals can contribute to existential risk reduction, such as selecting high-impact careers, <a href="/wiki/Effective_giving">effective giving</a>, and contributing to a public conversation on the issue.
</p>
<h2>Reception[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity&amp;action=edit&amp;section=6">edit</a>]</h2>
<p>A review in the <i><a href="/wiki/Evening_Standard">Evening Standard</a></i> called <i>The Precipice</i> a "a startling and rigorous contribution".<sup><a href="#cite_note-3">[3]</a></sup> In <i><a href="/wiki/The_Spectator">The Spectator</a></i>, Tom Chivers called <i>The Precipice</i> "a powerful book, written with a philosopher's eye for counterarguments so that he can meet them in advance. And Ord's love for humanity and hope for its future is infectious, as is his horrified wonder at how close we have come to destroying it".<sup><a href="#cite_note-4">[4]</a></sup>
</p><p>Writing in <i><a href="/wiki/The_Sunday_Times">The Sunday Times</a></i>, journalist and author <a href="/wiki/Bryan_Appleyard">Bryan Appleyard</a> expressed skepticism toward some of the moral philosophy in the book, stating "I doubt that it can redirect humanity away from its self-destructive ways", but ultimately praised the book, calling it "dense and often thrillingly written" and highlighting Ord's analysis of the science as "exemplary".<sup><a href="#cite_note-5">[5]</a></sup> Reviewer <a href="/wiki/Steven_Carroll">Steven Carroll</a> in <i><a href="/wiki/The_Sydney_Morning_Herald">The Sydney Morning Herald</a></i> called it authoritative and accessible.<sup><a href="#cite_note-6">[6]</a></sup>
</p><p>A review in <i><a href="/wiki/The_New_Yorker">The New Yorker</a></i> published in April 2020 during the <a href="/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic">coronavirus pandemic</a> noted that the book seemed "made for the present moment" and said "readers may find the sections that argue for why humanity deserves saving, and why we're equipped to face the challenges, even more arresting than the array of potential cataclysms".<sup><a href="#cite_note-7">[7]</a></sup>
</p>
<h2>See also[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity&amp;action=edit&amp;section=7">edit</a>]</h2>
<ul><li><a href="/wiki/Effective_altruism">Effective altruism</a></li>
<li><a href="/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk">Global catastrophic risk</a></li>
<li><a href="/wiki/Great_Filter">Great Filter</a></li>
<li><i><a href="/wiki/Human_Compatible">Human Compatible</a></i></li>
<li><i><a href="/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies">Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies</a></i></li>
<li><i><a href="/wiki/What_We_Owe_the_Future">What We Owe the Future</a></i></li></ul>
<h2>References[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity&amp;action=edit&amp;section=8">edit</a>]</h2>
<div>
<ol>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-1">^</a></b> <cite><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-precipice-9781526600219/">"The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity"</a>. <i>Bloomsbury</i>.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-2">^</a></b> <cite>Ord, Toby (9 July 2019). <a href="https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/toby-ord/the-precipice/9780316484893/"><i>The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity</i></a>. <i>Hachette Book Group</i>. <a href="/wiki/ISBN_(identifier)">ISBN</a> <a href="/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780316484893"><bdi>9780316484893</bdi></a>.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-3">^</a></b> <cite>Sexton, David (5 March 2020). <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/the-precipice-by-toby-ord-review-a4379471.html">"Book Review – The Precipice"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/Evening_Standard">Evening Standard</a></i>. Retrieved 27 March 2020.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-4">^</a></b> <cite>Chivers, Tom (7 March 2020). <a href="https://beta.spectator.co.uk/article/how-close-is-humanity-to-destroying-itself">"How close is humanity to destroying itself?"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/The_Spectator">The Spectator</a></i>. Retrieved 27 March 2020.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-5">^</a></b> <cite>Appleyard, Bryan (8 March 2020). <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-precipice-by-toby-ord-review-how-civilisation-could-end-l88ssndzk">"The Precipice by Toby Ord review — how civilisation could end"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/The_Sunday_Times">The Sunday Times</a></i>. Retrieved 27 March 2020.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-6">^</a></b> <cite><a href="/wiki/Steven_Carroll">Steven Carroll</a>; <a href="/wiki/Kerryn_Goldsworthy">Kerryn Goldsworthy</a> (19 March 2020). <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/the-future-of-humanity-has-reached-a-tipping-point-argues-new-book-20200318-p54bdq.html">"The future of humanity has reached a tipping point, argues new book"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/The_Sydney_Morning_Herald">The Sydney Morning Herald</a></i>. Retrieved 2 April 2020.</cite>
</li>
<li><b><a href="#cite_ref-7">^</a></b> <cite><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/the-precipice-the-magical-language-of-others-the-glass-hotel-and-then-the-fish-swallowed-him">"Briefly Noted Book Reviews"</a>. <i><a href="/wiki/The_New_Yorker">The New Yorker</a></i>. 6 April 2020.</cite>
</li>
</ol></div>
<h2>External links[<a href="/w/index.php?title=The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity&amp;action=edit&amp;section=9">edit</a>]</h2>
<ul><li><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/mar/06/worst-case-thinking-prevent-pandemics-coronavirus-existential-risk">Edited book extract</a> via <i><a href="/wiki/The_Guardian">The Guardian</a></i></li>
<li><a href="https://80000hours.org/2020/04/longtermist-policy-ideas/">Policy and research recommendations</a> from the book</li>
<li><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/mar/23/worst-case-thinking-prevent-pandemics-podcast"><i>Guardian</i> podcast</a> on the book</li>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMMAJRH94xY">Video</a> on <a href="/wiki/YouTube">YouTube</a></li>
<li>"<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/0ce83954-6851-11ea-a6ac-9122541af204">How to save the human race from extinction</a>", review in the <i><a href="/wiki/Financial_Times">Financial Times</a></i></li>
<li><a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/02/25/power-catastrophic-thinking-toby-ord-precipice/">"The Power of Catastrophic Thinking"</a>, review by <a href="/wiki/Jim_Holt_(philosopher)">Jim Holt</a> in <i><a href="/wiki/The_New_York_Review_of_Books">The New York Review of Books</a></i></li>
<li><a href="https://theprecipice.com/further-reading">Ord's Further Reading list</a></li></ul>
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 * 1 Summary
 + 1.1 The Precipice
 + 1.2 Existential catastrophe and existential risk
 + 1.3 Risk landscape
 + 1.4 Response
 * 2 Reception
 * 3 See also
 * 4 References
 * 5 External links
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 The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

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 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
 Hardcover edition
 Author Toby Ord 
 Country United Kingdom 
 Language English 
 Subject Existential risk 
 Genre Philosophy, popular science
 Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing[1] 
 Hachette Book Group[2] 
 Publication date 5 March 2020 (UK) 
 24 March 2020 (US) 
 Media type Print, e-book, audiobook 
 Pages 480 
 ISBN 1526600218 
 Website www.theprecipice.com 
 

 The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity is a 2020 non-fiction book by the Australian philosopher Toby Ord, a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford. It argues that humanity faces unprecedented risks over the next few centuries and examines the moral significance of safeguarding humanity's future.

 Summary [ edit ]

 The Precipice [ edit ]

 Ord argues that humanity is in a uniquely dangerous period in its development, which he calls the Precipice. Beginning with the first atomic bomb test in 1945, the Precipice is characterized by unprecedented destructive capability paired with inadequate wisdom and restraint. Ord predicts that the Precipice is likely to last no more than a few centuries, as humanity will either quickly develop the necessary self-control or succumb to the rapidly accumulating risk of catastrophe. Ord estimates that the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which leaders at the time thought had a 10–50% chance of causing nuclear war, was the closest humanity has yet come to self-destruction in its 200,000-year history.

 Existential catastrophe and existential risk [ edit ]

 Ord uses the concepts of existential catastrophe and existential risk, citing their definitions by Nick Bostrom. Existential catastrophe refers to the realized destruction of humanity's long-term potential, whereas existential risk refers to the probability that a given hazard will lead to existential catastrophe. Human extinction is one mechanism of existential catastrophe, but others can be imagined such as permanent totalitarian dystopia. This concept of existential catastrophe is strictly defined as a permanent, irreversible loss of potential; for example, even a disaster that killed a majority of humans would not be an existential catastrophe under this definition, provided that the survivors eventually recover and resume scientific and technological progress. Ord examines the immense moral implications of existential catastrophe from a variety of perspectives: existential catastrophe would simultaneously betray all that past humans have built, bring great harm upon humans existing at the time, and cut off the possibility of a vast future flourishing among the stars.

 Risk landscape [ edit ]

 Ord estimates a 1 in 6 total risk of existential catastrophe occurring in the next century. This includes a relatively negligible existential risk from natural catastrophes such as asteroid impacts but is overwhelmingly dominated by anthropogenic (human-caused) existential risk. Ord estimates the existential risk associated with unaligned artificial general intelligence to be 1 in 10 over the next century, higher than all other sources of existential risk combined. Other anthropogenic existential risks include nuclear war, engineered pandemics, and climate change.

 Response [ edit ]

 Ord states that humanity spends less than 0.001% of gross world product on targeted existential risk reduction interventions. He argues that motivation to fund such interventions is limited by insufficient global coordination, which could be improved via specialized global institutions. Moreover, interventions such as governance of dangerous emerging technologies may inherently require increased global coordination. Ord outlines a number of policy and research recommendations intended to reduce existential risk. He also explores several ways individuals can contribute to existential risk reduction, such as selecting high-impact careers, effective giving, and contributing to a public conversation on the issue.

 Reception [ edit ]

 A review in the Evening Standard called The Precipice a "a startling and rigorous contribution".[3] In The Spectator, Tom Chivers called The Precipice "a powerful book, written with a philosopher's eye for counterarguments so that he can meet them in advance. And Ord's love for humanity and hope for its future is infectious, as is his horrified wonder at how close we have come to destroying it".[4]

 Writing in The Sunday Times, journalist and author Bryan Appleyard expressed skepticism toward some of the moral philosophy in the book, stating "I doubt that it can redirect humanity away from its self-destructive ways", but ultimately praised the book, calling it "dense and often thrillingly written" and highlighting Ord's analysis of the science as "exemplary".[5] Reviewer Steven Carroll in The Sydney Morning Herald called it authoritative and accessible.[6]

 A review in The New Yorker published in April 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic noted that the book seemed "made for the present moment" and said "readers may find the sections that argue for why humanity deserves saving, and why we're equipped to face the challenges, even more arresting than the array of potential cataclysms".[7]

 See also [ edit ]

 * Effective altruism
 * Global catastrophic risk
 * Great Filter
 * Human Compatible
 * Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
 * What We Owe the Future

 References [ edit ]

 1. ^ "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity". Bloomsbury.
 2. ^ Ord, Toby (9 July 2019). The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Hachette Book Group. ISBN 9780316484893.
 3. ^ Sexton, David (5 March 2020). "Book Review – The Precipice". Evening Standard . Retrieved 27 March 2020 .
 4. ^ Chivers, Tom (7 March 2020). "How close is humanity to destroying itself?". The Spectator . Retrieved 27 March 2020 .
 5. ^ Appleyard, Bryan (8 March 2020). "The Precipice by Toby Ord review — how civilisation could end". The Sunday Times . Retrieved 27 March 2020 .
 6. ^ Steven Carroll; Kerryn Goldsworthy (19 March 2020). "The future of humanity has reached a tipping point, argues new book". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 2 April 2020 .
 7. ^ "Briefly Noted Book Reviews". The New Yorker. 6 April 2020.

 External links [ edit ]

 * Edited book extract via The Guardian
 * Policy and research recommendations from the book
 * Guardian podcast on the book
 * Video on YouTube
 * "How to save the human race from extinction", review in the Financial Times
 * "The Power of Catastrophic Thinking", review by Jim Holt in The New York Review of Books
 * Ord's Further Reading list
 * v 
 * t 
 * e 
 Effective altruism
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 Concepts * Earning to give 
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 * Utilitarianism 
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 * Sam Bankman-Fried 
 * Liv Boeree 
 * Nick Bostrom 
 * Hilary Greaves 
 * Holden Karnofsky 
 * William MacAskill 
 Key figures * Dustin Moskovitz 
 * Yew-Kwang Ng 
 * Toby Ord 
 * Derek Parfit 
 * Peter Singer 
 * Cari Tuna 
 * Eliezer Yudkowsky 
 * 80,000 Hours 
 * Against Malaria Foundation 
 * All-Party Parliamentary Group for Future Generations 
 * Animal Charity Evaluators 
 * Animal Ethics 
 * Centre for Effective Altruism 
 * Centre for Enabling EA Learning & Research 
 * Center for High Impact Philanthropy 
 * Centre for the Study of Existential Risk 
 * Development Media International 
 * Deworm the World Initiative 
 * Faunalytics 
 * Fistula Foundation 
 * Future of Humanity Institute 
 * Future of Life Institute 
 * Founders Pledge 
 Organizations * GiveDirectly 
 * GiveWell 
 * Giving What We Can 
 * Good Food Fund 
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 * The Humane League 
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 * Raising for Effective Giving 
 * Schistosomiasis Control Initiative 
 * Sentience Institute 
 * Wild Animal Initiative 
 * Biotechnology risk 
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 * Economic stability 
 * Existential risk from artificial general intelligence
 * Global catastrophic risk 
 * Global health 
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 Focus areas * Immigration reform 
 * Intensive animal farming 
 * Land use reform 
 * Life extension 
 * Malaria prevention 
 * Mass deworming 
 * Neglected tropical diseases 
 * Suffering risks 
 * Wild animal suffering 
 * Doing Good Better 
 * The End of Animal Farming 
 * "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" 
 * The Life You Can Save 
 Literature * Living High and Letting Die 
 * The Most Good You Can Do 
 * Practical Ethics 
 * The Precipice 
 * Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies 
 * What We Owe the Future 
 Events * Effective Altruism Global 
 
 * v 
 * t 
 * e 
 Existential risk from artificial intelligence
  * AI alignment 
  * AI capability control 
  * AI takeover 
  * Accelerating change 
  * Existential risk from artificial general intelligence 
 Concepts * Friendly artificial intelligence 
  * Instrumental convergence 
  * Intelligence explosion 
  * Machine ethics 
  * Superintelligence 
  * Technological singularity 
  * Allen Institute for AI 
  * Center for Applied Rationality 
  * Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence 
  * Centre for the Study of Existential Risk 
  * DeepMind 
  * Foundational Questions Institute 
 Organizations * Future of Humanity Institute 
  * Future of Life Institute 
  * Humanity+ 
  * Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies 
  * Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence 
  * Machine Intelligence Research Institute 
  * OpenAI 
  * Scott Alexander 
  * Nick Bostrom 
  * Eric Drexler 
  * Sam Harris 
  * Stephen Hawking 
  * Bill Hibbard 
  * Bill Joy 
  * Elon Musk 
 People * Steve Omohundro 
  * Huw Price 
  * Martin Rees 
  * Stuart J. Russell 
  * Jaan Tallinn 
  * Max Tegmark 
  * Frank Wilczek 
  * Roman Yampolskiy 
  * Andrew Yang 
  * Eliezer Yudkowsky 
  * Artificial intelligence as a global catastrophic risk 
  * Controversies and dangers of artificial general intelligence
  * Ethics of artificial intelligence 
  * Suffering risks 
 Other * Human Compatible 
  * Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence 
  * Our Final Invention 
  * The Precipice 
  * Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies 
  * Do You Trust This Computer? 
 Category 
 
 * v 
 * t 
 * e 
 Future of Humanity Institute
 * Nick Bostrom 
 * K. Eric Drexler 
 People * Robin Hanson 
 * Toby Ord 
 * Anders Sandberg 
 * Rebecca Roache 
 * Differential technological development 
 * Global catastrophic risk 
 * Great Filter 
 * Pascal's mugging 
 Concepts * Reversal test 
 * Self-indication assumption 
 * Self-sampling assumption 
 * Simulation hypothesis 
 * Singleton 
 * Anthropic Bias 
 * Global Catastrophic Risks 
 Works * Human Enhancement 
 * The Precipice 
 * Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
 
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
	 
 The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity       Hardcover edition    Author  Toby Ord    Country United Kingdom   Language English   Subject  Existential risk    Genre Philosophy, popular science    Publisher  Bloomsbury Publishing  [1]   Hachette Book Group  [2]      Publication date  5 March 2020 (UK)24 March 2020 (US)   Media type Print, e-book, audiobook   Pages 480    ISBN   1526600218    Website  www.theprecipice.com    
  The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity  is a 2020 non-fiction book by the Australian philosopher Toby Ord, a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford. It argues that humanity faces unprecedented risks over the next few centuries and examines the moral significance of safeguarding humanity's future.
Summary[edit]
The Precipice[edit]
Ord argues that humanity is in a uniquely dangerous period in its development, which he calls the Precipice. Beginning with the first atomic bomb test in 1945, the Precipice is characterized by unprecedented destructive capability paired with inadequate wisdom and restraint. Ord predicts that the Precipice is likely to last no more than a few centuries, as humanity will either quickly develop the necessary self-control or succumb to the rapidly accumulating risk of catastrophe. Ord estimates that the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which leaders at the time thought had a 10–50% chance of causing nuclear war, was the closest humanity has yet come to self-destruction in its 200,000-year history.
Existential catastrophe and existential risk[edit]
Ord uses the concepts of existential catastrophe and existential risk, citing their definitions by Nick Bostrom. Existential catastrophe refers to the realized destruction of humanity's long-term potential, whereas existential risk refers to the probability that a given hazard will lead to existential catastrophe. Human extinction is one mechanism of existential catastrophe, but others can be imagined such as permanent totalitarian dystopia. This concept of existential catastrophe is strictly defined as a permanent, irreversible loss of potential; for example, even a disaster that killed a majority of humans would not be an existential catastrophe under this definition, provided that the survivors eventually recover and resume scientific and technological progress. Ord examines the immense moral implications of existential catastrophe from a variety of perspectives: existential catastrophe would simultaneously betray all that past humans have built, bring great harm upon humans existing at the time, and cut off the possibility of a vast future flourishing among the stars.
Risk landscape[edit]
Ord estimates a 1 in 6 total risk of existential catastrophe occurring in the next century. This includes a relatively negligible existential risk from natural catastrophes such as asteroid impacts but is overwhelmingly dominated by anthropogenic (human-caused) existential risk. Ord estimates the existential risk associated with unaligned artificial general intelligence to be 1 in 10 over the next century, higher than all other sources of existential risk combined. Other anthropogenic existential risks include nuclear war, engineered pandemics, and climate change.
Response[edit]
Ord states that humanity spends less than 0.001% of gross world product on targeted existential risk reduction interventions. He argues that motivation to fund such interventions is limited by insufficient global coordination, which could be improved via specialized global institutions. Moreover, interventions such as governance of dangerous emerging technologies may inherently require increased global coordination. Ord outlines a number of policy and research recommendations intended to reduce existential risk. He also explores several ways individuals can contribute to existential risk reduction, such as selecting high-impact careers, effective giving, and contributing to a public conversation on the issue.
Reception[edit]
A review in the  Evening Standard  called The Precipice a "a startling and rigorous contribution". [3]  In  The Spectator , Tom Chivers called The Precipice "a powerful book, written with a philosopher's eye for counterarguments so that he can meet them in advance. And Ord's love for humanity and hope for its future is infectious, as is his horrified wonder at how close we have come to destroying it". [4] 
 Writing in  The Sunday Times , journalist and author Bryan Appleyard expressed skepticism toward some of the moral philosophy in the book, stating "I doubt that it can redirect humanity away from its self-destructive ways", but ultimately praised the book, calling it "dense and often thrillingly written" and highlighting Ord's analysis of the science as "exemplary". [5]  Reviewer Steven Carroll in  The Sydney Morning Herald  called it authoritative and accessible. [6] 
 A review in  The New Yorker  published in April 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic noted that the book seemed "made for the present moment" and said "readers may find the sections that argue for why humanity deserves saving, and why we're equipped to face the challenges, even more arresting than the array of potential cataclysms". [7] 
See also[edit]
  Effective altruism 
 Global catastrophic risk 
 Great Filter 
  Human Compatible  
  Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies  
  What We Owe the Future   
References[edit]
  ^   "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity". Bloomsbury.
  ^  Ord, Toby (9 July 2019).  The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity . Hachette Book Group. ISBN  9780316484893 .
  ^  Sexton, David (5 March 2020). "Book Review – The Precipice".  Evening Standard . Retrieved 27 March 2020.
  ^  Chivers, Tom (7 March 2020). "How close is humanity to destroying itself?".  The Spectator . Retrieved 27 March 2020.
  ^  Appleyard, Bryan (8 March 2020). "The Precipice by Toby Ord review — how civilisation could end".  The Sunday Times . Retrieved 27 March 2020.
  ^   Steven Carroll; Kerryn Goldsworthy (19 March 2020). "The future of humanity has reached a tipping point, argues new book".  The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  ^   "Briefly Noted Book Reviews".  The New Yorker . 6 April 2020.
 
External links[edit]
  Edited book extract via  The Guardian  
 Policy and research recommendations from the book
  Guardian podcast on the book
 Video on YouTube 
"How to save the human race from extinction", review in the  Financial Times  
 "The Power of Catastrophic Thinking", review by Jim Holt in  The New York Review of Books  
 Ord's Further Reading list
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity
https://www.amazon.com/Suicidal-Why-We-Kill-Ourselves/dp/022646332X
Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves Hardcover – October 30, 2018
2018-10-30
Jesse Bering
<div><p>Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.</p><p>Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.</p><div><p>Jesse Bering is an experimental psychologist and a leading scholar in the cognitive science of religion. He is also an essayist and science writer specializing in evolution and human behavior. His first book, The Belief Instinct (W. W. Norton, 2011), was included in the American Library Association’s Top 25 Books of the Year and voted one of the “11 Best Psychology Books of 2011” by The Atlantic. This was followed by a collection of his Webby-award nominated essays, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), and Perv (2013, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a taboo-breaking work that received widespread critical acclaim and was named as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His most recent book was A Very Human Ending (Doubleday, 2018).</p><p>Bering’s writings have been translated into many different languages and reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other outlets. He has also been featured in numerous documentaries and radio programs, including Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Conan, Chelsea Lately, Q&amp;A (Australia), and NPR’s All Things Considered.</p><p>Bering is Director of the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. He lives in Dunedin, New Zealand with his partner, Juan, and their two cheeky border terriers, Hanno and Kora.</p></div>||||I|||| Skip to main content
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 Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves Hardcover – October 30, 2018

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 For much of his thirties, Jesse Bering thought he was probably going to kill himself. He was a successful psychologist and writer, with books to his name and bylines in major magazines. But none of that mattered. The impulse to take his own life remained. At times it felt all but inescapable.

 Bering survived. And in addition to relief, the fading of his suicidal thoughts brought curiosity. Where had they come from? Would they return? Is the suicidal impulse found in other animals? Or is our vulnerability to suicide a uniquely human evolutionary development? In Suicidal , Bering answers all these questions and more, taking us through the science and psychology of suicide, revealing its cognitive secrets and the subtle tricks our minds play on us when we’re easy emotional prey. Scientific studies, personal stories, and remarkable cross-species comparisons come together to help readers critically analyze their own doomsday thoughts while gaining broad insight into a problem that, tragically, will most likely touch all of us at some point in our lives. But while the subject is certainly a heavy one, Bering’s touch is light. Having been through this himself, he knows that sometimes the most effective response to our darkest moments is a gentle humor, one that, while not denying the seriousness of suffering, at the same time acknowledges our complicated, flawed, and yet precious existence.

 Authoritative, accessible, personal, profound—there’s never been a book on suicide like this. It will help you understand yourself and your loved ones, and it will change the way you think about this most vexing of human problems.
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 1. Print length
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 2. Language
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 3. Publisher
 University of Chicago Press
 4. Publication date
 October 30, 2018
 5. Dimensions
 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
 6. ISBN-10
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 7. ISBN-13
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 Editorial Reviews

 Review

 "What undergirds Bering's inquiry is the belief that locating the psychological blunders that lead to suicide can help, in time, to curb their prevalence." ― New Yorker

 "He weaves together personal stories, delves into whether nonhuman animals die by suicide, and examines the relation of religion and self-killing. These angles offer a critical perspective on a devastating problem."
 ― Scientific American

 "Suicide is one of the toughest subjects to write about, and psychologist Jesse Bering does it with candor, scientific integrity and genuine empathy in Suicidal . . . . The book itself is a testament to the human spirit. Researching and writing the book, he says, was a way to combat suicidal ideation and give his own life a renewed sense of purpose. . . . Suicidal is a vital book--informative, engaging, and enlightening despite its dark subject matter." ― Shelf Awareness

 "Jesse Bering is the best science writer at work today."
 -- Dan Savage

 "By the time you finish reading these sentences someone in the world will have committed suicide. Why do more than a million people a year kill themselves? To answer this question we need a brilliant research scientist, an insightful psychologist, and a sensitive but powerful writer who has seriously contemplated taking their own life. Jesse Bering fits all three criteria and the book you hold in your hands is a deeply moving narrative that cuts to the heart of the ultimate question any of us could ever ask: why should I live? Given what’s at stake in the topic, Suicidal may very well be the most important book you will ever read." -- Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine

 "I'm not surprised that a book on suicide would be very personal, but I didn’t expect it to be so damn funny. It's also engaging, thoughtful, and sensitive--although Bering is certainly irreverent, there is a real appreciation of how painful and difficult this topic can be. This is a book for scholars and for a general audience, but it is also entirely suitable for people whose lives have been touched by the suicide of someone they loved." -- Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy

 "In Suicidal, Jesse Bering explores one of the most essential questions we all face: Why keep living? He doesn't claim to have found any easy answers, but his exploration is surprising, funny, touching, and deeply personal. Suicidal feels like a gift, and reading it reminded me that encounters with great books are reason enough, for now, to keep going." -- Christopher Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn

 "I have yet to come away from reading one of [Bering's] essays and not feel considerably better informed than I was just minutes before." ― Forbes

 "The book interweaves disciplinary, literary, historical, media, personal and sensationalist sources. . . . the resulting amalgam brilliantly succeeds at providing both an accessible and an earnest account." ― Allegra Lab

 About the Author

 Jesse Bering is the author of Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us , Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? , and The Belief Instinct . He is the director of the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
























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 * Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; First edition (October 30, 2018)
 * Language ‏ : ‎ English
 * Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
 * ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 022646332X
 * ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226463322
 * Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
 * Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
 * Best Sellers Rank: #361,345 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )
 + #265 in Coping with Suicide Grief
 + #1,172 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
 + #1,818 in Medical General Psychology
 * Customer Reviews:
 4.7 out of 5 stars 119 ratings
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 Jesse Bering

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 Jesse Bering is an experimental psychologist and a leading scholar in the cognitive science of religion. He is also an essayist and science writer specializing in evolution and human behavior. His first book, The Belief Instinct (W. W. Norton, 2011), was included in the American Library Association’s Top 25 Books of the Year and voted one of the “11 Best Psychology Books of 2011” by The Atlantic. This was followed by a collection of his Webby-award nominated essays, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), and Perv (2013, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a taboo-breaking work that received widespread critical acclaim and was named as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His most recent book was A Very Human Ending (Doubleday, 2018).

 Bering’s writings have been translated into many different languages and reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other outlets. He has also been featured in numerous documentaries and radio programs, including Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Conan, Chelsea Lately, Q&A (Australia), and NPR’s All Things Considered.

 Bering is Director of the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. He lives in Dunedin, New Zealand with his partner, Juan, and their two cheeky border terriers, Hanno and Kora.

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  BicameralMuse
  5.0 out of 5 stars Jesse Bering unlocks many doors on the way to understanding suicide
  Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 29, 2018
  Verified Purchase
  I have a personal reason for reading this book - we lost our son to suicide totally unexpectedly, without warnings, 16 months ago. The loss has devasted us and turned our own existence into a painful struggle. We had no idea that our son was suffering, let alone that he was suicidal. The appearance he presented was totally misleading. He was a young, highly functioning professional with a lot of friends. He was good looking, athletic and talented. He always appeared to be in control. His suicide was a shock to all. How could we all be so wrong?
  Jesse Bering’s book confirmed so many things that I have come up with during my own 16 months “psychological autopsy” and “trying to get into my son’s head”. There were certain traits that contributed to my son’s death. As Jesse lists some of them: perfectionism-check, sensitivity-check, very high standards for himself and blaming himself - check. Propensity for depression, combined with numerous situational stressors that created a perfect storm -check. Having a gun as Jesse points out, and I agree, was a recipe for disaster.
  I found chapter 4 on Roy Baumeister’s stages in which the individual moves from one degree of suicidality on to the next immensely valuable, particularly from the perspective that it is here where the deadly cycle can be broken. I actually reread this part and will be rereading many parts of the book.
  Another well-illustrated point is what Edwin Shneidman calls “psychache”. The case of Vic, a young girl who took her own life is particularly painful to read. Her writings are so beautiful and haunting.
  As Jesse points out, this is not a suicide prevention book. His hope is that it might help people better understand the problem and maybe recognize some of the signs and deal with them.
  After reading the book, I feel solidarity with the author, Jesse Bering. His sincerity and sharing of his personal struggles make me feel that we are in the same boat. In his outstanding book, Heavens on Earth, Michael Shermer writes about a staggering level of complexity produced by 85 billion of neurons in a human brain, each with about a thousand synaptic links, for a total of 100 trillion connections. I can’t help but think that somehow those 85 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections also account for the commonalties that we share as human beings. Though each suicide seems to be different, the commonalities are extremely important clues for dealing and hopefully understanding and solving the problem.
  Did Jesse’s book provide answers to all the questions? No, and Jesse himself acknowledges that. But he certainly went along this long, dark, seemingly endless hall with seemingly endless doors and he unlocked many of them one by one. And I hope that he doesn't stop here.. Luckily, Jesse is not alone on this hall. There are others doing the same.
  I found Jesse’s book so valuable that I will give a copy to people I know who are interested in understanding the subject better.
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  XYZ
  5.0 out of 5 stars love the truth in this book
  Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 9, 2022
  Verified Purchase
  The author tells it like it is. As someone who has close friends who completed suicide, it brought up a lot of feelings and gave me great insight. Highly recommend for those who have lost because of it, as well as those looking to gain more knowledge.
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  Ryan
  5.0 out of 5 stars Jesse Bering's, "Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves", Offers a Broad View of the Suicidal Mind
  Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 29, 2019
  Verified Purchase
  Jesse Bering’s, “Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves”, offers a wide lens in which to delve into and begin to explore the taboo and sensitive topic of suicide. Bering states, there is a suicidal person in all of us, which can be a very alarming and dark thought. However, through analyzing research and breaking the topic down from many angles and perspectives, this book has somehow made the intimidating topic of the suicidal mind approachable.
  Bering’s personal thread is woven through the book, which compliments the narrative and manages to add, unexpectedly, bits of lightness and humor. This book can’t help but start many of the conversations that we need to have about suicide, and give insight to the suicidal person in all of us; and hopefully, provide us tools and awareness to be more understanding of this difficult issue.
  2 people found this helpful
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  Tim K
  5.0 out of 5 stars Witty, engaging, and informative
  Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 19, 2018
  Verified Purchase
  Bering is one of my favorite authors and he doesn't disappoint with "Suicidal." As he makes clear from the beginning, this book is his attempt to make sense of suicide and hopefully provide others with a guide to help prevent future suicides. It is his hope that the information he provides can be a roadblock to those having suicidal thoughts as well as helpful to those interested in suicide and suicide prevention.

  Bering accepts Roy Baumeister's model of the steps leading up to suicide and dedicates a whole chapter to a case study. Although some might say that the book isn't exhaustive enough, I'd agree but I don't believe Bering's aim was an exhaustive, academic tome on suicide. Suicide, Bering makes clear, is a complicated topic but the more we know about it, the better we are at identifying those that are suicidal.

  Witty, engaging, and informative, "Suicidal" is for all those concerned about suicide.
  12 people found this helpful
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  Shannon Rowl
  5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding, raw & real.
  Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 6, 2019
  Verified Purchase
  I have spent the last 17 months reading everything I can find to help me rationalize & somehow try to understand the most painful & complicated event that made my world stop....why did my son Skyler, at the age of 23, take his life and no one saw it coming?
  This book has helped me see this tragedy through another set of eyes, it helped me to indicate more pieces of this puzzle that will never have all the pieces bundled nicely in a sealed tight bag. Thank you.
  13 people found this helpful
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  Lee McPherson
  5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for the suicidal and those that know them.
  Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 16, 2018
  Verified Purchase
  A deep dive into a taboo topic with a good mix of personal reflections from the author and reviews of relevant prior research. Jesse Bering's approach to the topic is balanced and respectful, always engaging, and sometimes somehow humorous. I'm grateful for the perspective he offers which has genuinely changed the way I look at suicidal ideation.
  7 people found this helpful
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  Whitehorserider
  5.0 out of 5 stars An important book
  Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 20, 2020
  Verified Purchase
  A little glib for such a serious subject, but excellent, up-to-date research. Jesse Bering has written a much needed, factual discussion that is essential for any suicide survivor.
  2 people found this helpful
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  A320
  5.0 out of 5 stars Why, Why, Why
  Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 8, 2019
  Verified Purchase
  Why is what was asked of me numerous times from my nieces when their father took his life. This book has given me some answers.
  4 people found this helpful
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 Top reviews from other countries

  DJ
  5.0 out of 5 stars Academic and down to earth...
  Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 9, 2022
  Verified Purchase
  Although it was obviously depressing in parts, I found it to be informative with lots of sources cited that I can follow up. I quite enjoyed his humour, honesty and the fact that he had lived experience on the subject. The chapters covered discussions on different aspects of suicide, such as, 'what doesn't die'. It was both academic and down to earth which I think will appeal to a diverse audience.
  One person found this helpful
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  E
  5.0 out of 5 stars All good just a small suggestion
  Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 15, 2019
  Verified Purchase
  Item as per description and arrived within speculated time. However, it would've been nice if they could provide tracking number.
  Report abuse
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Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.  Jesse Bering is an experimental psychologist and a leading scholar in the cognitive science of religion. He is also an essayist and science writer specializing in evolution and human behavior. His first book, The Belief Instinct (W. W. Norton, 2011), was included in the American Library Association’s Top 25 Books of the Year and voted one of the “11 Best Psychology Books of 2011” by The Atlantic. This was followed by a collection of his Webby-award nominated essays, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), and Perv (2013, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a taboo-breaking work that received widespread critical acclaim and was named as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His most recent book was A Very Human Ending (Doubleday, 2018). Bering’s writings have been translated into many different languages and reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other outlets. He has also been featured in numerous documentaries and radio programs, including Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Conan, Chelsea Lately, Q&amp;A (Australia), and NPR’s All Things Considered. Bering is Director of the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. He lives in Dunedin, New Zealand with his partner, Juan, and their two cheeky border terriers, Hanno and Kora.
Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves Hardcover – October 30, 2018
https://www.amazon.com/Suicidal-Why-We-Kill-Ourselves/dp/022646332X
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39105401-suicidal
Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves
2018-10-30
Author
<div><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6864942-valerity-val"></a></section><section><p>929 reviews2,734 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2487676649">October 18, 2018</a></section><div><p>– All the inconveniences in the world are not considerable enough that a man should die to evade them; and, besides, there being so many, so sudden and unexpected changes in human things, it is hard rightly to judge when we are at the end of our hope…<p>Michel de Montaigne, A Custom of the Isle of Cea (1574)</p><p>This is quite a good book on the topic of suicide, which seems to be a hot topic this year, with all of the people we have lost to it...think of all the big names that have taken their lives recently, and maybe the people you know personally too. Written by an author who personally has had issues with it, so he knows whereof he speaks, and has also done his homework, so it makes for very interesting reading on this fascinating subject.</p><p>The book takes on the question of whether non-human animals commit suicide, among many other issues. Think of the dog who lays by his master’s grave, refusing to eat or leave, brokenheartedly awaiting his return. It also discusses some unusual ways that people have used to commit suicide and delves into different studies and papers on suicide published by different scholars.</p><p>There’s a bit of something for just about any interest in the subject, and it was worth a read. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by NetGalley, author Jesse Bering, and the publisher for my fair review.</p><p>University of Chicago Press<br />Pub: Oct 30th, 2018</p><p>My BookZone blog:<br /><a href="https://wordpress.com/post/bookblog200.wordpress.com/973">https://wordpress.com/post/bookblog20...</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6864942?shelf=2018">2018</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6864942?shelf=netgalley">netgalley</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6864942?shelf=non-fiction">non-fiction</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/24573110-michelle"></a></section><section><p>585 reviews157 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2575423165">November 6, 2018</a></section><div><p>As a gifted academic, research psychologist and professor at Otago University (New Zealand) Jesse Bering is a bestselling author, his books have been translated in several languages. In “Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves” Bering delves into what he calls the “specter of suicide”-- among the darkest moments of the human condition. With about one million deaths (globally) each year, it is important to understand suicidal ideation in its various forms and patterns, the heartbreak and grief of survivors, many are compelled to seek and search for answers to understand this deadly final act.<p>Throughout the book, Bering shares his personal story: beginning as an anxious gay teen, Bering then had a rewarding grad school education, waves of accomplishment, excellence in combination with crushing academic disappointment and defeat; and later, more impressive success and authorship. In addition, Bering shares his deepest darkest moments and times with the “secrets” of suicidal impulses. Excellent research is combined with scientific and academic findings, literature, true stories from survivors and family members, also the subject of animal suicide make for some interesting and fascinating reading. <br />During war time there is a considerable drop in suicidal deaths: the same statistical decline in America was noted following the assassination of JFK, the Challenger Space Shuttle, and the 9/11 attacks. “To be rooted” observed Simone Weil “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” <br />Viktor Frankel attributed the Jewish survival rate and lack of suicide deaths from the horrific conditions of the Nazi concentration camps to the “innate human ability to find purpose in life.” In the book, “Suicide and the Holocaust” (2005) suicidologist David Lester reported that suicide deaths were high in the Jewish ghetto’s and concentration camps but either not reported or under reported by Nazi guards. <br />The “Werther Effect”-- the phenomenon and contagion of copy-cat suicide was explored in length. Following the release of the Goethe classic novel “The Sorrows of the Young Werther” (1776) the book was banned in several European countries due to the increase of suicide deaths copied from the book. The controversial Netflix series “13 Reasons Why…” (2017) teen Hanna Barker committed suicide because she felt she was badly treated by others. The disturbing scenes of her death were compared to horror movies. The concern of prevention specialists raised alarms over the risk of the show being aimed at impressionable vulnerable teens. In order to show an “honest” portrayal television executives ignored scientific data. The online media, cyberbullying was covered briefly.<br /> A 17 year old teen, Victoria “Vic” McLeod, left behind a detailed journal of four months of her crippling anxiety and suicidal thought process. Vic ended her life after jumping from a 10 story building in Singapore (2014). The journal entries were indeed “extraordinary”. Vic’s parents wanted to share their daughters story in order to help others.</p><p>There was no discussion of the Aokigahara Forest (a suicide “hot spot”) located at the base of Mt. Fuji. However, an Asian suicide epidemic began after the unusual “burning charcoal death” of Jessica Choi yuk-Chun, a Hong Kong engineering executive (1998). <br />In New Zealand, (suicide was a crime until 1961) the rates of suicide deaths are high. Often, depressed missing individuals are last seen on beaches, relatives plead with the public for any information; when the bodies are found, “No foul play suspected” is listed on the official report. This is not to conceal evidence, but used as a proven tactic in suicide prevention. <br />In the last part of the book, the methods used and detailed in suicide prevention clearly saved lives. However, if an individual is determined to conceal suicidal thoughts or intent to avoid intervention or hospitalization, even a skilled psychiatric mental health professional would be unable to detect a possible suicide attempt/death. In a large psychiatric clinic, The Implicit Association Test (IAT) a five minute computer program that flashed images and words across the screen was a more accurate predictor of people with suicidal risk over doctor interviews The development of new technologies are highly promising in suicide education and prevention. With thanks and appreciation to the University of Chicago Press via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/24573110?shelf=books-read">books-read</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/24573110?shelf=ebooks">ebooks</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/24573110?shelf=netgalley">netgalley</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2487905742">November 5, 2018</a></section><div><p>Have you ever talked with someone and you never knew exactly what they were getting at, or how what they were talking about was related? If yes, then you know how this book will read. While reading this book I could never really understand what the author's conclusion was at the end of each chapter, what the content in the chapter related to each other in the chapter, and sometimes how the chapter was related to suicide. The author, who said this in the beginning of the book, cherry-picked data, and that is clear; he also mostly included theories that he agreed with, and some he absolutely disagreed with. This book is by no means an objective overview of suicide theories. I was left very disappointed; it offered no insight. I would suggest reading other books on suicide. [Got an ARC from NetGalley.com]</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/76455039?shelf=netgalley">netgalley</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/76455039?shelf=psychopathology">psychopathology</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2454789087">July 20, 2018</a></section><div><p>As an academic librarian with some familiarity with current scholarship on suicide (through both my research assistance and my recreational interest), I unreservedly and enthusiastically recommend this superbly written, scientifically informed, and richly insightful book accessible to a wide and varied readership. Whether you are fortunate enough to have only a casual or more distantly philosophical interest in the topic, or have been personally touched or harrowed by suicide in the various ways sensitively and masterfully illuminated by Bering, there is something of lasting value for nearly any possible reader. Bering's unique combination of (1) professional background in cognitive and evolutionary psychology, in which he has made substantial contributions, and in award-winning popular scientific writing, (2) longstanding personal experience contending with suicidal ideation, and (3) exquisitely fluent and dexterous writing skill -- this singular synthesis confers upon SUICIDAL an authority and pathos scarcely matched by any other book in recent years on this darkly enigmatic and perhaps uniquely human phenomenon which, according the the World Health Organization, on average claims a life every 40 seconds.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/72034738-aisling"></a></section><section><p>25 reviews</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3511302841">August 26, 2020</a></section><div><p>Positives of this book: it provides some interesting statistics/scenarios that shed more light on the topic. The writing is accessible. <p>My biggest gripe: he went and brought religion into it.</p><p>Here's my deal - religion IS relevant here. Yes, in more than one religion, at some point in history, suicide was or is considered a sin, something that would prevent you from being favoured in the afterlife or something that might have negative ramifications. </p><p>What is not relevant, however, is whether or not there actually is an afterlife. And this author made it clear that 1) he does not believe in an afterlife and 2) if you disagree, you're wrong.</p><p>Why'd you go and do that bro, I was with you up until now.</p><p>At one point, he talks about a study carried out, with young children being the subjects, essentially to test if they believed that the consciousness lives on when the body dies. He found that the youngest children were more likely to believe that the mind lives on than the older children, and he draws this conclusion:</p><p><i>"this erroneous belief in the survival of personal consciousness after death is our species' 'default stance.'"</i></p><p>The word erroneous here carries so much weight. To imply that YOU, a developmental psychologist, have the answer that people have been searching for for centuries. YOU alone are sure that there is no life after death! Gee, that's neat. Please email me the study in which you categorically proved that the consciousness dies when the body does. Surely that's Nobel Prize worthy stuff, no?</p><p>He even goes on to liken being an atheist surrounded by the religious to <i>"being surrounded by people who are in the middle of a role-playing fantasy game and you can't get them to just be serious for a minute"</i>.</p><p>I mean, the arrogance. </p><p>I did not read this book for your philosophical opinion, sir. I read it for an informed evaluation of why people might take their own lives, and what they might be feeling up until that point. </p><p>Before you ask, yes I am religious. However, I also love science. Science and faith are not mutually exclusive and plenty of great scientists and mathematicians throughout the ages have also been religious (Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton - all dedicated Christians). To bring your faith (or lack thereof) into what is supposed to be a <i>scientific</i> analysis of human behaviour and present it as <i>fact </i>is absurd. </p><p>I really wouldn't have seen this as a negative if it was presented as opinion, but to arrogantly laugh in the face of the <i>billions</i> of people in the world who do believe that there is some form of life after death and call that belief erroneous? Blatantly unprofessional. The afterlife is, by nature, an unfalsifiable concept, a term of which I'm sure you know the meaning, being that it's a term you would learn in first year uni as a psychology student. To talk about religion as if it's everybody else off in fantasy land while you're sat there going, "Guys? Can we all come back to reality for a minute?" </p><p>Miss me with that shit.</p><p>For anyone wanting to come at me - I'm not annoyed that this guy is not religious. I don't give a shit what anyone believes as long as it's not hurting other people. What's pissed me off is that this guy has used his nonfiction, science based book, which features scientific research and investigation, to present his own belief as fact. Frankly, I think it's just incompetent. </p><p>But more than anything, it was irrelevant. Whether or not there is an afterlife does not matter here, when you're only supposed to be informing me of whether or not belief in that afterlife affects suicide rates. Literally, why would you even bring your lack of faith into that. There was a whole chapter dedicated to faith and suicide, and for a pretty big chunk of it I was thinking, <i>yeah, I might just skip this chapter because at this point he's just telling me that religion is a fairy tale, and that's not the content I signed up for when reading a book about suicidality.</i></p><p>tl;dr: I read this book to learn more about suicidal minds, not have you tell me that God isn't real. Unless you have some kind of proof to back that claim up, do not state your opinion as fact in a nonfiction book supposed to be based in science. It came across as arrogant and gross.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/20456668-diane-hernandez"></a></section><section><p>2,125 reviews31 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2577594635">November 2, 2018</a></section><div><p>Theories abound, but few conclusions are reached in the interesting, but ultimately disappointing, Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves.<p>Recently, there has been a spate of celebrity suicides: Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain and Avicii (Tim Bergling). Despite having an outwardly successful life, these people, and many others over the years felt that suicide was the best choice. Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves attempts to answer that question using scientific studies and the author’s own suicidal tendencies as a roadmap.</p><p>The statistics and studies are fascinating. For example, 43% of suicides are caused by genetics, and 57% are caused by environment. 90% of the genetic issues are mood disorders like depression or bipolar disorder. The worst risk is when a person genetically predisposed to suicide runs into one of the environmental issues like the death of a loved one or loss of a job. The risks stack rather than run concurrently. However, the book’s episodic nature jumps from the police’s difficulty of determining suicidal intent conclusively to whether animals commit suicide to pure scientific research about brain chemistry. </p><p>Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves attempts to answer the “why are people suicidal” question. However, the presentation of a multitude of theories, many of them conflicting, fails to provide a clear answer. The conclusion presents some interesting facts about prevention, which answers only the “how are suicides done” question. The why remains a mystery.</p><p>Readers interested in how to prevent suicide rather than why suicide occurs will enjoy this book. Also, therapists or police officers interested in learning the results of studies of suicides would appreciate it. However, it is not recommended for families dealing with a suicide that has already occurred as it will generate more questions than answers. Also, anyone contemplating suicide would be better served by reading one of the many self-help or therapeutic books on the subject. 3 stars.</p><p>Thanks to University of Chicago Press and NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/20456668?shelf=netgalley">netgalley</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/834122-vegantrav"></a></section><section><p>807 reviews173 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2720871668">February 19, 2019</a></section><div><p>In this perceptive, sensitive study, Jesse Bering looks at suicide from all angles. He asks the philosophical and ethical questions surrounding it. He looks at it psychologically, from the mental health perspective. He examines the sociological and religious factors that impinge on suicide. He considers the practicalities of suicide--how access to tools that make suicide easier (guns, for example) affects suicide rates. He wrestles with the difficult questions about suicidal contagion--that is, whether some individuals are more likely to attempt suicide after exposure to suicide in literature, in film, or in the news. <p>Then, moving beyond these academic analyses, Bering probes numerous individual stories of those who have attempted suicide or died by suicide. He quotes extensively from and reflects upon their journals and suicide notes, and he listens to and relates to his readers what their family members and friends have to say. To shed further light, he interviews mental health professionals who have worked with suicidal individuals and academics who have written and published extensively on suicide. Finally, he writes about his own struggles with suicidal ideation; this is a very personal book for Bering, and it's all the better for it.</p><p>The final result is a fascinating, extremely informative, nuanced discussion of suicide. It is humane, thoughtful, wise, and kind. It offers no easy answers or definitive judgements, for there are none. This is a book that is going to stick with me and will, I think, with most readers.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/36547750-neil-h"></a></section><section><p>178 reviews10 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2562535196">October 18, 2018</a></section><div><p>I half expected this book to be a frivolous read. I admit bias when the author confesses his literary work with such lurid names as Why Is a Penis Shaped Like That amongst others. But as one of many others who have a history of addiction, mental and suicidal thoughts. I thought this might come in handy with understanding the profundity of taking one's life. Jesse writes and I agree that aside from morality, religious or libertarian we have an immense history of self harm and for loads of fathomable and mysterious reasons. Some quick to commit, some use it as an attention seeking tool. Whatever the flavors a person's descent into self non existence is. Nobody close to its action/actor is immune to its affects and effects. History and philosophical persuasion aside. Unless we are in their shoes, we will never understand the motivation. It's not a mind disease. It's not a survival or adaptive behaviour. It's a social affliction that persists.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/44035367-maher-razouk"></a></section><section><p>633 reviews174 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4902033739">January 3, 2023</a></section><div><p>على صعيد عالميّ، يَقتل مليون شخص أنفسهم سنويًا، ويحاول ملايين آخرين القيام بذلك. ربما يكون هذا الرقم متحفظًا للغاية ؛ بسبب وصمة العار ومطالبات التأمين الباهظة، أي أنه قد يكون أكبر من ذلك. من المعروف أن حالات الانتحار ومحاولات الانتحار لا يتم الإبلاغ عنها بشكل كافٍ عندما يتعلق الأمر بالإحصاءات الرسمية. ومع ذلك، تُترجم هذه الأرقام تقريبًا إلى حقيقة أن شخصًا ما ينتحر كل أربعين ثانية. من الآن وحتى الوقت الذي تنتهي فيه من قراءة الفقرة التالية، سيقرر شخص ما، في مكان ما، أن الموت هو خيار أفضل من التنفس مرة أخرى ، وسوف يُزيل نفسه بشكل دائم من هذا العالم.<br />.<br />Jesse Bering<br />A Very Human Ending<br />Translated By #Maher_Razouk</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2540960-ron-christiansen"></a></section><section><p>638 reviews6 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2712868560">April 14, 2019</a></section><div><p>Bering interweaves his own experience with suicidal ideation with historical research on suicide in search of describing the suicidal mind. His big contention is that the book will explore the "suicidal person in all of us." Clearly the book resonated with me as in the back matter of the book I listed two full pages of tiny scribbled notes and quotations. <p>In part, my interest comes from my own intense year in 2014 of suicidal ideation. I was never suicidal which I hate writing as if to say, "at least I wasn't suicidal like..." Yet I don't see it that way. It just wasn't in my DNA or possibly it was simply the luck of combining my genetic proclivities with my environment at the time. Of course no guarantees those feelings will not return and the experience will always always be there even if deeply tucked away. In short I wrote and ruminated on what life means and what kind of life is worth living; that's the academic version. But I also was wracked with the pain and extreme ludicrous nature of this life we live. I was counting down the years until 60, until retirement, until...</p><p>I'm also interested because I agree in spirit with Camus' contention that suicide is "the only truly serious philosophical problem." What bigger question is there? But even as I write this I realize many, probably most, will disagree. And that's most likely a good thing. It seems most have an immunity built up against suicidal ideation and suicide which pushes it deep into a dormant stage only to be awakened in extreme contexts or in a cultural memetic moment. Thank goodness. </p><p>Yet for me much resonates...</p><p>"When you are happy, you know that it will dissipate, but it feels like it could last forever. When you are sad it is long. A protracted and dull lethargy that is dense, but in the moment it feels like it could last forever" (127). </p><p>"I am not sad so much as gone" (134).</p><p>"It is a pity that the scales of justice tilt so heavily in our minds in favor of a person's worst deed" (229).</p><p>I live on not because life may be joyous tomorrow (even though it surely will at some point), but because I cannot imagine contributing to someone else's, a loved one or otherwise, existential horror.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2540960?shelf=memoir">memoir</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2540960?shelf=suicide">suicide</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/107819547-cecile-kerubo"></a></section><section><p>23 reviews2 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4177375700">January 9, 2023</a></section><div><p>"She kills herself not out of guilt for her actions, but for the shame of others finding out"...Humans are social beings constantly thinking about what others think. What we ourselves think. And what others think we think. The natural psychologists of the animal kingdom.<p>Statistically, someone takes their own life every 40 seconds, plenty of these cases are linked to psychiatric conditions but plenty aren't, and that's the everyday person dealing with suicidal thoughts. Also, not everyone who is depressed dies by suicide, and not everyone who commits suicide is depressed. Damning information and just to add onto that "historically, suicide has accounted for more deaths than all wars and homicides combined."These statistics probably mean we know someone who has died by suicide (am careful to use the term committed suicide - which the book also delves into in some great detail), they are shocking statistics to me, and this is why I ask myself the question, why would a person choose to end their life, where do they get the guts, how? etc etc </p><p>As with everything that involves how the human mind works, the answers are never satisfying. The book explores the 6 stages a suicidal person goes through before they get to a point of no return. With real-life examples, you get to journey with those who have successfully suicided (a verb that's also acceptable in the English language) and those who were unsuccessful in their attempts. Its almost heart-wrenching to read some of these stories and think to myself, hey talk to someone, someone must care. I now no longer judge those who decide to go this way, my mind has been opened to accept that my and your moral standpoint on this matter doesn't do anyone any favors. <br />Why are we the only apes that jump? What can we do to stop ourselves? If you are suicidal I believe this would be a great read considering the author was also suicidal. I mean that shows he's empathetic enough. For those who are not suicidal, it will help you view things in a different perspective. To know what signs to look out for in our friends, family, etc and what we can do to help. And for those who have to live with the fact that someone close to them decided to end their lives, the book will offer some understanding as to why and maybe that will help you deal with the situation even slightly better.</p><p>"After a lonely Bay Area man killed himself by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge...a suicide note had been left on a bureau. "I am going to walk to the bridge, it read "If one person smiles to me on the way, I will not jump".</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2008190-drowningmermaid"></a></section><section><p>844 reviews39 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4075944634">June 29, 2021</a></section><div><p>So, if you see me reading a lot of suicide books, and something happens to me, I was murdered. It wasn't suicide.<p>I'm doing some reading because there was a suicide at my work. </p><p>Most books fall into the 'memoir' category, and here and there a 'therapy techniques' book.</p><p>This is the only one I've found that is scientific, non-judgemental, and the closest thing to answering the 'why's of the people left behind.</p><p>It explains that suicide is more common among people whose lives are going basically well, because <br /> the focus comes to be on the few things that aren't going well. It explains the process that the brain goes through as it tricks itself into its own end.</p><p>Also, there is a bacteria that can cause suicidal ideation in humans, and attraction to cat piss in rats.</p><p>Since it's written by someone with suicidal tendencies, it has a unique perspective, and you can tell that he really empathizes with some of the people who took their lives.</p><p>Part historical overview, part psychological profile, and part biology, this is the best book on suicide I have encountered.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2008190?shelf=2021">2021</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2008190?shelf=suicide">suicide</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/12272008-bart"></a></section><section><p>127 reviews3 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2514065288">September 13, 2018</a></section><div><p>Bam, in your face. Wat een rit was dit boek zeg, van de psychologische benadering van zelfmoord tot zeer persoonlijke verhalen van mensen die zelfmoord pleegden. Nogmaals, verplichte kost voor psychologen, maar niet voor iedereen weggelegd.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6855672-randi"></a></section><section><p>869 reviews1 follower</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2723543650">February 28, 2019</a></section><div><p>A deadly serious topic discussed with humor, sincerity, and empathy. Discusses the science of suicide, including different theories of why we kill ourselves : evolutionary adaptation? Mental illness? Emotional maladaptation to perceived failures?<p>For me, as someone who regularly battles suicidal thoughts, the chapter on 'hacking the suicidal brain', discussing the mental steps that progress to suicide, provides a tool to help me better cope. </p><p>Highly recommended to those who suffer from suicidal ideation, to those who want to understand the psychology of suicide, and for those who work with at risk populations.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6855672?shelf=2019">2019</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6855672?shelf=contemp-issues">contemp-issues</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6855672?shelf=criticism-and-essays">criticism-and-essays</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/77061786-aimee"></a></section><section><p>416 reviews8 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2451157316">July 9, 2018</a></section><div><p>Have you thought about suicide? Have you been affected by suicide? Are you just interested in what causes suicide and what makes some people more susceptible than others? If so, this is an excellent book for you. The book covers:<p>•	A brief overview of how genetics and differences in VENs (contributing to our ability to think about what others think of us) in the brain contribute to suicidal ideation.<br />•	Parasuicide and theory of mind (attempting to figure out what the individual was thinking prior to death).<br />•	Theories for how suicide works with survival of the fittest<br />•	The social contagion of suicide and what makes some suicides more contagious than others and also what part the internet has played.<br />•	The six phases in thinking that suicidal people go through when suicidal and how our minds can be tricked into making a fatal decision.<br />•	A historical look at changing perspectives of suicide and social/religious forces surrounding the issue now. Also, how the sometimes-irrational stigma we place on suicide a can actually be a protective force (causing people to be less likely to act on those impulses).<br />•	 How mental health experts can be very bad at deciphering if someone is suicidal and what tools are much more effective. </p><p> The author beautifully and compassionately unfolds the story and factors that contribute to suicide. He weaves his own personal struggle with suicidal ideation along with the struggles of others who suffer from those same issues or have lost a loved one to suicide. The most powerful example of this was using Victoria McLeod’s diary to take the abstract concepts of the six phases of suicidal thinking and make them tangible and concrete.</p><p>The author takes a very dark taboo subject and actually makes it more entertaining and easier to read about than you would think possible while still retaining the respect for the subject matter. While he is a bit wordy at times and has a tendency to go off on tangents sometimes, this is a thoughtful, informative book and an excellent read to boot.</p><p>Thanks so much to Netgalley, the publishers, and the author for providing me with a copy for an honest review.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/100525814-chris-boutt"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>7 books134 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2986566808">February 3, 2021</a></section><div><p>For most of my life, I was depressed and suicidal, which is one of the main reasons I turned to drugs and alcohol. Today, with over 8 years sober, I try to help others with their mental health by giving them hope with my story as well as trying to learn as much as possible. When I saw this new book from Jesse Bering, I knew I had to read it although I was unfamiliar with his work. There are so many questions around suicide, and I have yet to find many books with much information behind the psychology of it all. There are many misconceptions about suicidality, but Jesse Bering did an amazing job with this book. <p>Bering was extremely thorough with his research on the subject, and he's someone that shares from his personal experience as well. As someone who is also a fan of evolutionary psychology, I found Bering's chapter on an evolutionary/social reason for why people may decide to end their life. I do think there were quite a few questions that were left unanswered by the end of this book, but it's at no fault of the author. It's just a subject that we're still trying to learn more about so we can save more lives. By far, this is one of the best books I've read on the subject, and the author has gained me as a lifelong fan. I can't wait to check out his other books.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5838785-ivana"></a></section><section><p>388 reviews</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2716607694">February 27, 2019</a></section><div><p>If I could recommend one book to those who lost their loved one to suicide as well as to those who feel life is simply too much, I’d recommend this one. There are sentences in this book that I can only describe as surgical scalpels which cut so precisely into the marrow of all the things I feel but cannot put into words. </p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/112586-stephen-kelly"></a></section><section><p>126 reviews19 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3193696846">February 17, 2020</a></section><div><p>I think I scared my husband when I referred to "the book about suicide I'm reading" as being "inspiring," but I meant the modifier in the usual, non-lethal way. This is a book that will make you feel like life is doable, even if you've been prone to thinking that it's anything but. <p>Spencer Kornhaber's review of the finale of "The Good Place" in <i>The Atlantic</i> led me to this book, which I was quickly able to access for free as an ebook through my university's library. I'd been grappling with the final episode of "The Good Place" for over a week. I'd enjoyed it, but for reasons I couldn't quite articulate, I'd been bothered by the writers' suggestion that even the strongest, healthiest, most loving relationships have an expiration date that can only be resolved through annihilation. If it's just a checklist of accomplishments that makes life feel worthwhile, then sometimes suicide makes sense; I wasn't happy with that idea.</p><p>Bering's goal is to show us that suicidal thoughts are a fairly normal thing that happen to our primate brains and that if we can manage to remember that, then maybe we can guide ourselves out of the darkness. His writing is accessible, earnest, intimate, and even quite funny at times. I recognized myself in much of this book, including the personal confessions that Bering shares, and I felt a deep, life-affirming warmth and affinity as I consumed the pages. </p><p>Suicidal thoughts create a world of extreme isolation. In this book, Bering reveals that loneliness for the hurtful illusion it is.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/112586?shelf=21st-century">21st-century</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/112586?shelf=new-zealand">new-zealand</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/112586?shelf=singapore">singapore</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3341907143">May 21, 2020</a></section><div><p>A thorough exploration of an important topic and generally quite accessibly and realistically written. An exemplary offering, of both the tone and content: "It's a prejudice of mine, I admit it, but it's difficult for me to fully trust anyone for whom the thought of taking one's own life hasn't alighted at least briefly, enticingly, on their thoughts..." (I assume he means trust them on the topic, not writ large in life, though the following comments make it more unclear.) I have really only two qualms with this tome, which I tore through: (1) he presumes an atheistic worldview, and rather defensively so, which makes it offputting to the few nonatheists of us clinging to intellectual thought (which reminds me to observe that we've entered this strange time where both atheists and nonatheists think they are in the minority - how is this possible?). (2) He seems eager to define "the suicidal mind" to the point that it oversimplifies. Though he takes great pains to caveat the complexity of the situation, there are still a lot of broad-brush observations that seem to conflate, for example, thoughtfully planned and impulsive suicides. All that said, there's a lot of vital stuff here and he ticks important boxes, from pop culture iconography to the real problem with guns. Worth a read if you're into this subject, with all the usual cautions.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/83863174-literary-redhead"></a></section><section><p>1,582 reviews477 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2844827011">June 3, 2019</a></section><div><p>Depression is the jewel passed down through our family for generations, the one you wish you could refuse. So I was eager to read this important book, which explains eloquently and through meticulous research and the author’s own story why, according to the World Health Organization, nearly 800,000 die by their own hands every year, or one person every 40 seconds. Bering is a psychologist and award-winning writer who was beset by suicidal ideation in his ‘30s. His personal tale is incredibly moving, and the science and psychology and methods for preventing suicide he shares make this an important teaching text on a subject, thankfully, we can now discuss openly. 5/5 stars<p>  Pub Date 30 Oct 2018</p><p>Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. Opinions are mine. #Suicidal #NetGalley</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/83863174?shelf=featured-netgalley-review">featured-netgalley-review</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/83863174?shelf=health-medical">health-medical</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/83863174?shelf=netgalley-review">netgalley-review</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4258173-weixiang"></a></section><section><p>180 reviews9 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2775876812">April 8, 2019</a></section><div><p>Since we are in a culture where the act in the title has increased 5 percent in the last 16 years for white Americans, as well as affected my life through the death of my friends, this book was a great source of info on such topic. At the end, a lot of it comes to our shame responses towards others, ourselves, and how much we are connected to our social core. Fascinating read on the act of self death. <p>Reading Difficulty: Sophomore level college. </p><p>Who is it for? For those who has attempted it, and wishes to understand maybe why. For those curious on why their loved one did it. For those who are no longer in mourning. For those who wishes to prevent it. For those with kids preparing for cyber bullying. </p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2797717502">April 24, 2019</a></section><div><p>A Magpie's Nest of Gaffes, Guffaws, and Tears<p>Is this a Responsible Book on a Risky Subject? <br />This book is out of balance, All Yin, No Yang. This opinion-driven, ugly book deserves an opinion-driven, ugly review. </p><p>As the author has thought of suicide himself, is it unkind to write a negative review? <br />No, I think people need to know his book is ugly before they read it. I suggest retracting the book. </p><p>Does this book add to the ethical and scientific body of knowledge on the topic? <br />No. Some material seemed quite improbable, such as a diary he detailed. I question his role: he interacts with the actively suicidal or families of those who died. I wonder about the appropriateness of the details he has disclosed and the privacy rights of those involved. </p><p>Does this book hold biases and prejudices that offend? <br />Yes. For example, he devoted a great deal of time to the death of a “tall, attractive blonde.” What about the short, dark people? Are they less sympathetic or worthwhile? </p><p>Did this book help me with my own existential crisis? <br />Not a bit, although writing a negative review might temporarily help me turn my anger outwards with my keyboard. </p><p>Does this book enhance a personal sense of value to society? <br />No. I feel less valued, less connected, less needed, less wanted. I am reinforced in negative perceptions that people do not like people in distress. Is a menopausal woman useful to society or "off the list"? My new term from the author for menopausal women: sexless worker ants. I do not think that using labels like he does is productive. </p><p>Do I feel less isolated after reading this book? <br />No. I feel more isolated, and, worse yet, I was reminded by the author that isolation is a predictor of suicide. </p><p>Was useful advice provided? <br />No. I have found better advice on day to day coping elsewhere. My impression from him was a push and pull based on, “If you are useless to the group, leave.” The laundry list of worldwide phone numbers at the end is of very low value. However, an easy 9-1-1 style number for all people worldwide to get help in crisis is beyond what the author could provide. I think that is needed. The CDC has clearer objectives that address people’s core needs better than what was detailed in the book, such as: economic security initiatives, access to mental health care, social-emotional learning programs, relationship programs, treatment programs, community engagement activities, and system change. I would add to that destigmatization efforts after reading this book. However, these are all prospective investments in people and are not this year’s action initiatives. </p><p>Does this book help develop the Protective Factors to lower Suicide Risk? <br />Even if the US Public Health Service overlaps some of the CDC objectives, these deserve to be reiterated as our society’s needs are urgent: <br />• Effective clinical care for mental, physical, and substance abuse disorders <br />• Easy access to a variety of clinical interventions and support for help seeking <br />• Family and community support (connectedness) <br />• Support from ongoing medical and mental health care relationships <br />• Skills in problem solving, conflict resolution, and nonviolent ways of handling disputes <br />• Cultural and religious beliefs that discourage suicide and support instincts for self-preservation </p><p>Does this author help or hinder suicide survivors? <br />The author describes research that indicates people would rather love someone from an “outside” or marginated ethnic group than someone who attempted suicide. So, this makes those of us who are unloved even less loved. Good to know. <br />The author talks about how some people find watching a suicide as incredibly funny or deserved. For those who find the world to be an ugly place, this reinforces a perception that society is diseased. I offer a possible “rationale” for this uncomfortable description of the reactions of some: observers may blame and shame the suicidal person because they are attempting to control their feelings and they feel like they lack control of the situation. Psychologists might be better able to expand on the paradoxical situations involving suicide, but the author did not suitably frame the anecdote. </p><p>Do I feel more positive about the human race and my place in it after reading this book? <br />No. People damage other people in measurable ways. This book causes damage. </p><p>Did the author offer helpful coping strategies? <br />Not in particular, and each of us needs prescriptions that are right for us. For example, he advises a type of “dissociation” and suggests looking at our situation as if we were an observer of our life on a stage. This is scary!!! Detachment like this seems to me to characterize how a person can become the emotionally detached mass murderer. Anger turned inwards is often associated with depression or suicide. Anger turned outwards can get aggressive towards other people or animals or inanimate objects. Detaching from emotions negates happiness and fear right along with the anger and sadness. A 2013 article in Psychological Science emphasizes that anger, happiness, sadness, and fear have the same common neural building blocks. I do not know if it is ever possible to remove one emotion without interfering with the others. What research, Mr. Author, do you cite that supports healthy outcomes from detaching from our emotions? I am familiar with the visualizations where we try to passively observe our emotions, but that is very different from what you offered. We need our emotions; what we don’t need is denial of health and mental care, denial of our emotions, denial of economic possibilities, denial of love, denial of families through courts, and denial of our human hearts. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/45592686?shelf=audible">audible</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/45592686?shelf=avoid">avoid</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/45592686?shelf=psychology">psychology</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/16718086-alyssa"></a></section><section><p>467 reviews38 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3013296313">November 26, 2020</a></section><div><p>It took me quite some time to read this book, but not because I didn't enjoy it. I find Jesse Bering's writing style quite soothing and funny, even though he is dealing with quite difficult subject matter. The book provides a balance between academic research and personal experiences (both his as well as that of other people). It is an honest, painful and funny analysis of humans, behaviour, society, religion, etc.<p>I would definitely recommend it; however, as indicated by the amount of time it took me to get through this book, it is not an easy reading experience. It is still suicide, and regardless of how funny and down-to-earth Jesse is, it is extremely heartbreaking to read about.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/16718086?shelf=related-books">related-books</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/104039601-vaughan-hatton"></a></section><section><p>28 reviews</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3011559864">May 21, 2020</a></section><div><p>What a book. A absolute rollercoaster of feeling, emotions and pain. But in my eyes, it's a book EVERYONE needs to read. <p>Mental health is a horrible problem around the world and needs to be addressed. As someone from New Zealand, and as someone who has lost friends and family to suicide, this taboo issue needs to be explored and talked about more. </p><p>A very tough book to read though. Some heartbreaking stories and moments where I found myself hugging the book hoping the people included could feel, I'm with them.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/36556065-aj"></a></section><section><p>270 reviews2 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4263433566">September 29, 2021</a></section><div><p>An informative and sensitively handled look into the why's concerning this taboo topic. Bering (a fellow suicide ideator himself) goes through the circumstances that leads to individuals committing the deed through scientific, philosophical, psychological, and spiritual lenses. He does a fine job of remaining curious as opposed to judgmental.<p>The subject matter can be heavy at times but well worth the read (YMMV). For those more volatile and emotionally connected to the subject, read at your own risk. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/36556065?shelf=philo-psy">philo-psy</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2437899-max"></a></section><section><p>103 reviews61 followers</p></section></div><section><section><p><b>Read</b></p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2693555589">April 7, 2019</a></section><div><p>I haven't actually read the last two chapters (60-70 pages or so). I might come back and read them later or I might not, but right now I'm marking this as read for arcane personal reasons. Everything below is just me trying to process my feelings about the stuff I did read.<p>(WARNING: Non-graphic discussion of suicide, and of suicide-related triggers, below.)</p><p>So, again with the caveat that I haven't read the last chunk of this book: I'm not sure how to rate this. A large part of that is because I'm not rational about the topic of suicide, and I'm not <i>capable</i> of being rational about the topic of suicide. Suicide is perhaps my most major and consistent trigger, and I picked this up from the library knowing full well that it wasn't a great idea in terms of self-care, but blah blah blah, seeking out things that resemble your trauma, that's a whole other discussion. Basically I knew this could end badly for me, and I did it anyway, so take this all with a grain of salt.</p><p>I really, really liked this book for the first four chapters. The author was open about his biases, and compassionate without being patronizing, and frank about his own suicidality and how this book related to it. It was informative and comforting in the way that - as the author puts it - "intellectualizing a personal problem" notoriously is. The footnotes provided useful or interesting context, or counterarguments for some of the theories the author was summarizing. I learned stuff! It was good.</p><p>Things started to go awry for me right at the end of the fourth chapter, "Hacking the Suicidal Mind", when Bering footnoted a quote from Kay Redfield Jamison's <i>Night Falls Fast</i>, a laundry list of "creative"/horrifying ways human beings have killed themselves. That struck me as a little weird and not super necessary at all for the point Bering was making, but hey, I'm sensitive about suicide, it's probably just me. </p><p>Then the next chapter, "The Things She Told Lorraine", was a detailed account of a real teenage girl who died by suicide in 2014, with quote after quote after quote from the diary she kept during the four month period of acute suffering leading up to her death. It described her method of suicide pretty thoroughly, though admittedly not graphically. This seemed... I don't know, ethically questionable? Not so much that Bering was publishing this dead girl's diary - her parents gave him permission and he has some line about how he thinks the girl in question would want him to, which, whatever, not gonna argue that right now - but because he was thorough, and so detailed, and yes, it was a case study meant to exemplify the stages of Bering's favourite scientific theory of suicide, but it didn't sit well with me.</p><p>The sixth chapter, "To Log Off this Mortal Coil", is where I had to stop. This chapter is about the very real ways that media, especially new media, influence suicide, with many, many examples, and Bering spends the whole chapter providing <i>detailed description after detailed description</i> of ways people have chosen to end their own lives. The chapter opens with the case of <i>13 Reasons Why</i> (the Netflix show, though the same issue probably arose with the book it's based on) and the alarming spike in social media-based suicidal behaviours its release precipitated. A few pages later, Bering outlines a "helpful list of do's and don'ts" from an internet-based guide for reporting on suicide without <i>increasing rates of suicide</i>. This, naturally, included instructions not to sensationalize the death, linger over the method or location, or "report on suicide similar to reporting on a crime."</p><p>Why, then, Bering then went ahead and, on the very next page, detailed - "for [the reader's] cognitive needs" - three particularly alarming methods used by four specific people who died by suicide in the late 19th century, is beyond me. He had just spent several pages telling us that even well-meaning discussions of suicide (e.g., community health PSAs) can lead to increased attempts and completed suicides among various populations, and those three anecdotes were not even helpful in making his point. He even <i>indicates</i> that he's doing it just because he assumes his readers have some prurient interest in it ("cognitive needs").</p><p>The remainder of this sixth chapter is mostly about the internet, and we learn the upsetting (and occasionally gruesome) details of death after livestreamed death. Bering was not necessarily reticent when it came to discussing the details of specific cases in previous chapters, but here it strikes me as unbearably excessive, and I can't account for most of these details being included unless I assume that Bering was attempting to be shocking. </p><p>If I sound upset, it's because I am; that's why I foregrounded this with my inability to be rational about this stuff. I'm not level-headed about it at all. Towards the end of this chapter I realized I was exhibiting a lot of signs of having been triggered, and I still very badly wanted to keep reading (another sign), so I forced myself to stop. I might genuinely just be, I don't know, projecting or something. But my reading is that a book I found comfortingly matter-of-fact and informative about suicide for most of the first half managed to transition into a book that sensationalized it while claiming to criticize others who do so, so... I'm frustrated.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2437899?shelf=nonfiction">nonfiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4229341268">January 19, 2022</a></section><div><p>good balance of psychology research and personal stories. tears were leaking out of my eyes the entire time in the chapter "the things she told lorraine"<p>fave quote: “Stare at an ape’s hands long enough, or up at the sky into a vast universe, and suddenly you feel your existence becoming, paradoxically, both more insignificant and more meaningful” p.177</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/9793573-cassy"></a></section><section><p>202 reviews13 followers</p></section></div><section><section><p><b>Read</b></p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2574183727">February 2, 2022</a></section><div><p>9 out of 10 times I’d rather out myself as bi than suicidal.<p>This book was great though. A cold analysis can be cathartic. </p><p>Materialistic worldview from the author.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/9793573?shelf=bucket-list">bucket-list</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2552933992">October 10, 2018</a></section><div><p>In A Very Human Ending: How suicide haunts our species, Jesse Bering attempts to unravel the seemingly impenetrable mind of the suicidal individual through psychological, biological, evolutionary and sociological exploratory lenses, but perhaps most emotively, through personal testimonies. Exploring Roy Baumeister's stages of suicidality, Bering presents the story of Victoria-a seventeen-year-old who took her own life-in her own candid words taken from her diary, correlating each step with chronological entries that evidence such a progressive deterioration in her ability to think her way out of that dark chasm. <br />Bering's theory is that by understanding why humans are the only animals to end their lives whilst fully understanding the finality of the act, it may offer insight into the aspect of human nature that makes us unique in this sense and thus allow "reverse-engineering...to defuse the suicidal brain's default wiring". <br /> The subject is covered sensitively and Bering's open discussion around his own battle with suicidal thoughts gives the book a personal feel that makes it all the more compelling, readable and accessible.<br />Suicide rates are rising, according the World Health Organisation (WHO), and are predicted to increase by 2020 from 1 every 40 seconds globally, to 1 every 20 seconds. This worrying trend alone signifies the importance and timeliness of this book. Highly recommended.</p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/46567731-robleestvanalles"></a></section><section><p>59 reviews14 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3092684678">December 20, 2019</a></section><div><p>Lovely title for the holiday season! This is a great book to get to know more about the phenomenon of suicide. <br />Main point of critique is that it is quite selective in its treatment of suicide. It lacks coherence and a logical order at times, especially after the first half of the book. It's full of interesting facts and notes on research and historical figures/data. Overall, however, it feels like a collection of information brought about by a personal quest (Bering) for meaning in suicidal tendencies. <p>I for instance missed information on suicide tourism and more on suicide sites (hot spots, as he briefly touched upon this matter), or more elaborate and extensive research on it's philosophical roots. While he for instance describes suicidal contagion and hot-spots and suicide pacts and the role of media, he touches upon these interesting topics briefly and does so somewhat dispersed throughout the book. Things like 'assisted suicide' he does not treat at all. He could have done way more with providing historical data and the societal aspect of suicide (how suicide has had different meanings throughout the times and in different societies; eg senicide in different older cultures as normalised suicidal behavior -which he only touched upon very briefly) and I missed stuff on different types of suicide and the importance of age in suicide attempts (someone committing suicide in their 20s tends to have different motivations/methods etc than someone who was able the brood on it for a longer period of time, and what have the experiences been from shortly retired people who committed suicide for instance? As most graphs show a rapid increase of suicides right after that). </p><p>My biggest issue with this book is the writer's prominent ego throughout. Especially near the ending he often reverts to less factual writing, more story-telling, and his own story is overly present. I could appreciate the qualitative use of information from interviews or diaries from persons having committed suicide, but they are lengthy and gave me the impression that he ran out of steam somewhere halfway. His stories about how he is not that technical and how he would be bad at committing suicide if that would imply he needed to make something chemical or mechanic, or the lengthy parts on how he had everything (how successful he was) but became depressed, made the book drag a bit. These parts could have been cut shorter. However, I appreciate his personal stance and the vulnerability he has shown. <br />I also very much appreciate his reference to suicide among homosexuals by describing his own struggles with that. However, he did not really go into that which I think is unforgivable, as sexuality/gender tends to impact feelings of guilt/shame (not being accepted or wanted in society) and statistics show that suicide among people diverting from the heterosexual norm tend to be relatively high. Not only in terms of homosexuality but it also very much applies to for instance transgenders. The fact that many psychologists today still view transgenders as people suffering from psychological problems and that they strongly medicalize people with suicidal urges is amoral and plain wrong. Instead of helping people discover their strengths and meaning in life, they are problem-focused and medicalize (labelling, working from a vague assumed pathology). This book fortunately rightly stresses the social dimension of suicide. Suicide is a social problem, not a psychological disease!</p><p>I would have graded this book more stars if the structure and logical order would have been stronger, if it read less like the end-result of an emotional fact-finding mission, and if parts would have been less focused on the writer himself/less dragging because of the lengthy story-telling. And.. if there were few books out there about this topic, but fortunately there are. Thank you Mr Bering for writing about this topic and your own experiences.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section></section></article></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves

 Jesse Bering

 3.93
 879 ratings 118 reviews
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 For much of his thirties, Jesse Bering thought he was probably going to kill himself. He was a successful psychologist and writer, with books to his name and bylines in major magazines. But none of that mattered. The impulse to take his own life remained. At times it felt all but inescapable.

 Bering survived. And in addition to relief, the fading of his suicidal thoughts brought curiosity. Where had they come from? Would they return? Is the suicidal impulse found in other animals? Or is our vulnerability to suicide a uniquely human evolutionary development? In Suicidal , Bering answers all these questions and more, taking us through the science and psychology of suicide, revealing its cognitive secrets and the subtle tricks our minds play on us when we’re easy emotional prey. Scientific studies, personal stories, and remarkable cross-species comparisons come together to help readers critically analyze their own doomsday thoughts while gaining broad insight into a problem that, tragically, will most likely touch all of us at some point in our lives. But while the subject is certainly a heavy one, Bering’s touch is light. Having been through this himself, he knows that sometimes the most effective response to our darkest moments is a gentle humor, one that, while not denying the seriousness of suffering, at the same time acknowledges our complicated, flawed, and yet precious existence.

 Authoritative, accessible, personal, profound—there’s never been a book on suicide like this. It will help you understand yourself and your loved ones, and it will change the way you think about this most vexing of human problems.
 Genres Nonfiction Psychology Mental Health Science Health Mental Illness Death
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 275 pages, Hardcover

 First published October 30, 2018

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 Jesse Bering

 6 books 254 followers
 Jesse Bering is an experimental psychologist and a leading scholar in the cognitive science of religion. He is also an essayist and science writer specializing in evolution and human behavior. His first book, The Belief Instinct (W. W. Norton, 2011), was included in the American Library Association’s Top 25 Books of the Year and voted one of the “11 Best Psychology Books of 2011” by The Atlantic. This was followed by a collection of his Webby-award nominated essays, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), and Perv (2013, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a taboo-breaking work that received widespread critical acclaim and was named as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His most recent book was A Very Human Ending (Doubleday, 2018).

 Bering’s writings have been translated into many different languages and reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other outlets. He has also been featured in numerous documentaries and radio programs, including Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Conan, Chelsea Lately, Q&A (Australia), and NPR’s All Things Considered.

 Bering is Director of the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. He lives in Dunedin, New Zealand with his partner, Juan, and their two cheeky border terriers, Hanno and Kora.

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 3.93
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 Valerity (Val)
 929 reviews 2,734 followers
 October 18, 2018
 – All the inconveniences in the world are not considerable enough that a man should die to evade them; and, besides, there being so many, so sudden and unexpected changes in human things, it is hard rightly to judge when we are at the end of our hope…

 Michel de Montaigne, A Custom of the Isle of Cea (1574)

 This is quite a good book on the topic of suicide, which seems to be a hot topic this year, with all of the people we have lost to it...think of all the big names that have taken their lives recently, and maybe the people you know personally too. Written by an author who personally has had issues with it, so he knows whereof he speaks, and has also done his homework, so it makes for very interesting reading on this fascinating subject.

 The book takes on the question of whether non-human animals commit suicide, among many other issues. Think of the dog who lays by his master’s grave, refusing to eat or leave, brokenheartedly awaiting his return. It also discusses some unusual ways that people have used to commit suicide and delves into different studies and papers on suicide published by different scholars.

 There’s a bit of something for just about any interest in the subject, and it was worth a read. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by NetGalley, author Jesse Bering, and the publisher for my fair review.

 University of Chicago Press
 Pub: Oct 30th, 2018

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 Michelle
 585 reviews 157 followers
 November 6, 2018
 As a gifted academic, research psychologist and professor at Otago University (New Zealand) Jesse Bering is a bestselling author, his books have been translated in several languages. In “Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves” Bering delves into what he calls the “specter of suicide”-- among the darkest moments of the human condition. With about one million deaths (globally) each year, it is important to understand suicidal ideation in its various forms and patterns, the heartbreak and grief of survivors, many are compelled to seek and search for answers to understand this deadly final act.

 Throughout the book, Bering shares his personal story: beginning as an anxious gay teen, Bering then had a rewarding grad school education, waves of accomplishment, excellence in combination with crushing academic disappointment and defeat; and later, more impressive success and authorship. In addition, Bering shares his deepest darkest moments and times with the “secrets” of suicidal impulses. Excellent research is combined with scientific and academic findings, literature, true stories from survivors and family members, also the subject of animal suicide make for some interesting and fascinating reading.
 During war time there is a considerable drop in suicidal deaths: the same statistical decline in America was noted following the assassination of JFK, the Challenger Space Shuttle, and the 9/11 attacks. “To be rooted” observed Simone Weil “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
 Viktor Frankel attributed the Jewish survival rate and lack of suicide deaths from the horrific conditions of the Nazi concentration camps to the “innate human ability to find purpose in life.” In the book, “Suicide and the Holocaust” (2005) suicidologist David Lester reported that suicide deaths were high in the Jewish ghetto’s and concentration camps but either not reported or under reported by Nazi guards.
 The “Werther Effect”-- the phenomenon and contagion of copy-cat suicide was explored in length. Following the release of the Goethe classic novel “The Sorrows of the Young Werther” (1776) the book was banned in several European countries due to the increase of suicide deaths copied from the book. The controversial Netflix series “13 Reasons Why…” (2017) teen Hanna Barker committed suicide because she felt she was badly treated by others. The disturbing scenes of her death were compared to horror movies. The concern of prevention specialists raised alarms over the risk of the show being aimed at impressionable vulnerable teens. In order to show an “honest” portrayal television executives ignored scientific data. The online media, cyberbullying was covered briefly.
 A 17 year old teen, Victoria “Vic” McLeod, left behind a detailed journal of four months of her crippling anxiety and suicidal thought process. Vic ended her life after jumping from a 10 story building in Singapore (2014). The journal entries were indeed “extraordinary”. Vic’s parents wanted to share their daughters story in order to help others.

 There was no discussion of the Aokigahara Forest (a suicide “hot spot”) located at the base of Mt. Fuji. However, an Asian suicide epidemic began after the unusual “burning charcoal death” of Jessica Choi yuk-Chun, a Hong Kong engineering executive (1998).
 In New Zealand, (suicide was a crime until 1961) the rates of suicide deaths are high. Often, depressed missing individuals are last seen on beaches, relatives plead with the public for any information; when the bodies are found, “No foul play suspected” is listed on the official report. This is not to conceal evidence, but used as a proven tactic in suicide prevention.
 In the last part of the book, the methods used and detailed in suicide prevention clearly saved lives. However, if an individual is determined to conceal suicidal thoughts or intent to avoid intervention or hospitalization, even a skilled psychiatric mental health professional would be unable to detect a possible suicide attempt/death. In a large psychiatric clinic, The Implicit Association Test (IAT) a five minute computer program that flashed images and words across the screen was a more accurate predictor of people with suicidal risk over doctor interviews The development of new technologies are highly promising in suicide education and prevention. With thanks and appreciation to the University of Chicago Press via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.
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 Seth
 68 reviews 22 followers
 November 5, 2018
 Have you ever talked with someone and you never knew exactly what they were getting at, or how what they were talking about was related? If yes, then you know how this book will read. While reading this book I could never really understand what the author's conclusion was at the end of each chapter, what the content in the chapter related to each other in the chapter, and sometimes how the chapter was related to suicide. The author, who said this in the beginning of the book, cherry-picked data, and that is clear; he also mostly included theories that he agreed with, and some he absolutely disagreed with. This book is by no means an objective overview of suicide theories. I was left very disappointed; it offered no insight. I would suggest reading other books on suicide. [Got an ARC from NetGalley.com]
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 Rob Sica
 10 reviews 9 followers
 July 20, 2018
 As an academic librarian with some familiarity with current scholarship on suicide (through both my research assistance and my recreational interest), I unreservedly and enthusiastically recommend this superbly written, scientifically informed, and richly insightful book accessible to a wide and varied readership. Whether you are fortunate enough to have only a casual or more distantly philosophical interest in the topic, or have been personally touched or harrowed by suicide in the various ways sensitively and masterfully illuminated by Bering, there is something of lasting value for nearly any possible reader. Bering's unique combination of (1) professional background in cognitive and evolutionary psychology, in which he has made substantial contributions, and in award-winning popular scientific writing, (2) longstanding personal experience contending with suicidal ideation, and (3) exquisitely fluent and dexterous writing skill -- this singular synthesis confers upon SUICIDAL an authority and pathos scarcely matched by any other book in recent years on this darkly enigmatic and perhaps uniquely human phenomenon which, according the the World Health Organization, on average claims a life every 40 seconds.
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 Aisling
 25 reviews
 August 26, 2020
 Positives of this book: it provides some interesting statistics/scenarios that shed more light on the topic. The writing is accessible.

 My biggest gripe: he went and brought religion into it.

 Here's my deal - religion IS relevant here. Yes, in more than one religion, at some point in history, suicide was or is considered a sin, something that would prevent you from being favoured in the afterlife or something that might have negative ramifications.

 What is not relevant, however, is whether or not there actually is an afterlife. And this author made it clear that 1) he does not believe in an afterlife and 2) if you disagree, you're wrong.

 Why'd you go and do that bro, I was with you up until now.

 At one point, he talks about a study carried out, with young children being the subjects, essentially to test if they believed that the consciousness lives on when the body dies. He found that the youngest children were more likely to believe that the mind lives on than the older children, and he draws this conclusion:

 "this erroneous belief in the survival of personal consciousness after death is our species' 'default stance.'"

 The word erroneous here carries so much weight. To imply that YOU, a developmental psychologist, have the answer that people have been searching for for centuries. YOU alone are sure that there is no life after death! Gee, that's neat. Please email me the study in which you categorically proved that the consciousness dies when the body does. Surely that's Nobel Prize worthy stuff, no?

 He even goes on to liken being an atheist surrounded by the religious to "being surrounded by people who are in the middle of a role-playing fantasy game and you can't get them to just be serious for a minute" .

 I mean, the arrogance.

 I did not read this book for your philosophical opinion, sir. I read it for an informed evaluation of why people might take their own lives, and what they might be feeling up until that point.

 Before you ask, yes I am religious. However, I also love science. Science and faith are not mutually exclusive and plenty of great scientists and mathematicians throughout the ages have also been religious (Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton - all dedicated Christians). To bring your faith (or lack thereof) into what is supposed to be a scientific analysis of human behaviour and present it as fact is absurd.

 I really wouldn't have seen this as a negative if it was presented as opinion, but to arrogantly laugh in the face of the billions of people in the world who do believe that there is some form of life after death and call that belief erroneous? Blatantly unprofessional. The afterlife is, by nature, an unfalsifiable concept, a term of which I'm sure you know the meaning, being that it's a term you would learn in first year uni as a psychology student. To talk about religion as if it's everybody else off in fantasy land while you're sat there going, "Guys? Can we all come back to reality for a minute?"

 Miss me with that shit.

 For anyone wanting to come at me - I'm not annoyed that this guy is not religious. I don't give a shit what anyone believes as long as it's not hurting other people. What's pissed me off is that this guy has used his nonfiction, science based book, which features scientific research and investigation, to present his own belief as fact. Frankly, I think it's just incompetent.

 But more than anything, it was irrelevant. Whether or not there is an afterlife does not matter here, when you're only supposed to be informing me of whether or not belief in that afterlife affects suicide rates. Literally, why would you even bring your lack of faith into that. There was a whole chapter dedicated to faith and suicide, and for a pretty big chunk of it I was thinking, yeah, I might just skip this chapter because at this point he's just telling me that religion is a fairy tale, and that's not the content I signed up for when reading a book about suicidality.

 tl;dr: I read this book to learn more about suicidal minds, not have you tell me that God isn't real. Unless you have some kind of proof to back that claim up, do not state your opinion as fact in a nonfiction book supposed to be based in science. It came across as arrogant and gross.
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 Diane Hernandez
 2,125 reviews 31 followers
 November 2, 2018
 Theories abound, but few conclusions are reached in the interesting, but ultimately disappointing, Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves.

 Recently, there has been a spate of celebrity suicides: Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain and Avicii (Tim Bergling). Despite having an outwardly successful life, these people, and many others over the years felt that suicide was the best choice. Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves attempts to answer that question using scientific studies and the author’s own suicidal tendencies as a roadmap.

 The statistics and studies are fascinating. For example, 43% of suicides are caused by genetics, and 57% are caused by environment. 90% of the genetic issues are mood disorders like depression or bipolar disorder. The worst risk is when a person genetically predisposed to suicide runs into one of the environmental issues like the death of a loved one or loss of a job. The risks stack rather than run concurrently. However, the book’s episodic nature jumps from the police’s difficulty of determining suicidal intent conclusively to whether animals commit suicide to pure scientific research about brain chemistry.

 Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves attempts to answer the “why are people suicidal” question. However, the presentation of a multitude of theories, many of them conflicting, fails to provide a clear answer. The conclusion presents some interesting facts about prevention, which answers only the “how are suicides done” question. The why remains a mystery.

 Readers interested in how to prevent suicide rather than why suicide occurs will enjoy this book. Also, therapists or police officers interested in learning the results of studies of suicides would appreciate it. However, it is not recommended for families dealing with a suicide that has already occurred as it will generate more questions than answers. Also, anyone contemplating suicide would be better served by reading one of the many self-help or therapeutic books on the subject. 3 stars.

 Thanks to University of Chicago Press and NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
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 Vegantrav
 807 reviews 173 followers
 February 19, 2019
 In this perceptive, sensitive study, Jesse Bering looks at suicide from all angles. He asks the philosophical and ethical questions surrounding it. He looks at it psychologically, from the mental health perspective. He examines the sociological and religious factors that impinge on suicide. He considers the practicalities of suicide--how access to tools that make suicide easier (guns, for example) affects suicide rates. He wrestles with the difficult questions about suicidal contagion--that is, whether some individuals are more likely to attempt suicide after exposure to suicide in literature, in film, or in the news.

 Then, moving beyond these academic analyses, Bering probes numerous individual stories of those who have attempted suicide or died by suicide. He quotes extensively from and reflects upon their journals and suicide notes, and he listens to and relates to his readers what their family members and friends have to say. To shed further light, he interviews mental health professionals who have worked with suicidal individuals and academics who have written and published extensively on suicide. Finally, he writes about his own struggles with suicidal ideation; this is a very personal book for Bering, and it's all the better for it.

 The final result is a fascinating, extremely informative, nuanced discussion of suicide. It is humane, thoughtful, wise, and kind. It offers no easy answers or definitive judgements, for there are none. This is a book that is going to stick with me and will, I think, with most readers.
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 Neil H
 178 reviews 10 followers
 October 18, 2018
 I half expected this book to be a frivolous read. I admit bias when the author confesses his literary work with such lurid names as Why Is a Penis Shaped Like That amongst others. But as one of many others who have a history of addiction, mental and suicidal thoughts. I thought this might come in handy with understanding the profundity of taking one's life. Jesse writes and I agree that aside from morality, religious or libertarian we have an immense history of self harm and for loads of fathomable and mysterious reasons. Some quick to commit, some use it as an attention seeking tool. Whatever the flavors a person's descent into self non existence is. Nobody close to its action/actor is immune to its affects and effects. History and philosophical persuasion aside. Unless we are in their shoes, we will never understand the motivation. It's not a mind disease. It's not a survival or adaptive behaviour. It's a social affliction that persists.
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 Maher Razouk
 633 reviews 174 followers
 January 3, 2023
 على صعيد عالميّ، يَقتل مليون شخص أنفسهم سنويًا، ويحاول ملايين آخرين القيام بذلك. ربما يكون هذا الرقم متحفظًا للغاية ؛ بسبب وصمة العار ومطالبات التأمين الباهظة، أي أنه قد يكون أكبر من ذلك. من المعروف أن حالات الانتحار ومحاولات الانتحار لا يتم الإبلاغ عنها بشكل كافٍ عندما يتعلق الأمر بالإحصاءات الرسمية. ومع ذلك، تُترجم هذه الأرقام تقريبًا إلى حقيقة أن شخصًا ما ينتحر كل أربعين ثانية. من الآن وحتى الوقت الذي تنتهي فيه من قراءة الفقرة التالية، سيقرر شخص ما، في مكان ما، أن الموت هو خيار أفضل من التنفس مرة أخرى ، وسوف يُزيل نفسه بشكل دائم من هذا العالم.
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 Jesse Bering
 A Very Human Ending
 Translated By #Maher_Razouk
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 Ron Christiansen
 638 reviews 6 followers
 April 14, 2019
 Bering interweaves his own experience with suicidal ideation with historical research on suicide in search of describing the suicidal mind. His big contention is that the book will explore the "suicidal person in all of us." Clearly the book resonated with me as in the back matter of the book I listed two full pages of tiny scribbled notes and quotations.

 In part, my interest comes from my own intense year in 2014 of suicidal ideation. I was never suicidal which I hate writing as if to say, "at least I wasn't suicidal like..." Yet I don't see it that way. It just wasn't in my DNA or possibly it was simply the luck of combining my genetic proclivities with my environment at the time. Of course no guarantees those feelings will not return and the experience will always always be there even if deeply tucked away. In short I wrote and ruminated on what life means and what kind of life is worth living; that's the academic version. But I also was wracked with the pain and extreme ludicrous nature of this life we live. I was counting down the years until 60, until retirement, until...

 I'm also interested because I agree in spirit with Camus' contention that suicide is "the only truly serious philosophical problem." What bigger question is there? But even as I write this I realize many, probably most, will disagree. And that's most likely a good thing. It seems most have an immunity built up against suicidal ideation and suicide which pushes it deep into a dormant stage only to be awakened in extreme contexts or in a cultural memetic moment. Thank goodness.

 Yet for me much resonates...

 "When you are happy, you know that it will dissipate, but it feels like it could last forever. When you are sad it is long. A protracted and dull lethargy that is dense, but in the moment it feels like it could last forever" (127).

 "I am not sad so much as gone" (134).

 "It is a pity that the scales of justice tilt so heavily in our minds in favor of a person's worst deed" (229).

 I live on not because life may be joyous tomorrow (even though it surely will at some point), but because I cannot imagine contributing to someone else's, a loved one or otherwise, existential horror.
 memoir suicide
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 Cecile Kerubo
 23 reviews 2 followers
 January 9, 2023
 "She kills herself not out of guilt for her actions, but for the shame of others finding out"...Humans are social beings constantly thinking about what others think. What we ourselves think. And what others think we think. The natural psychologists of the animal kingdom.

 Statistically, someone takes their own life every 40 seconds, plenty of these cases are linked to psychiatric conditions but plenty aren't, and that's the everyday person dealing with suicidal thoughts. Also, not everyone who is depressed dies by suicide, and not everyone who commits suicide is depressed. Damning information and just to add onto that "historically, suicide has accounted for more deaths than all wars and homicides combined."These statistics probably mean we know someone who has died by suicide (am careful to use the term committed suicide - which the book also delves into in some great detail), they are shocking statistics to me, and this is why I ask myself the question, why would a person choose to end their life, where do they get the guts, how? etc etc

 As with everything that involves how the human mind works, the answers are never satisfying. The book explores the 6 stages a suicidal person goes through before they get to a point of no return. With real-life examples, you get to journey with those who have successfully suicided (a verb that's also acceptable in the English language) and those who were unsuccessful in their attempts. Its almost heart-wrenching to read some of these stories and think to myself, hey talk to someone, someone must care. I now no longer judge those who decide to go this way, my mind has been opened to accept that my and your moral standpoint on this matter doesn't do anyone any favors.
 Why are we the only apes that jump? What can we do to stop ourselves? If you are suicidal I believe this would be a great read considering the author was also suicidal. I mean that shows he's empathetic enough. For those who are not suicidal, it will help you view things in a different perspective. To know what signs to look out for in our friends, family, etc and what we can do to help. And for those who have to live with the fact that someone close to them decided to end their lives, the book will offer some understanding as to why and maybe that will help you deal with the situation even slightly better.

 "After a lonely Bay Area man killed himself by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge...a suicide note had been left on a bureau. "I am going to walk to the bridge, it read "If one person smiles to me on the way, I will not jump".
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 drowningmermaid
 844 reviews 39 followers
 June 29, 2021
 So, if you see me reading a lot of suicide books, and something happens to me, I was murdered. It wasn't suicide.

 I'm doing some reading because there was a suicide at my work.

 Most books fall into the 'memoir' category, and here and there a 'therapy techniques' book.

 This is the only one I've found that is scientific, non-judgemental, and the closest thing to answering the 'why's of the people left behind.

 It explains that suicide is more common among people whose lives are going basically well, because
 the focus comes to be on the few things that aren't going well. It explains the process that the brain goes through as it tricks itself into its own end.

 Also, there is a bacteria that can cause suicidal ideation in humans, and attraction to cat piss in rats.

 Since it's written by someone with suicidal tendencies, it has a unique perspective, and you can tell that he really empathizes with some of the people who took their lives.

 Part historical overview, part psychological profile, and part biology, this is the best book on suicide I have encountered.




 2021 suicide
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 Bart
 127 reviews 3 followers
 September 13, 2018
 Bam, in your face. Wat een rit was dit boek zeg, van de psychologische benadering van zelfmoord tot zeer persoonlijke verhalen van mensen die zelfmoord pleegden. Nogmaals, verplichte kost voor psychologen, maar niet voor iedereen weggelegd.
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 Randi
 869 reviews 1 follower
 February 28, 2019
 A deadly serious topic discussed with humor, sincerity, and empathy. Discusses the science of suicide, including different theories of why we kill ourselves : evolutionary adaptation? Mental illness? Emotional maladaptation to perceived failures?

 For me, as someone who regularly battles suicidal thoughts, the chapter on 'hacking the suicidal brain', discussing the mental steps that progress to suicide, provides a tool to help me better cope.

 Highly recommended to those who suffer from suicidal ideation, to those who want to understand the psychology of suicide, and for those who work with at risk populations.
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 Aimee
 416 reviews 8 followers
 July 9, 2018
 Have you thought about suicide? Have you been affected by suicide? Are you just interested in what causes suicide and what makes some people more susceptible than others? If so, this is an excellent book for you. The book covers:

 • A brief overview of how genetics and differences in VENs (contributing to our ability to think about what others think of us) in the brain contribute to suicidal ideation.
 • Parasuicide and theory of mind (attempting to figure out what the individual was thinking prior to death).
 • Theories for how suicide works with survival of the fittest
 • The social contagion of suicide and what makes some suicides more contagious than others and also what part the internet has played.
 • The six phases in thinking that suicidal people go through when suicidal and how our minds can be tricked into making a fatal decision.
 • A historical look at changing perspectives of suicide and social/religious forces surrounding the issue now. Also, how the sometimes-irrational stigma we place on suicide a can actually be a protective force (causing people to be less likely to act on those impulses).
 • How mental health experts can be very bad at deciphering if someone is suicidal and what tools are much more effective.

 The author beautifully and compassionately unfolds the story and factors that contribute to suicide. He weaves his own personal struggle with suicidal ideation along with the struggles of others who suffer from those same issues or have lost a loved one to suicide. The most powerful example of this was using Victoria McLeod’s diary to take the abstract concepts of the six phases of suicidal thinking and make them tangible and concrete.

 The author takes a very dark taboo subject and actually makes it more entertaining and easier to read about than you would think possible while still retaining the respect for the subject matter. While he is a bit wordy at times and has a tendency to go off on tangents sometimes, this is a thoughtful, informative book and an excellent read to boot.

 Thanks so much to Netgalley, the publishers, and the author for providing me with a copy for an honest review.
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 Chris Boutté
 Author 7 books 134 followers
 February 3, 2021
 For most of my life, I was depressed and suicidal, which is one of the main reasons I turned to drugs and alcohol. Today, with over 8 years sober, I try to help others with their mental health by giving them hope with my story as well as trying to learn as much as possible. When I saw this new book from Jesse Bering, I knew I had to read it although I was unfamiliar with his work. There are so many questions around suicide, and I have yet to find many books with much information behind the psychology of it all. There are many misconceptions about suicidality, but Jesse Bering did an amazing job with this book.

 Bering was extremely thorough with his research on the subject, and he's someone that shares from his personal experience as well. As someone who is also a fan of evolutionary psychology, I found Bering's chapter on an evolutionary/social reason for why people may decide to end their life. I do think there were quite a few questions that were left unanswered by the end of this book, but it's at no fault of the author. It's just a subject that we're still trying to learn more about so we can save more lives. By far, this is one of the best books I've read on the subject, and the author has gained me as a lifelong fan. I can't wait to check out his other books.
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 Ivana
 388 reviews
 February 27, 2019
 If I could recommend one book to those who lost their loved one to suicide as well as to those who feel life is simply too much, I’d recommend this one. There are sentences in this book that I can only describe as surgical scalpels which cut so precisely into the marrow of all the things I feel but cannot put into words.
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 Stephen Kelly
 126 reviews 19 followers
 February 17, 2020
 I think I scared my husband when I referred to "the book about suicide I'm reading" as being "inspiring," but I meant the modifier in the usual, non-lethal way. This is a book that will make you feel like life is doable, even if you've been prone to thinking that it's anything but.

 Spencer Kornhaber's review of the finale of "The Good Place" in The Atlantic led me to this book, which I was quickly able to access for free as an ebook through my university's library. I'd been grappling with the final episode of "The Good Place" for over a week. I'd enjoyed it, but for reasons I couldn't quite articulate, I'd been bothered by the writers' suggestion that even the strongest, healthiest, most loving relationships have an expiration date that can only be resolved through annihilation. If it's just a checklist of accomplishments that makes life feel worthwhile, then sometimes suicide makes sense; I wasn't happy with that idea.

 Bering's goal is to show us that suicidal thoughts are a fairly normal thing that happen to our primate brains and that if we can manage to remember that, then maybe we can guide ourselves out of the darkness. His writing is accessible, earnest, intimate, and even quite funny at times. I recognized myself in much of this book, including the personal confessions that Bering shares, and I felt a deep, life-affirming warmth and affinity as I consumed the pages.

 Suicidal thoughts create a world of extreme isolation. In this book, Bering reveals that loneliness for the hurtful illusion it is.
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 Storey Clayton
 Author 1 book 5 followers
 May 21, 2020
 A thorough exploration of an important topic and generally quite accessibly and realistically written. An exemplary offering, of both the tone and content: "It's a prejudice of mine, I admit it, but it's difficult for me to fully trust anyone for whom the thought of taking one's own life hasn't alighted at least briefly, enticingly, on their thoughts..." (I assume he means trust them on the topic, not writ large in life, though the following comments make it more unclear.) I have really only two qualms with this tome, which I tore through: (1) he presumes an atheistic worldview, and rather defensively so, which makes it offputting to the few nonatheists of us clinging to intellectual thought (which reminds me to observe that we've entered this strange time where both atheists and nonatheists think they are in the minority - how is this possible?). (2) He seems eager to define "the suicidal mind" to the point that it oversimplifies. Though he takes great pains to caveat the complexity of the situation, there are still a lot of broad-brush observations that seem to conflate, for example, thoughtfully planned and impulsive suicides. All that said, there's a lot of vital stuff here and he ticks important boxes, from pop culture iconography to the real problem with guns. Worth a read if you're into this subject, with all the usual cautions.
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 Literary Redhead
 1,582 reviews 477 followers
 June 3, 2019
 Depression is the jewel passed down through our family for generations, the one you wish you could refuse. So I was eager to read this important book, which explains eloquently and through meticulous research and the author’s own story why, according to the World Health Organization, nearly 800,000 die by their own hands every year, or one person every 40 seconds. Bering is a psychologist and award-winning writer who was beset by suicidal ideation in his ‘30s. His personal tale is incredibly moving, and the science and psychology and methods for preventing suicide he shares make this an important teaching text on a subject, thankfully, we can now discuss openly. 5/5 stars

 Pub Date 30 Oct 2018

 Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. Opinions are mine. #Suicidal #NetGalley
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 Weixiang
 180 reviews 9 followers
 April 8, 2019
 Since we are in a culture where the act in the title has increased 5 percent in the last 16 years for white Americans, as well as affected my life through the death of my friends, this book was a great source of info on such topic. At the end, a lot of it comes to our shame responses towards others, ourselves, and how much we are connected to our social core. Fascinating read on the act of self death.

 Reading Difficulty: Sophomore level college.


 Who is it for? For those who has attempted it, and wishes to understand maybe why. For those curious on why their loved one did it. For those who are no longer in mourning. For those who wishes to prevent it. For those with kids preparing for cyber bullying.
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 Marian
 67 reviews 18 followers
 April 24, 2019
 A Magpie's Nest of Gaffes, Guffaws, and Tears

 Is this a Responsible Book on a Risky Subject?
 This book is out of balance, All Yin, No Yang. This opinion-driven, ugly book deserves an opinion-driven, ugly review.

 As the author has thought of suicide himself, is it unkind to write a negative review?
 No, I think people need to know his book is ugly before they read it. I suggest retracting the book.

 Does this book add to the ethical and scientific body of knowledge on the topic?
 No. Some material seemed quite improbable, such as a diary he detailed. I question his role: he interacts with the actively suicidal or families of those who died. I wonder about the appropriateness of the details he has disclosed and the privacy rights of those involved.

 Does this book hold biases and prejudices that offend?
 Yes. For example, he devoted a great deal of time to the death of a “tall, attractive blonde.” What about the short, dark people? Are they less sympathetic or worthwhile?

 Did this book help me with my own existential crisis?
 Not a bit, although writing a negative review might temporarily help me turn my anger outwards with my keyboard.

 Does this book enhance a personal sense of value to society?
 No. I feel less valued, less connected, less needed, less wanted. I am reinforced in negative perceptions that people do not like people in distress. Is a menopausal woman useful to society or "off the list"? My new term from the author for menopausal women: sexless worker ants. I do not think that using labels like he does is productive.

 Do I feel less isolated after reading this book?
 No. I feel more isolated, and, worse yet, I was reminded by the author that isolation is a predictor of suicide.

 Was useful advice provided?
 No. I have found better advice on day to day coping elsewhere. My impression from him was a push and pull based on, “If you are useless to the group, leave.” The laundry list of worldwide phone numbers at the end is of very low value. However, an easy 9-1-1 style number for all people worldwide to get help in crisis is beyond what the author could provide. I think that is needed. The CDC has clearer objectives that address people’s core needs better than what was detailed in the book, such as: economic security initiatives, access to mental health care, social-emotional learning programs, relationship programs, treatment programs, community engagement activities, and system change. I would add to that destigmatization efforts after reading this book. However, these are all prospective investments in people and are not this year’s action initiatives.

 Does this book help develop the Protective Factors to lower Suicide Risk?
 Even if the US Public Health Service overlaps some of the CDC objectives, these deserve to be reiterated as our society’s needs are urgent:
 • Effective clinical care for mental, physical, and substance abuse disorders
 • Easy access to a variety of clinical interventions and support for help seeking
 • Family and community support (connectedness)
 • Support from ongoing medical and mental health care relationships
 • Skills in problem solving, conflict resolution, and nonviolent ways of handling disputes
 • Cultural and religious beliefs that discourage suicide and support instincts for self-preservation

 Does this author help or hinder suicide survivors?
 The author describes research that indicates people would rather love someone from an “outside” or marginated ethnic group than someone who attempted suicide. So, this makes those of us who are unloved even less loved. Good to know.
 The author talks about how some people find watching a suicide as incredibly funny or deserved. For those who find the world to be an ugly place, this reinforces a perception that society is diseased. I offer a possible “rationale” for this uncomfortable description of the reactions of some: observers may blame and shame the suicidal person because they are attempting to control their feelings and they feel like they lack control of the situation. Psychologists might be better able to expand on the paradoxical situations involving suicide, but the author did not suitably frame the anecdote.

 Do I feel more positive about the human race and my place in it after reading this book?
 No. People damage other people in measurable ways. This book causes damage.

 Did the author offer helpful coping strategies?
 Not in particular, and each of us needs prescriptions that are right for us. For example, he advises a type of “dissociation” and suggests looking at our situation as if we were an observer of our life on a stage. This is scary!!! Detachment like this seems to me to characterize how a person can become the emotionally detached mass murderer. Anger turned inwards is often associated with depression or suicide. Anger turned outwards can get aggressive towards other people or animals or inanimate objects. Detaching from emotions negates happiness and fear right along with the anger and sadness. A 2013 article in Psychological Science emphasizes that anger, happiness, sadness, and fear have the same common neural building blocks. I do not know if it is ever possible to remove one emotion without interfering with the others. What research, Mr. Author, do you cite that supports healthy outcomes from detaching from our emotions? I am familiar with the visualizations where we try to passively observe our emotions, but that is very different from what you offered. We need our emotions; what we don’t need is denial of health and mental care, denial of our emotions, denial of economic possibilities, denial of love, denial of families through courts, and denial of our human hearts.
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 Alyssa
 467 reviews 38 followers
 November 26, 2020
 It took me quite some time to read this book, but not because I didn't enjoy it. I find Jesse Bering's writing style quite soothing and funny, even though he is dealing with quite difficult subject matter. The book provides a balance between academic research and personal experiences (both his as well as that of other people). It is an honest, painful and funny analysis of humans, behaviour, society, religion, etc.

 I would definitely recommend it; however, as indicated by the amount of time it took me to get through this book, it is not an easy reading experience. It is still suicide, and regardless of how funny and down-to-earth Jesse is, it is extremely heartbreaking to read about.
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 Vaughan Hatton
 28 reviews
 May 21, 2020
 What a book. A absolute rollercoaster of feeling, emotions and pain. But in my eyes, it's a book EVERYONE needs to read.

 Mental health is a horrible problem around the world and needs to be addressed. As someone from New Zealand, and as someone who has lost friends and family to suicide, this taboo issue needs to be explored and talked about more.

 A very tough book to read though. Some heartbreaking stories and moments where I found myself hugging the book hoping the people included could feel, I'm with them.
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 AJ
 270 reviews 2 followers
 September 29, 2021
 An informative and sensitively handled look into the why's concerning this taboo topic. Bering (a fellow suicide ideator himself) goes through the circumstances that leads to individuals committing the deed through scientific, philosophical, psychological, and spiritual lenses. He does a fine job of remaining curious as opposed to judgmental.

 The subject matter can be heavy at times but well worth the read (YMMV). For those more volatile and emotionally connected to the subject, read at your own risk.
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 Max
 103 reviews 61 followers
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 April 7, 2019
 I haven't actually read the last two chapters (60-70 pages or so). I might come back and read them later or I might not, but right now I'm marking this as read for arcane personal reasons. Everything below is just me trying to process my feelings about the stuff I did read.

 (WARNING: Non-graphic discussion of suicide, and of suicide-related triggers, below.)

 So, again with the caveat that I haven't read the last chunk of this book: I'm not sure how to rate this. A large part of that is because I'm not rational about the topic of suicide, and I'm not capable of being rational about the topic of suicide. Suicide is perhaps my most major and consistent trigger, and I picked this up from the library knowing full well that it wasn't a great idea in terms of self-care, but blah blah blah, seeking out things that resemble your trauma, that's a whole other discussion. Basically I knew this could end badly for me, and I did it anyway, so take this all with a grain of salt.

 I really, really liked this book for the first four chapters. The author was open about his biases, and compassionate without being patronizing, and frank about his own suicidality and how this book related to it. It was informative and comforting in the way that - as the author puts it - "intellectualizing a personal problem" notoriously is. The footnotes provided useful or interesting context, or counterarguments for some of the theories the author was summarizing. I learned stuff! It was good.

 Things started to go awry for me right at the end of the fourth chapter, "Hacking the Suicidal Mind", when Bering footnoted a quote from Kay Redfield Jamison's Night Falls Fast , a laundry list of "creative"/horrifying ways human beings have killed themselves. That struck me as a little weird and not super necessary at all for the point Bering was making, but hey, I'm sensitive about suicide, it's probably just me.

 Then the next chapter, "The Things She Told Lorraine", was a detailed account of a real teenage girl who died by suicide in 2014, with quote after quote after quote from the diary she kept during the four month period of acute suffering leading up to her death. It described her method of suicide pretty thoroughly, though admittedly not graphically. This seemed... I don't know, ethically questionable? Not so much that Bering was publishing this dead girl's diary - her parents gave him permission and he has some line about how he thinks the girl in question would want him to, which, whatever, not gonna argue that right now - but because he was thorough, and so detailed, and yes, it was a case study meant to exemplify the stages of Bering's favourite scientific theory of suicide, but it didn't sit well with me.

 The sixth chapter, "To Log Off this Mortal Coil", is where I had to stop. This chapter is about the very real ways that media, especially new media, influence suicide, with many, many examples, and Bering spends the whole chapter providing detailed description after detailed description of ways people have chosen to end their own lives. The chapter opens with the case of 13 Reasons Why (the Netflix show, though the same issue probably arose with the book it's based on) and the alarming spike in social media-based suicidal behaviours its release precipitated. A few pages later, Bering outlines a "helpful list of do's and don'ts" from an internet-based guide for reporting on suicide without increasing rates of suicide . This, naturally, included instructions not to sensationalize the death, linger over the method or location, or "report on suicide similar to reporting on a crime."

 Why, then, Bering then went ahead and, on the very next page, detailed - "for [the reader's] cognitive needs" - three particularly alarming methods used by four specific people who died by suicide in the late 19th century, is beyond me. He had just spent several pages telling us that even well-meaning discussions of suicide (e.g., community health PSAs) can lead to increased attempts and completed suicides among various populations, and those three anecdotes were not even helpful in making his point. He even indicates that he's doing it just because he assumes his readers have some prurient interest in it ("cognitive needs").

 The remainder of this sixth chapter is mostly about the internet, and we learn the upsetting (and occasionally gruesome) details of death after livestreamed death. Bering was not necessarily reticent when it came to discussing the details of specific cases in previous chapters, but here it strikes me as unbearably excessive, and I can't account for most of these details being included unless I assume that Bering was attempting to be shocking.

 If I sound upset, it's because I am; that's why I foregrounded this with my inability to be rational about this stuff. I'm not level-headed about it at all. Towards the end of this chapter I realized I was exhibiting a lot of signs of having been triggered, and I still very badly wanted to keep reading (another sign), so I forced myself to stop. I might genuinely just be, I don't know, projecting or something. But my reading is that a book I found comfortingly matter-of-fact and informative about suicide for most of the first half managed to transition into a book that sensationalized it while claiming to criticize others who do so, so... I'm frustrated.
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 Stacey
 44 reviews
 January 19, 2022
 good balance of psychology research and personal stories. tears were leaking out of my eyes the entire time in the chapter "the things she told lorraine"

 fave quote: “Stare at an ape’s hands long enough, or up at the sky into a vast universe, and suddenly you feel your existence becoming, paradoxically, both more insignificant and more meaningful” p.177
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 Cassy
 202 reviews 13 followers
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 February 2, 2022
 9 out of 10 times I’d rather out myself as bi than suicidal.

 This book was great though. A cold analysis can be cathartic.

 Materialistic worldview from the author.
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 Maddy Reid
 1 review
 October 10, 2018
 In A Very Human Ending: How suicide haunts our species, Jesse Bering attempts to unravel the seemingly impenetrable mind of the suicidal individual through psychological, biological, evolutionary and sociological exploratory lenses, but perhaps most emotively, through personal testimonies. Exploring Roy Baumeister's stages of suicidality, Bering presents the story of Victoria-a seventeen-year-old who took her own life-in her own candid words taken from her diary, correlating each step with chronological entries that evidence such a progressive deterioration in her ability to think her way out of that dark chasm.
 Bering's theory is that by understanding why humans are the only animals to end their lives whilst fully understanding the finality of the act, it may offer insight into the aspect of human nature that makes us unique in this sense and thus allow "reverse-engineering...to defuse the suicidal brain's default wiring".
 The subject is covered sensitively and Bering's open discussion around his own battle with suicidal thoughts gives the book a personal feel that makes it all the more compelling, readable and accessible.
 Suicide rates are rising, according the World Health Organisation (WHO), and are predicted to increase by 2020 from 1 every 40 seconds globally, to 1 every 20 seconds. This worrying trend alone signifies the importance and timeliness of this book. Highly recommended.
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 robleestvanalles
 59 reviews 14 followers
 December 20, 2019
 Lovely title for the holiday season! This is a great book to get to know more about the phenomenon of suicide.
 Main point of critique is that it is quite selective in its treatment of suicide. It lacks coherence and a logical order at times, especially after the first half of the book. It's full of interesting facts and notes on research and historical figures/data. Overall, however, it feels like a collection of information brought about by a personal quest (Bering) for meaning in suicidal tendencies.

 I for instance missed information on suicide tourism and more on suicide sites (hot spots, as he briefly touched upon this matter), or more elaborate and extensive research on it's philosophical roots. While he for instance describes suicidal contagion and hot-spots and suicide pacts and the role of media, he touches upon these interesting topics briefly and does so somewhat dispersed throughout the book. Things like 'assisted suicide' he does not treat at all. He could have done way more with providing historical data and the societal aspect of suicide (how suicide has had different meanings throughout the times and in different societies; eg senicide in different older cultures as normalised suicidal behavior -which he only touched upon very briefly) and I missed stuff on different types of suicide and the importance of age in suicide attempts (someone committing suicide in their 20s tends to have different motivations/methods etc than someone who was able the brood on it for a longer period of time, and what have the experiences been from shortly retired people who committed suicide for instance? As most graphs show a rapid increase of suicides right after that).

 My biggest issue with this book is the writer's prominent ego throughout. Especially near the ending he often reverts to less factual writing, more story-telling, and his own story is overly present. I could appreciate the qualitative use of information from interviews or diaries from persons having committed suicide, but they are lengthy and gave me the impression that he ran out of steam somewhere halfway. His stories about how he is not that technical and how he would be bad at committing suicide if that would imply he needed to make something chemical or mechanic, or the lengthy parts on how he had everything (how successful he was) but became depressed, made the book drag a bit. These parts could have been cut shorter. However, I appreciate his personal stance and the vulnerability he has shown.
 I also very much appreciate his reference to suicide among homosexuals by describing his own struggles with that. However, he did not really go into that which I think is unforgivable, as sexuality/gender tends to impact feelings of guilt/shame (not being accepted or wanted in society) and statistics show that suicide among people diverting from the heterosexual norm tend to be relatively high. Not only in terms of homosexuality but it also very much applies to for instance transgenders. The fact that many psychologists today still view transgenders as people suffering from psychological problems and that they strongly medicalize people with suicidal urges is amoral and plain wrong. Instead of helping people discover their strengths and meaning in life, they are problem-focused and medicalize (labelling, working from a vague assumed pathology). This book fortunately rightly stresses the social dimension of suicide. Suicide is a social problem, not a psychological disease!

 I would have graded this book more stars if the structure and logical order would have been stronger, if it read less like the end-result of an emotional fact-finding mission, and if parts would have been less focused on the writer himself/less dragging because of the lengthy story-telling. And.. if there were few books out there about this topic, but fortunately there are. Thank you Mr Bering for writing about this topic and your own experiences.
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929 reviews2,734 followers     October 18, 2018   – All the inconveniences in the world are not considerable enough that a man should die to evade them; and, besides, there being so many, so sudden and unexpected changes in human things, it is hard rightly to judge when we are at the end of our hope…Michel de Montaigne, A Custom of the Isle of Cea (1574) This is quite a good book on the topic of suicide, which seems to be a hot topic this year, with all of the people we have lost to it...think of all the big names that have taken their lives recently, and maybe the people you know personally too. Written by an author who personally has had issues with it, so he knows whereof he speaks, and has also done his homework, so it makes for very interesting reading on this fascinating subject. The book takes on the question of whether non-human animals commit suicide, among many other issues. Think of the dog who lays by his master’s grave, refusing to eat or leave, brokenheartedly awaiting his return. It also discusses some unusual ways that people have used to commit suicide and delves into different studies and papers on suicide published by different scholars. There’s a bit of something for just about any interest in the subject, and it was worth a read. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by NetGalley, author Jesse Bering, and the publisher for my fair review. University of Chicago PressPub: Oct 30th, 2018 My BookZone blog: https://wordpress.com/post/bookblog20...      2018 netgalley non-fiction               585 reviews157 followers     November 6, 2018   As a gifted academic, research psychologist and professor at Otago University (New Zealand) Jesse Bering is a bestselling author, his books have been translated in several languages. In “Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves” Bering delves into what he calls the “specter of suicide”-- among the darkest moments of the human condition. With about one million deaths (globally) each year, it is important to understand suicidal ideation in its various forms and patterns, the heartbreak and grief of survivors, many are compelled to seek and search for answers to understand this deadly final act.Throughout the book, Bering shares his personal story: beginning as an anxious gay teen, Bering then had a rewarding grad school education, waves of accomplishment, excellence in combination with crushing academic disappointment and defeat; and later, more impressive success and authorship. In addition, Bering shares his deepest darkest moments and times with the “secrets” of suicidal impulses. Excellent research is combined with scientific and academic findings, literature, true stories from survivors and family members, also the subject of animal suicide make for some interesting and fascinating reading. During war time there is a considerable drop in suicidal deaths: the same statistical decline in America was noted following the assassination of JFK, the Challenger Space Shuttle, and the 9/11 attacks. “To be rooted” observed Simone Weil “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Viktor Frankel attributed the Jewish survival rate and lack of suicide deaths from the horrific conditions of the Nazi concentration camps to the “innate human ability to find purpose in life.” In the book, “Suicide and the Holocaust” (2005) suicidologist David Lester reported that suicide deaths were high in the Jewish ghetto’s and concentration camps but either not reported or under reported by Nazi guards. The “Werther Effect”-- the phenomenon and contagion of copy-cat suicide was explored in length. Following the release of the Goethe classic novel “The Sorrows of the Young Werther” (1776) the book was banned in several European countries due to the increase of suicide deaths copied from the book. The controversial Netflix series “13 Reasons Why…” (2017) teen Hanna Barker committed suicide because she felt she was badly treated by others. The disturbing scenes of her death were compared to horror movies. The concern of prevention specialists raised alarms over the risk of the show being aimed at impressionable vulnerable teens. In order to show an “honest” portrayal television executives ignored scientific data. The online media, cyberbullying was covered briefly. A 17 year old teen, Victoria “Vic” McLeod, left behind a detailed journal of four months of her crippling anxiety and suicidal thought process. Vic ended her life after jumping from a 10 story building in Singapore (2014). The journal entries were indeed “extraordinary”. Vic’s parents wanted to share their daughters story in order to help others. There was no discussion of the Aokigahara Forest (a suicide “hot spot”) located at the base of Mt. Fuji. However, an Asian suicide epidemic began after the unusual “burning charcoal death” of Jessica Choi yuk-Chun, a Hong Kong engineering executive (1998). In New Zealand, (suicide was a crime until 1961) the rates of suicide deaths are high. Often, depressed missing individuals are last seen on beaches, relatives plead with the public for any information; when the bodies are found, “No foul play suspected” is listed on the official report. This is not to conceal evidence, but used as a proven tactic in suicide prevention. In the last part of the book, the methods used and detailed in suicide prevention clearly saved lives. However, if an individual is determined to conceal suicidal thoughts or intent to avoid intervention or hospitalization, even a skilled psychiatric mental health professional would be unable to detect a possible suicide attempt/death. In a large psychiatric clinic, The Implicit Association Test (IAT) a five minute computer program that flashed images and words across the screen was a more accurate predictor of people with suicidal risk over doctor interviews The development of new technologies are highly promising in suicide education and prevention. With thanks and appreciation to the University of Chicago Press via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.      books-read ebooks netgalley           November 5, 2018   Have you ever talked with someone and you never knew exactly what they were getting at, or how what they were talking about was related? If yes, then you know how this book will read. While reading this book I could never really understand what the author's conclusion was at the end of each chapter, what the content in the chapter related to each other in the chapter, and sometimes how the chapter was related to suicide. The author, who said this in the beginning of the book, cherry-picked data, and that is clear; he also mostly included theories that he agreed with, and some he absolutely disagreed with. This book is by no means an objective overview of suicide theories. I was left very disappointed; it offered no insight. I would suggest reading other books on suicide. [Got an ARC from NetGalley.com]    netgalley psychopathology           July 20, 2018   As an academic librarian with some familiarity with current scholarship on suicide (through both my research assistance and my recreational interest), I unreservedly and enthusiastically recommend this superbly written, scientifically informed, and richly insightful book accessible to a wide and varied readership. Whether you are fortunate enough to have only a casual or more distantly philosophical interest in the topic, or have been personally touched or harrowed by suicide in the various ways sensitively and masterfully illuminated by Bering, there is something of lasting value for nearly any possible reader. Bering's unique combination of (1) professional background in cognitive and evolutionary psychology, in which he has made substantial contributions, and in award-winning popular scientific writing, (2) longstanding personal experience contending with suicidal ideation, and (3) exquisitely fluent and dexterous writing skill -- this singular synthesis confers upon SUICIDAL an authority and pathos scarcely matched by any other book in recent years on this darkly enigmatic and perhaps uniquely human phenomenon which, according the the World Health Organization, on average claims a life every 40 seconds.                  25 reviews     August 26, 2020   Positives of this book: it provides some interesting statistics/scenarios that shed more light on the topic. The writing is accessible. My biggest gripe: he went and brought religion into it. Here's my deal - religion IS relevant here. Yes, in more than one religion, at some point in history, suicide was or is considered a sin, something that would prevent you from being favoured in the afterlife or something that might have negative ramifications.  What is not relevant, however, is whether or not there actually is an afterlife. And this author made it clear that 1) he does not believe in an afterlife and 2) if you disagree, you're wrong. Why'd you go and do that bro, I was with you up until now. At one point, he talks about a study carried out, with young children being the subjects, essentially to test if they believed that the consciousness lives on when the body dies. He found that the youngest children were more likely to believe that the mind lives on than the older children, and he draws this conclusion:  "this erroneous belief in the survival of personal consciousness after death is our species' 'default stance.'"  The word erroneous here carries so much weight. To imply that YOU, a developmental psychologist, have the answer that people have been searching for for centuries. YOU alone are sure that there is no life after death! Gee, that's neat. Please email me the study in which you categorically proved that the consciousness dies when the body does. Surely that's Nobel Prize worthy stuff, no? He even goes on to liken being an atheist surrounded by the religious to "being surrounded by people who are in the middle of a role-playing fantasy game and you can't get them to just be serious for a minute". I mean, the arrogance.  I did not read this book for your philosophical opinion, sir. I read it for an informed evaluation of why people might take their own lives, and what they might be feeling up until that point.  Before you ask, yes I am religious. However, I also love science. Science and faith are not mutually exclusive and plenty of great scientists and mathematicians throughout the ages have also been religious (Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton - all dedicated Christians). To bring your faith (or lack thereof) into what is supposed to be a scientific analysis of human behaviour and present it as fact is absurd.  I really wouldn't have seen this as a negative if it was presented as opinion, but to arrogantly laugh in the face of the billions of people in the world who do believe that there is some form of life after death and call that belief erroneous? Blatantly unprofessional. The afterlife is, by nature, an unfalsifiable concept, a term of which I'm sure you know the meaning, being that it's a term you would learn in first year uni as a psychology student. To talk about religion as if it's everybody else off in fantasy land while you're sat there going, "Guys? Can we all come back to reality for a minute?"  Miss me with that shit. For anyone wanting to come at me - I'm not annoyed that this guy is not religious. I don't give a shit what anyone believes as long as it's not hurting other people. What's pissed me off is that this guy has used his nonfiction, science based book, which features scientific research and investigation, to present his own belief as fact. Frankly, I think it's just incompetent.  But more than anything, it was irrelevant. Whether or not there is an afterlife does not matter here, when you're only supposed to be informing me of whether or not belief in that afterlife affects suicide rates. Literally, why would you even bring your lack of faith into that. There was a whole chapter dedicated to faith and suicide, and for a pretty big chunk of it I was thinking, yeah, I might just skip this chapter because at this point he's just telling me that religion is a fairy tale, and that's not the content I signed up for when reading a book about suicidality.  tl;dr: I read this book to learn more about suicidal minds, not have you tell me that God isn't real. Unless you have some kind of proof to back that claim up, do not state your opinion as fact in a nonfiction book supposed to be based in science. It came across as arrogant and gross.                   2,125 reviews31 followers     November 2, 2018   Theories abound, but few conclusions are reached in the interesting, but ultimately disappointing, Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves.Recently, there has been a spate of celebrity suicides: Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain and Avicii (Tim Bergling). Despite having an outwardly successful life, these people, and many others over the years felt that suicide was the best choice. Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves attempts to answer that question using scientific studies and the author’s own suicidal tendencies as a roadmap. The statistics and studies are fascinating. For example, 43% of suicides are caused by genetics, and 57% are caused by environment. 90% of the genetic issues are mood disorders like depression or bipolar disorder. The worst risk is when a person genetically predisposed to suicide runs into one of the environmental issues like the death of a loved one or loss of a job. The risks stack rather than run concurrently. However, the book’s episodic nature jumps from the police’s difficulty of determining suicidal intent conclusively to whether animals commit suicide to pure scientific research about brain chemistry.  Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves attempts to answer the “why are people suicidal” question. However, the presentation of a multitude of theories, many of them conflicting, fails to provide a clear answer. The conclusion presents some interesting facts about prevention, which answers only the “how are suicides done” question. The why remains a mystery. Readers interested in how to prevent suicide rather than why suicide occurs will enjoy this book. Also, therapists or police officers interested in learning the results of studies of suicides would appreciate it. However, it is not recommended for families dealing with a suicide that has already occurred as it will generate more questions than answers. Also, anyone contemplating suicide would be better served by reading one of the many self-help or therapeutic books on the subject. 3 stars. Thanks to University of Chicago Press and NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.     netgalley               807 reviews173 followers     February 19, 2019   In this perceptive, sensitive study, Jesse Bering looks at suicide from all angles. He asks the philosophical and ethical questions surrounding it. He looks at it psychologically, from the mental health perspective. He examines the sociological and religious factors that impinge on suicide. He considers the practicalities of suicide--how access to tools that make suicide easier (guns, for example) affects suicide rates. He wrestles with the difficult questions about suicidal contagion--that is, whether some individuals are more likely to attempt suicide after exposure to suicide in literature, in film, or in the news. Then, moving beyond these academic analyses, Bering probes numerous individual stories of those who have attempted suicide or died by suicide. He quotes extensively from and reflects upon their journals and suicide notes, and he listens to and relates to his readers what their family members and friends have to say. To shed further light, he interviews mental health professionals who have worked with suicidal individuals and academics who have written and published extensively on suicide. Finally, he writes about his own struggles with suicidal ideation; this is a very personal book for Bering, and it's all the better for it. The final result is a fascinating, extremely informative, nuanced discussion of suicide. It is humane, thoughtful, wise, and kind. It offers no easy answers or definitive judgements, for there are none. This is a book that is going to stick with me and will, I think, with most readers.                   178 reviews10 followers     October 18, 2018   I half expected this book to be a frivolous read. I admit bias when the author confesses his literary work with such lurid names as Why Is a Penis Shaped Like That amongst others. But as one of many others who have a history of addiction, mental and suicidal thoughts. I thought this might come in handy with understanding the profundity of taking one's life. Jesse writes and I agree that aside from morality, religious or libertarian we have an immense history of self harm and for loads of fathomable and mysterious reasons. Some quick to commit, some use it as an attention seeking tool. Whatever the flavors a person's descent into self non existence is. Nobody close to its action/actor is immune to its affects and effects. History and philosophical persuasion aside. Unless we are in their shoes, we will never understand the motivation. It's not a mind disease. It's not a survival or adaptive behaviour. It's a social affliction that persists.                  633 reviews174 followers     January 3, 2023   على صعيد عالميّ، يَقتل مليون شخص أنفسهم سنويًا، ويحاول ملايين آخرين القيام بذلك. ربما يكون هذا الرقم متحفظًا للغاية ؛ بسبب وصمة العار ومطالبات التأمين الباهظة، أي أنه قد يكون أكبر من ذلك. من المعروف أن حالات الانتحار ومحاولات الانتحار لا يتم الإبلاغ عنها بشكل كافٍ عندما يتعلق الأمر بالإحصاءات الرسمية. ومع ذلك، تُترجم هذه الأرقام تقريبًا إلى حقيقة أن شخصًا ما ينتحر كل أربعين ثانية. من الآن وحتى الوقت الذي تنتهي فيه من قراءة الفقرة التالية، سيقرر شخص ما، في مكان ما، أن الموت هو خيار أفضل من التنفس مرة أخرى ، وسوف يُزيل نفسه بشكل دائم من هذا العالم..Jesse BeringA Very Human EndingTranslated By #Maher_Razouk                  638 reviews6 followers     April 14, 2019   Bering interweaves his own experience with suicidal ideation with historical research on suicide in search of describing the suicidal mind. His big contention is that the book will explore the "suicidal person in all of us." Clearly the book resonated with me as in the back matter of the book I listed two full pages of tiny scribbled notes and quotations. In part, my interest comes from my own intense year in 2014 of suicidal ideation. I was never suicidal which I hate writing as if to say, "at least I wasn't suicidal like..." Yet I don't see it that way. It just wasn't in my DNA or possibly it was simply the luck of combining my genetic proclivities with my environment at the time. Of course no guarantees those feelings will not return and the experience will always always be there even if deeply tucked away. In short I wrote and ruminated on what life means and what kind of life is worth living; that's the academic version. But I also was wracked with the pain and extreme ludicrous nature of this life we live. I was counting down the years until 60, until retirement, until... I'm also interested because I agree in spirit with Camus' contention that suicide is "the only truly serious philosophical problem." What bigger question is there? But even as I write this I realize many, probably most, will disagree. And that's most likely a good thing. It seems most have an immunity built up against suicidal ideation and suicide which pushes it deep into a dormant stage only to be awakened in extreme contexts or in a cultural memetic moment. Thank goodness.  Yet for me much resonates... "When you are happy, you know that it will dissipate, but it feels like it could last forever. When you are sad it is long. A protracted and dull lethargy that is dense, but in the moment it feels like it could last forever" (127).  "I am not sad so much as gone" (134). "It is a pity that the scales of justice tilt so heavily in our minds in favor of a person's worst deed" (229). I live on not because life may be joyous tomorrow (even though it surely will at some point), but because I cannot imagine contributing to someone else's, a loved one or otherwise, existential horror.     memoir suicide               23 reviews2 followers     January 9, 2023   "She kills herself not out of guilt for her actions, but for the shame of others finding out"...Humans are social beings constantly thinking about what others think. What we ourselves think. And what others think we think. The natural psychologists of the animal kingdom.Statistically, someone takes their own life every 40 seconds, plenty of these cases are linked to psychiatric conditions but plenty aren't, and that's the everyday person dealing with suicidal thoughts. Also, not everyone who is depressed dies by suicide, and not everyone who commits suicide is depressed. Damning information and just to add onto that "historically, suicide has accounted for more deaths than all wars and homicides combined."These statistics probably mean we know someone who has died by suicide (am careful to use the term committed suicide - which the book also delves into in some great detail), they are shocking statistics to me, and this is why I ask myself the question, why would a person choose to end their life, where do they get the guts, how? etc etc  As with everything that involves how the human mind works, the answers are never satisfying. The book explores the 6 stages a suicidal person goes through before they get to a point of no return. With real-life examples, you get to journey with those who have successfully suicided (a verb that's also acceptable in the English language) and those who were unsuccessful in their attempts. Its almost heart-wrenching to read some of these stories and think to myself, hey talk to someone, someone must care. I now no longer judge those who decide to go this way, my mind has been opened to accept that my and your moral standpoint on this matter doesn't do anyone any favors. Why are we the only apes that jump? What can we do to stop ourselves? If you are suicidal I believe this would be a great read considering the author was also suicidal. I mean that shows he's empathetic enough. For those who are not suicidal, it will help you view things in a different perspective. To know what signs to look out for in our friends, family, etc and what we can do to help. And for those who have to live with the fact that someone close to them decided to end their lives, the book will offer some understanding as to why and maybe that will help you deal with the situation even slightly better. "After a lonely Bay Area man killed himself by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge...a suicide note had been left on a bureau. "I am going to walk to the bridge, it read "If one person smiles to me on the way, I will not jump".                   844 reviews39 followers     June 29, 2021   So, if you see me reading a lot of suicide books, and something happens to me, I was murdered. It wasn't suicide.I'm doing some reading because there was a suicide at my work.  Most books fall into the 'memoir' category, and here and there a 'therapy techniques' book. This is the only one I've found that is scientific, non-judgemental, and the closest thing to answering the 'why's of the people left behind. It explains that suicide is more common among people whose lives are going basically well, because  the focus comes to be on the few things that aren't going well. It explains the process that the brain goes through as it tricks itself into its own end. Also, there is a bacteria that can cause suicidal ideation in humans, and attraction to cat piss in rats. Since it's written by someone with suicidal tendencies, it has a unique perspective, and you can tell that he really empathizes with some of the people who took their lives. Part historical overview, part psychological profile, and part biology, this is the best book on suicide I have encountered.     2021 suicide               127 reviews3 followers     September 13, 2018   Bam, in your face. Wat een rit was dit boek zeg, van de psychologische benadering van zelfmoord tot zeer persoonlijke verhalen van mensen die zelfmoord pleegden. Nogmaals, verplichte kost voor psychologen, maar niet voor iedereen weggelegd.                  869 reviews1 follower     February 28, 2019   A deadly serious topic discussed with humor, sincerity, and empathy. Discusses the science of suicide, including different theories of why we kill ourselves : evolutionary adaptation? Mental illness? Emotional maladaptation to perceived failures?For me, as someone who regularly battles suicidal thoughts, the chapter on 'hacking the suicidal brain', discussing the mental steps that progress to suicide, provides a tool to help me better cope.  Highly recommended to those who suffer from suicidal ideation, to those who want to understand the psychology of suicide, and for those who work with at risk populations.     2019 contemp-issues criticism-and-essays               416 reviews8 followers     July 9, 2018   Have you thought about suicide? Have you been affected by suicide? Are you just interested in what causes suicide and what makes some people more susceptible than others? If so, this is an excellent book for you. The book covers:•	A brief overview of how genetics and differences in VENs (contributing to our ability to think about what others think of us) in the brain contribute to suicidal ideation.•	Parasuicide and theory of mind (attempting to figure out what the individual was thinking prior to death).•	Theories for how suicide works with survival of the fittest•	The social contagion of suicide and what makes some suicides more contagious than others and also what part the internet has played.•	The six phases in thinking that suicidal people go through when suicidal and how our minds can be tricked into making a fatal decision.•	A historical look at changing perspectives of suicide and social/religious forces surrounding the issue now. Also, how the sometimes-irrational stigma we place on suicide a can actually be a protective force (causing people to be less likely to act on those impulses).•	 How mental health experts can be very bad at deciphering if someone is suicidal and what tools are much more effective.   The author beautifully and compassionately unfolds the story and factors that contribute to suicide. He weaves his own personal struggle with suicidal ideation along with the struggles of others who suffer from those same issues or have lost a loved one to suicide. The most powerful example of this was using Victoria McLeod’s diary to take the abstract concepts of the six phases of suicidal thinking and make them tangible and concrete. The author takes a very dark taboo subject and actually makes it more entertaining and easier to read about than you would think possible while still retaining the respect for the subject matter. While he is a bit wordy at times and has a tendency to go off on tangents sometimes, this is a thoughtful, informative book and an excellent read to boot. Thanks so much to Netgalley, the publishers, and the author for providing me with a copy for an honest review.                   Author  7 books134 followers     February 3, 2021   For most of my life, I was depressed and suicidal, which is one of the main reasons I turned to drugs and alcohol. Today, with over 8 years sober, I try to help others with their mental health by giving them hope with my story as well as trying to learn as much as possible. When I saw this new book from Jesse Bering, I knew I had to read it although I was unfamiliar with his work. There are so many questions around suicide, and I have yet to find many books with much information behind the psychology of it all. There are many misconceptions about suicidality, but Jesse Bering did an amazing job with this book. Bering was extremely thorough with his research on the subject, and he's someone that shares from his personal experience as well. As someone who is also a fan of evolutionary psychology, I found Bering's chapter on an evolutionary/social reason for why people may decide to end their life. I do think there were quite a few questions that were left unanswered by the end of this book, but it's at no fault of the author. It's just a subject that we're still trying to learn more about so we can save more lives. By far, this is one of the best books I've read on the subject, and the author has gained me as a lifelong fan. I can't wait to check out his other books.                   388 reviews     February 27, 2019   If I could recommend one book to those who lost their loved one to suicide as well as to those who feel life is simply too much, I’d recommend this one. There are sentences in this book that I can only describe as surgical scalpels which cut so precisely into the marrow of all the things I feel but cannot put into words.                   126 reviews19 followers     February 17, 2020   I think I scared my husband when I referred to "the book about suicide I'm reading" as being "inspiring," but I meant the modifier in the usual, non-lethal way. This is a book that will make you feel like life is doable, even if you've been prone to thinking that it's anything but. Spencer Kornhaber's review of the finale of "The Good Place" in The Atlantic led me to this book, which I was quickly able to access for free as an ebook through my university's library. I'd been grappling with the final episode of "The Good Place" for over a week. I'd enjoyed it, but for reasons I couldn't quite articulate, I'd been bothered by the writers' suggestion that even the strongest, healthiest, most loving relationships have an expiration date that can only be resolved through annihilation. If it's just a checklist of accomplishments that makes life feel worthwhile, then sometimes suicide makes sense; I wasn't happy with that idea. Bering's goal is to show us that suicidal thoughts are a fairly normal thing that happen to our primate brains and that if we can manage to remember that, then maybe we can guide ourselves out of the darkness. His writing is accessible, earnest, intimate, and even quite funny at times. I recognized myself in much of this book, including the personal confessions that Bering shares, and I felt a deep, life-affirming warmth and affinity as I consumed the pages.  Suicidal thoughts create a world of extreme isolation. In this book, Bering reveals that loneliness for the hurtful illusion it is.     21st-century new-zealand singapore           May 21, 2020   A thorough exploration of an important topic and generally quite accessibly and realistically written. An exemplary offering, of both the tone and content: "It's a prejudice of mine, I admit it, but it's difficult for me to fully trust anyone for whom the thought of taking one's own life hasn't alighted at least briefly, enticingly, on their thoughts..." (I assume he means trust them on the topic, not writ large in life, though the following comments make it more unclear.) I have really only two qualms with this tome, which I tore through: (1) he presumes an atheistic worldview, and rather defensively so, which makes it offputting to the few nonatheists of us clinging to intellectual thought (which reminds me to observe that we've entered this strange time where both atheists and nonatheists think they are in the minority - how is this possible?). (2) He seems eager to define "the suicidal mind" to the point that it oversimplifies. Though he takes great pains to caveat the complexity of the situation, there are still a lot of broad-brush observations that seem to conflate, for example, thoughtfully planned and impulsive suicides. All that said, there's a lot of vital stuff here and he ticks important boxes, from pop culture iconography to the real problem with guns. Worth a read if you're into this subject, with all the usual cautions.                  1,582 reviews477 followers     June 3, 2019   Depression is the jewel passed down through our family for generations, the one you wish you could refuse. So I was eager to read this important book, which explains eloquently and through meticulous research and the author’s own story why, according to the World Health Organization, nearly 800,000 die by their own hands every year, or one person every 40 seconds. Bering is a psychologist and award-winning writer who was beset by suicidal ideation in his ‘30s. His personal tale is incredibly moving, and the science and psychology and methods for preventing suicide he shares make this an important teaching text on a subject, thankfully, we can now discuss openly. 5/5 stars  Pub Date 30 Oct 2018 Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. Opinions are mine. #Suicidal #NetGalley     featured-netgalley-review health-medical netgalley-review               180 reviews9 followers     April 8, 2019   Since we are in a culture where the act in the title has increased 5 percent in the last 16 years for white Americans, as well as affected my life through the death of my friends, this book was a great source of info on such topic. At the end, a lot of it comes to our shame responses towards others, ourselves, and how much we are connected to our social core. Fascinating read on the act of self death. Reading Difficulty: Sophomore level college.  Who is it for? For those who has attempted it, and wishes to understand maybe why. For those curious on why their loved one did it. For those who are no longer in mourning. For those who wishes to prevent it. For those with kids preparing for cyber bullying.                April 24, 2019   A Magpie's Nest of Gaffes, Guffaws, and TearsIs this a Responsible Book on a Risky Subject? This book is out of balance, All Yin, No Yang. This opinion-driven, ugly book deserves an opinion-driven, ugly review.  As the author has thought of suicide himself, is it unkind to write a negative review? No, I think people need to know his book is ugly before they read it. I suggest retracting the book.  Does this book add to the ethical and scientific body of knowledge on the topic? No. Some material seemed quite improbable, such as a diary he detailed. I question his role: he interacts with the actively suicidal or families of those who died. I wonder about the appropriateness of the details he has disclosed and the privacy rights of those involved.  Does this book hold biases and prejudices that offend? Yes. For example, he devoted a great deal of time to the death of a “tall, attractive blonde.” What about the short, dark people? Are they less sympathetic or worthwhile?  Did this book help me with my own existential crisis? Not a bit, although writing a negative review might temporarily help me turn my anger outwards with my keyboard.  Does this book enhance a personal sense of value to society? No. I feel less valued, less connected, less needed, less wanted. I am reinforced in negative perceptions that people do not like people in distress. Is a menopausal woman useful to society or "off the list"? My new term from the author for menopausal women: sexless worker ants. I do not think that using labels like he does is productive.  Do I feel less isolated after reading this book? No. I feel more isolated, and, worse yet, I was reminded by the author that isolation is a predictor of suicide.  Was useful advice provided? No. I have found better advice on day to day coping elsewhere. My impression from him was a push and pull based on, “If you are useless to the group, leave.” The laundry list of worldwide phone numbers at the end is of very low value. However, an easy 9-1-1 style number for all people worldwide to get help in crisis is beyond what the author could provide. I think that is needed. The CDC has clearer objectives that address people’s core needs better than what was detailed in the book, such as: economic security initiatives, access to mental health care, social-emotional learning programs, relationship programs, treatment programs, community engagement activities, and system change. I would add to that destigmatization efforts after reading this book. However, these are all prospective investments in people and are not this year’s action initiatives.  Does this book help develop the Protective Factors to lower Suicide Risk? Even if the US Public Health Service overlaps some of the CDC objectives, these deserve to be reiterated as our society’s needs are urgent: • Effective clinical care for mental, physical, and substance abuse disorders • Easy access to a variety of clinical interventions and support for help seeking • Family and community support (connectedness) • Support from ongoing medical and mental health care relationships • Skills in problem solving, conflict resolution, and nonviolent ways of handling disputes • Cultural and religious beliefs that discourage suicide and support instincts for self-preservation  Does this author help or hinder suicide survivors? The author describes research that indicates people would rather love someone from an “outside” or marginated ethnic group than someone who attempted suicide. So, this makes those of us who are unloved even less loved. Good to know. The author talks about how some people find watching a suicide as incredibly funny or deserved. For those who find the world to be an ugly place, this reinforces a perception that society is diseased. I offer a possible “rationale” for this uncomfortable description of the reactions of some: observers may blame and shame the suicidal person because they are attempting to control their feelings and they feel like they lack control of the situation. Psychologists might be better able to expand on the paradoxical situations involving suicide, but the author did not suitably frame the anecdote.  Do I feel more positive about the human race and my place in it after reading this book? No. People damage other people in measurable ways. This book causes damage.  Did the author offer helpful coping strategies? Not in particular, and each of us needs prescriptions that are right for us. For example, he advises a type of “dissociation” and suggests looking at our situation as if we were an observer of our life on a stage. This is scary!!! Detachment like this seems to me to characterize how a person can become the emotionally detached mass murderer. Anger turned inwards is often associated with depression or suicide. Anger turned outwards can get aggressive towards other people or animals or inanimate objects. Detaching from emotions negates happiness and fear right along with the anger and sadness. A 2013 article in Psychological Science emphasizes that anger, happiness, sadness, and fear have the same common neural building blocks. I do not know if it is ever possible to remove one emotion without interfering with the others. What research, Mr. Author, do you cite that supports healthy outcomes from detaching from our emotions? I am familiar with the visualizations where we try to passively observe our emotions, but that is very different from what you offered. We need our emotions; what we don’t need is denial of health and mental care, denial of our emotions, denial of economic possibilities, denial of love, denial of families through courts, and denial of our human hearts.      audible avoid psychology               467 reviews38 followers     November 26, 2020   It took me quite some time to read this book, but not because I didn't enjoy it. I find Jesse Bering's writing style quite soothing and funny, even though he is dealing with quite difficult subject matter. The book provides a balance between academic research and personal experiences (both his as well as that of other people). It is an honest, painful and funny analysis of humans, behaviour, society, religion, etc.I would definitely recommend it; however, as indicated by the amount of time it took me to get through this book, it is not an easy reading experience. It is still suicide, and regardless of how funny and down-to-earth Jesse is, it is extremely heartbreaking to read about.     related-books               28 reviews     May 21, 2020   What a book. A absolute rollercoaster of feeling, emotions and pain. But in my eyes, it's a book EVERYONE needs to read. Mental health is a horrible problem around the world and needs to be addressed. As someone from New Zealand, and as someone who has lost friends and family to suicide, this taboo issue needs to be explored and talked about more.  A very tough book to read though. Some heartbreaking stories and moments where I found myself hugging the book hoping the people included could feel, I'm with them.                   270 reviews2 followers     September 29, 2021   An informative and sensitively handled look into the why's concerning this taboo topic. Bering (a fellow suicide ideator himself) goes through the circumstances that leads to individuals committing the deed through scientific, philosophical, psychological, and spiritual lenses. He does a fine job of remaining curious as opposed to judgmental.The subject matter can be heavy at times but well worth the read (YMMV). For those more volatile and emotionally connected to the subject, read at your own risk.      philo-psy               103 reviews61 followers      Read  April 7, 2019   I haven't actually read the last two chapters (60-70 pages or so). I might come back and read them later or I might not, but right now I'm marking this as read for arcane personal reasons. Everything below is just me trying to process my feelings about the stuff I did read.(WARNING: Non-graphic discussion of suicide, and of suicide-related triggers, below.) So, again with the caveat that I haven't read the last chunk of this book: I'm not sure how to rate this. A large part of that is because I'm not rational about the topic of suicide, and I'm not capable of being rational about the topic of suicide. Suicide is perhaps my most major and consistent trigger, and I picked this up from the library knowing full well that it wasn't a great idea in terms of self-care, but blah blah blah, seeking out things that resemble your trauma, that's a whole other discussion. Basically I knew this could end badly for me, and I did it anyway, so take this all with a grain of salt. I really, really liked this book for the first four chapters. The author was open about his biases, and compassionate without being patronizing, and frank about his own suicidality and how this book related to it. It was informative and comforting in the way that - as the author puts it - "intellectualizing a personal problem" notoriously is. The footnotes provided useful or interesting context, or counterarguments for some of the theories the author was summarizing. I learned stuff! It was good. Things started to go awry for me right at the end of the fourth chapter, "Hacking the Suicidal Mind", when Bering footnoted a quote from Kay Redfield Jamison's Night Falls Fast, a laundry list of "creative"/horrifying ways human beings have killed themselves. That struck me as a little weird and not super necessary at all for the point Bering was making, but hey, I'm sensitive about suicide, it's probably just me.  Then the next chapter, "The Things She Told Lorraine", was a detailed account of a real teenage girl who died by suicide in 2014, with quote after quote after quote from the diary she kept during the four month period of acute suffering leading up to her death. It described her method of suicide pretty thoroughly, though admittedly not graphically. This seemed... I don't know, ethically questionable? Not so much that Bering was publishing this dead girl's diary - her parents gave him permission and he has some line about how he thinks the girl in question would want him to, which, whatever, not gonna argue that right now - but because he was thorough, and so detailed, and yes, it was a case study meant to exemplify the stages of Bering's favourite scientific theory of suicide, but it didn't sit well with me. The sixth chapter, "To Log Off this Mortal Coil", is where I had to stop. This chapter is about the very real ways that media, especially new media, influence suicide, with many, many examples, and Bering spends the whole chapter providing detailed description after detailed description of ways people have chosen to end their own lives. The chapter opens with the case of 13 Reasons Why (the Netflix show, though the same issue probably arose with the book it's based on) and the alarming spike in social media-based suicidal behaviours its release precipitated. A few pages later, Bering outlines a "helpful list of do's and don'ts" from an internet-based guide for reporting on suicide without increasing rates of suicide. This, naturally, included instructions not to sensationalize the death, linger over the method or location, or "report on suicide similar to reporting on a crime." Why, then, Bering then went ahead and, on the very next page, detailed - "for [the reader's] cognitive needs" - three particularly alarming methods used by four specific people who died by suicide in the late 19th century, is beyond me. He had just spent several pages telling us that even well-meaning discussions of suicide (e.g., community health PSAs) can lead to increased attempts and completed suicides among various populations, and those three anecdotes were not even helpful in making his point. He even indicates that he's doing it just because he assumes his readers have some prurient interest in it ("cognitive needs"). The remainder of this sixth chapter is mostly about the internet, and we learn the upsetting (and occasionally gruesome) details of death after livestreamed death. Bering was not necessarily reticent when it came to discussing the details of specific cases in previous chapters, but here it strikes me as unbearably excessive, and I can't account for most of these details being included unless I assume that Bering was attempting to be shocking.  If I sound upset, it's because I am; that's why I foregrounded this with my inability to be rational about this stuff. I'm not level-headed about it at all. Towards the end of this chapter I realized I was exhibiting a lot of signs of having been triggered, and I still very badly wanted to keep reading (another sign), so I forced myself to stop. I might genuinely just be, I don't know, projecting or something. But my reading is that a book I found comfortingly matter-of-fact and informative about suicide for most of the first half managed to transition into a book that sensationalized it while claiming to criticize others who do so, so... I'm frustrated.     nonfiction           January 19, 2022   good balance of psychology research and personal stories. tears were leaking out of my eyes the entire time in the chapter "the things she told lorraine"fave quote: “Stare at an ape’s hands long enough, or up at the sky into a vast universe, and suddenly you feel your existence becoming, paradoxically, both more insignificant and more meaningful” p.177                   202 reviews13 followers      Read  February 2, 2022   9 out of 10 times I’d rather out myself as bi than suicidal.This book was great though. A cold analysis can be cathartic.  Materialistic worldview from the author.     bucket-list           October 10, 2018   In A Very Human Ending: How suicide haunts our species, Jesse Bering attempts to unravel the seemingly impenetrable mind of the suicidal individual through psychological, biological, evolutionary and sociological exploratory lenses, but perhaps most emotively, through personal testimonies. Exploring Roy Baumeister's stages of suicidality, Bering presents the story of Victoria-a seventeen-year-old who took her own life-in her own candid words taken from her diary, correlating each step with chronological entries that evidence such a progressive deterioration in her ability to think her way out of that dark chasm. Bering's theory is that by understanding why humans are the only animals to end their lives whilst fully understanding the finality of the act, it may offer insight into the aspect of human nature that makes us unique in this sense and thus allow "reverse-engineering...to defuse the suicidal brain's default wiring".  The subject is covered sensitively and Bering's open discussion around his own battle with suicidal thoughts gives the book a personal feel that makes it all the more compelling, readable and accessible.Suicide rates are rising, according the World Health Organisation (WHO), and are predicted to increase by 2020 from 1 every 40 seconds globally, to 1 every 20 seconds. This worrying trend alone signifies the importance and timeliness of this book. Highly recommended.                  59 reviews14 followers     December 20, 2019   Lovely title for the holiday season! This is a great book to get to know more about the phenomenon of suicide. Main point of critique is that it is quite selective in its treatment of suicide. It lacks coherence and a logical order at times, especially after the first half of the book. It's full of interesting facts and notes on research and historical figures/data. Overall, however, it feels like a collection of information brought about by a personal quest (Bering) for meaning in suicidal tendencies. I for instance missed information on suicide tourism and more on suicide sites (hot spots, as he briefly touched upon this matter), or more elaborate and extensive research on it's philosophical roots. While he for instance describes suicidal contagion and hot-spots and suicide pacts and the role of media, he touches upon these interesting topics briefly and does so somewhat dispersed throughout the book. Things like 'assisted suicide' he does not treat at all. He could have done way more with providing historical data and the societal aspect of suicide (how suicide has had different meanings throughout the times and in different societies; eg senicide in different older cultures as normalised suicidal behavior -which he only touched upon very briefly) and I missed stuff on different types of suicide and the importance of age in suicide attempts (someone committing suicide in their 20s tends to have different motivations/methods etc than someone who was able the brood on it for a longer period of time, and what have the experiences been from shortly retired people who committed suicide for instance? As most graphs show a rapid increase of suicides right after that).  My biggest issue with this book is the writer's prominent ego throughout. Especially near the ending he often reverts to less factual writing, more story-telling, and his own story is overly present. I could appreciate the qualitative use of information from interviews or diaries from persons having committed suicide, but they are lengthy and gave me the impression that he ran out of steam somewhere halfway. His stories about how he is not that technical and how he would be bad at committing suicide if that would imply he needed to make something chemical or mechanic, or the lengthy parts on how he had everything (how successful he was) but became depressed, made the book drag a bit. These parts could have been cut shorter. However, I appreciate his personal stance and the vulnerability he has shown. I also very much appreciate his reference to suicide among homosexuals by describing his own struggles with that. However, he did not really go into that which I think is unforgivable, as sexuality/gender tends to impact feelings of guilt/shame (not being accepted or wanted in society) and statistics show that suicide among people diverting from the heterosexual norm tend to be relatively high. Not only in terms of homosexuality but it also very much applies to for instance transgenders. The fact that many psychologists today still view transgenders as people suffering from psychological problems and that they strongly medicalize people with suicidal urges is amoral and plain wrong. Instead of helping people discover their strengths and meaning in life, they are problem-focused and medicalize (labelling, working from a vague assumed pathology). This book fortunately rightly stresses the social dimension of suicide. Suicide is a social problem, not a psychological disease! I would have graded this book more stars if the structure and logical order would have been stronger, if it read less like the end-result of an emotional fact-finding mission, and if parts would have been less focused on the writer himself/less dragging because of the lengthy story-telling. And.. if there were few books out there about this topic, but fortunately there are. Thank you Mr Bering for writing about this topic and your own experiences.
Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39105401-suicidal
https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-ethnobiology/volume-41/issue-2/0278-0771-41.2.144/Scientists-Warning-to-Humanity-on-Threats-to-Indigenous-and-Local/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.144.full
Scientists' Warning to Humanity on Threats to Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems
2021-07-27
Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares; Dana Lepofsky; Ken Lertzman; Chelsey Geralda Armstrong; Eduardo S Brondizio; Michael C Gavin; Phil O'B Lyver; George P Nicholas; Pua'ala Pascua; Nicholas J Reo; Victoria Reyes-García; Nancy J Turner; Johanna Yletyinen; E N Anderson; William Balée; Joji Cariño; Dominique M David-Chavez; Christopher P Dunn; Stephen C Garnett; Spencer Greening goot; Shain Jackson; Harriet Kuhnlein; Zsolt Molnár; Guillaume Odonne; Gunn-Britt Retter; William J Ripple; László Sáfián; Abolfazl Sharifian Bahraman; Miquel Torrents-Ticó; Mehana Blaich Vaughan
<div><div><div><a></a><h2>Introduction</h2><p>Indigenous Peoples and local communities have long histories of place-based living and time-honored traditions generating intricate and complex systems of knowledge about the world around them (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr15">Berkes 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr85">McGregor et al. 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr155">Whyte 2013</a>). Such sophisticated sets of knowledge and practice are broadly referred to as Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) (see  <a href="https://bioone.org/Journals/Journal-of-Ethnobiology/volume-41/issue-2/0278-0771-41.2.144/Scientists-Warning-to-Humanity-on-Threats-to-Indigenous-and-Local/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.144.full?tab=ArticleLinkSupplemental">
Supplement A (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)</a> for a discussion of terminology). These systems of knowledge and practice have been passed down from generation to generation through oral transmission, expressive culture, rituals, hands-on place-based learning, and, more recently, in writing. Despite the wide diversity of ILK systems, they often share a strong emphasis on nurturing positive, reciprocal, and responsible relationships among humans and their non-human kin (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr01">Anderson 2014</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr34">Diver et al. 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr105">Reo 2019</a>), are grounded in lived experiences, and are anchored in Indigenous and local governance, cosmology, ideology, language, and religion (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr137">Turner 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr139">Turner et al. 2008</a>). ILK systems are an important part of humanity's heritage and an invaluable living repository of in-depth information on how to safeguard life on Earth (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr36">Dunn 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr44">FPP et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr60">IPBES 2019</a>).</p><p>ILK systems worldwide are at risk of attrition as a direct result of the compounded forces of globalization, colonialism, political oppression, and economic interests on the territories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr25">Cámara-Leret et al. 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr80">Lyver et al. 2019a</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr130">Tang and Gavin 2016</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#f01">Figure 1</a>). Although ILK is inherently dynamic and, to some extent, capable of adapting to changing political and social-ecological scenarios (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr61">Jackson 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr103">Quinlan and Quinlan 2007</a>), substantial bodies of ILK are being lost at alarming rates (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr48">Gaup Eira et al. 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr109">Reyes-García et al. 2013a</a>, <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr110">2013b</a>; see also  <a href="https://bioone.org/Journals/Journal-of-Ethnobiology/volume-41/issue-2/0278-0771-41.2.144/Scientists-Warning-to-Humanity-on-Threats-to-Indigenous-and-Local/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.144.full?tab=ArticleLinkSupplemental">Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)</a>). Such losses alter the foundations of peoples' cultures and livelihoods, and result in poverty, dispossession, and ongoing cultural erosion (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr03">Armstrong and Brown 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr43">Ford et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr105">Reo et al. 2019</a>). Consequently, Indigenous Peoples and local communities experience disproportionate impacts from social and environmental changes (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr36">Dunn 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr121">Savo et al. 2016</a>).</p><p>It has been shown that ILK systems play a fundamental role in supporting and achieving local, regional, and planetary sustainability (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr20">Brondizio et al. 2021a</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr60">IPBES 2019</a>). A substantial proportion of the world's wild and domesticated biodiversity lies on lands and in waters traditionally stewarded by Indigenous Peoples and local communities (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr37">Ellis et al. 2021</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr47">Garnett et al. 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr90">Molnár and Babai 2021</a>); these territories are strongholds for crucial environmental functions that contribute to human and non-human well-being, including mitigation of climate change (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr39">Fa et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr44">FPP et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr117">RRI 2018</a>). Despite tremendous pressures from industrial resource extraction and other anthropogenic drivers, globally, biodiversity is declining less rapidly in the territories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities than in ecosystems outside of them (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr32">Díaz et al. 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr44">FPP et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr60">IPBES 2019</a>). The maintenance of much of this biodiversity is often due to the leadership of these communities fighting to keep these spaces free from intensive development and to maintain their ecological and cultural integrity (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr03">Armstrong and Brown 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr45">Frainer et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr128">Spice 2018</a>).</p><p>In this article, we build on the manifesto “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity,” issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr142">1992</a>) and re-issued 25 years later by the Alliance of World Scientists and endorsed by more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr113">Ripple et al. 2017</a>). In the 2017 warning, humanity was urged to practice more environmentally sustainable alternatives to “business as usual” economic development to avoid irreversible impacts on our planet. Following the wide distribution of this warning, the Alliance of World Scientists called for follow-up papers on specific topics of global concern. We answer their call and explore critical means for sustaining ILK systems for better stewardship of our planet and for the well-being of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. In writing this, we seek to raise awareness among all humanity about the local, regional, and global importance of ILK systems—whether operating as individuals or communities, or as part of organizations in both the private and public sectors.</p><p>We write this from our perspectives as ethnobiologists, environmental anthropologists, natural resource scientists, and conservation biologists. Our authorship is epistemically diverse and includes nine Indigenous community perspectives (i.e., Arawak Taíno, Coast Salish, Chippewa, Native Hawaiian, Ibaloi, Māori, Tsimshian, and Saami). Although our overall framing is heavily influenced by Western epistemic traditions, we address knowledge more as a social process than as a formal outcome. While ILK systems play an instrumental role in the protection of our planet's biological and cultural diversity, we view the maintenance of ILK systems and the lifeways in which they are embedded to be an inherent good in itself, irrespective of its contributions to safeguarding global public interests. Based on our experience, we largely focus on commonalities across ILK systems globally, while recognizing that distinct historical and contextual complexities underpin the myriad ways in which these systems are being pressured all over the world. Collectively, our goal is to raise the alarm about the interwoven social-ecological consequences of the active destruction of ILK and highlight strategic actions supporting Indigenous Peoples and local communities in sustaining their homelands and associated knowledge systems.</p></div><div><a></a><h2>Continuity, Change, and Resilience in Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems</h2><p>Despite myriad pressures on the lifeways of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, ILK systems demonstrate resilience to social-ecological changes (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr43">Ford et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr145">Vaughan 2018</a>). This resilience is largely due to the inherently adaptive and dynamic nature of ILK systems (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr08">Athayde et al. 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr17">Berkes et al. 2000</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr74">Lam et al. 2020</a>). These systems have developed in the context of changing local environments and have been evaluated and modified in relation to new information and social challenges, often over millennia (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr61">Jackson 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr103">Quinlan and Quinlan 2007</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr144">Vandebroek and Balick 2012</a>). Resistance, adaptation, resilience, and transformation are all reflected in the histories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities as a result of their ongoing and arduous work to maintain their languages, cultural integrity, and ties to land, as well as diverse environmental stewardship practices (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr44">FPP et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr89">Mingorría 2021</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr137">Turner 2020</a>). The adaptability and resilience of ILK systems is evident today in ecosystems around the world that bear evidence of millennia-old sustainable management by Indigenous Peoples and local communities (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr12">Balée et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr76">Lepofsky et al. 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr95">Odonne et al. 2019</a>). The specific practices involved are as varied as the ecosystems and the people from which they stem, and include the use of prescribed fire (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr153">Welch et al. 2013</a>), terracing of steep or erodible slopes (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr120">Sandor and Homburg 2017</a>), fertilizing and soil enhancement, thinning and pruning (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr138">Turner et al. 2013</a>), and domestication of plants and animals (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr09">Aumeeruddy-Thomas et al. 2017</a>), among many others. Across the vast majority of our planet, the historical and current land-uses of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, together with their interwoven practices and knowledge systems, are essential for understanding and sustaining our planet's biodiversity (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr04">Armstrong et al. 2021</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr37">Ellis et al. 2021</a>).</p><p>However, adaptive capacity and resilience are finite (see <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr150">Walker et al. 2006</a>), and mechanisms for absorbing change (e.g., flexibility in traditional practices, effective social networks) have been compromised by colonial settlement, land dispossession, state-sanctioned violence, and resource extraction (<a href="https://bioone.org/#f01">Figure 1</a>), among many other processes (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr46">Galvin 2009</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr98">Par-lee et al. 2018</a>; see also  <a href="https://bioone.org/Journals/Journal-of-Ethnobiology/volume-41/issue-2/0278-0771-41.2.144/Scientists-Warning-to-Humanity-on-Threats-to-Indigenous-and-Local/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.144.full?tab=ArticleLinkSupplemental">Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)</a>). Furthermore, social-ecological changes happen today in many places at a rate that is incommensurate with intergenerational ILK transmission, experimentation, and development (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr40">Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2015</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr119">Salomon et al. 2019</a>). Disruptions to social-ecological processes that integrate ILK into daily life (either implicitly or by force) have eroded and continue to impact the foundations of many ILK systems worldwide (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr22">Brosi et al. 2007</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr23">Bussmann et al. 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr55">Hedges et al. 2020</a>).</p><p>While it is easy to focus on impacts to ecosystems and culture or on knowledge <i>losses</i>, this can overshadow other positive processes of change and adaptation (e.g., hybridization, innovation, revitalization) that are also present (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr46">Galvin 2009</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr52">Gómez-Baggethun and Reyes-García 2013</a>). In particular, focusing on losses does not do justice to the immense and powerful continuity that is a hallmark of the cultures of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr83">McCarter et al. 2014</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr87">McMillen et al. 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr132">Tareau et al. 2020</a>). Similarly, the dynamic nature of ILK systems can be overlooked in culture “preservation” plans, which often purportedly aim to fix ILK in place and time (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr50">Gavin et al. 2015</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr75">Leonti 2011</a>). Furthermore, the narrative framing ILK losses is also often problematic, as many communities affirm that their knowledge systems were not simply “lost,” but rather violently wrested from them and destroyed with intent (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr125">Simpson 2004</a>). Other communities recognize this “lost” knowledge as dormant or “sleeping” (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr58">Hobson et al. 2010</a>) or kept alive by the ancestors until it is ready to be re-awakened (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr114">Risling Baldy 2018</a>). Additionally, framing of ILK systems in a constant state of loss and vulnerability can make some communities feel hopeless and hinder their efforts towards reclaiming, sustaining, and revitalizing their cultural traditions (see <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr53">Haalboom and Natcher 2012</a>). Thus, the challenge is to acknowledge and understand the different realities of loss, while affirming the ongoing struggle to nurture, revitalize, and enact deeply rooted cultural mechanisms of persistence, adaptation, and resilience.</p><div><a></a><h2>Figure 1.</h2><p>Some of the many threats to ILK systems and lifeways of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (outer boxes) and the interconnected consequences for social and ecological dimensions (central oval). Drivers of change can exert their influence quickly or over time in subtle and pernicious ways. Many of these linked threats and consequences are highlighted in this paper's case studies and 15 recommendations.</p><p><a href="https://bioone.org/ContentImages/Journals/etbi/41/2/0278-0771-41.2.144/graphic/img-z5-1_144.jpg"></a></p></div></div><div><a></a><h2>The Multidimensionality of Threats to ILK Systems</h2><p>Threats to ILK systems ramify through complex pathways and result in diverse ecological and socio-cultural consequences. The factors that drive these pressures are familiar and replicated around the world and can be grouped in six main clusters (<a href="https://bioone.org/#f01">Figure 1</a>): suppression of culture; misrepresentation of culture; appropriation of culture, land, and resources; assimilation; disconnection of people and their territories; and destruction of heritage, ecosystems, and ongoing violent displacement or even killing of the knowledge holders themselves. These socio-cultural impacts can be experienced by individuals, communities, and at regional scales, and can be gender- and age-specific (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr140">Turner and Turner 2008</a>). The ecological consequences can manifest across scales of the biological hierarchy from genes to ecosystems and landscapes (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr25">Cámara-Leret et al. 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr60">IPBES 2019</a>).</p><p>Losses of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity are inextricably linked and are often driven by the same pressures (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr45">Frainer et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr50">Gavin et al. 2015</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr82">Maffi 2005</a>). For instance, it has been estimated that at least 40% of the world's 6700 languages are endangered (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr91">Moseley 2010</a>), with two-thirds of all language extinctions occurring only in the past 60 years (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr104">Rehg and Campbell 2018</a>). The majority of these endangered languages belong to Indigenous Peoples and local communities (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr91">Moseley 2010</a>). Loss of language is often tied to broader losses of knowledge, collective identity, and cultural heritage (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr36">Dunn 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr45">Frainer et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr105">Reo et al. 2019</a>). Such losses largely arise via diverse pressures from settler colonial institutions and actions (<a href="https://bioone.org/#f01">Figure 1</a>). These include assimilation policies (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr54">Haque and Patrick 2014</a>), the theft and appropriation of traditional lands (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr88">Middleton 2011</a>), the destruction of heritage sites (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr94">Nicholas and Smith 2020</a>), the commodification of nature (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr77">Liverman 2004</a>), and the rapid expansion of extractive frontiers (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr122">Scheidel et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr128">Spice 2018</a>). These pressures impact both ILK holders, and the social and ecological spaces needed to enact and transmit such knowledge (<a href="https://bioone.org/#f01">Figure 1</a>;  <a href="https://bioone.org/Journals/Journal-of-Ethnobiology/volume-41/issue-2/0278-0771-41.2.144/Scientists-Warning-to-Humanity-on-Threats-to-Indigenous-and-Local/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.144.full?tab=ArticleLinkSupplemental">Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)</a>).</p><p>These pressures can generate legacies of intergenerational trauma and reduced cultural engagement, leading to declines in peoples' physical and mental well-being, including feelings of shame and insignificance (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr30">Cunsolo Willox and Ellis 2018</a>). Ultimately, these processes limit peoples' ability to engage in the many mutually reinforcing aspects of knowing and being. These include customary governance structures and institutions (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr27">Carson et al. 2018</a>), the creation of arts, social gatherings (e.g., storytelling, music performances; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr42">Fernández-Llamazares and Lepofsky 2019</a>), and the coming together for collecting and processing food (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr72">Kuhnlein et al. 2013</a>), as well as for rituals and spiritual renewal (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr69">Kealiikanakaoleohaililani et al. 2018</a>). Thus, loss of ILK can lead to declines in community cohesion, undermining prosocial behaviors that, among other things, help to prevent local resource depletion (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr11">Baggio et al. 2016</a>).</p><p>The erosion of ILK can lead to fracturing of the traditional values and management systems that have shaped and maintained ecosystems (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr40">Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2015</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr63">Jandreau and Berkes 2016</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr80">Lyver et al. 2019a</a>). This includes the destabilizing of worldviews and norms that enforce and make sense of actions and beliefs about how to behave respectfully towards the environment and other beings (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr139">Turner et al. 2008</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr141">Umeek 2011</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr155">Whyte 2013</a>). The resulting degradation of traditionally maintained ecosystems (e.g., through invasive species, overharvesting, pollution, changing flood and fire regimes, urbanization, soil erosion) has diverse cascading consequences. These include threats to human health and food security and sovereignty through reduced access to culturally important, locally available, healthy foods and other culturally valued resources (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr72">Kuhnlein et al. 2013</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr112">Reyes-García et al. 2019</a>).</p></div><div><a></a><h2>Interwoven Challenges and Consequences: Three Case Studies</h2><p>In this section, we illustrate with three case studies the interwoven challenges facing ILK systems and the social and ecological consequences of these challenges. These examples are only a few of the very many ( <a href="https://bioone.org/Journals/Journal-of-Ethnobiology/volume-41/issue-2/0278-0771-41.2.144/Scientists-Warning-to-Humanity-on-Threats-to-Indigenous-and-Local/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.144.full?tab=ArticleLinkSupplemental">Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)</a>) in which ILK systems support the conservation of biological and cultural diversity and how a myriad of pressures (<a href="https://bioone.org/#f01">Figure 1</a>) threaten the health of social-ecological systems (see also <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr116">Rozzi et al. 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr130">Tang and Gavin 2016</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr140">Turner and Turner 2008</a>). They also illustrate how Indigenous Peoples and local communities are taking action to turn these trends around by applying ILK embedded in traditional management practices and governance. Collectively, the three case studies reflect a range of contexts where ILK is being challenged. The first focuses on a single species which is valued among several cultural groups, the second on a suite of species in one cultural group, and the third on one species in one cultural group (<a href="https://bioone.org/#f02">Figure 2</a>).</p><div><a></a><h2>Figure 2.</h2><p>Images from three case studies illustrating the challenges facing ILK systems, the consequences of those challenges, and the role of ILK in maintaining healthy ecosystems. L to R: William Gladstone, long-time activist for Heiltsuk First Nation herring rights, holding traditionally harvested herring roe on hemlock (<i>Tsuga heterophylla</i>) boughs (D. Lepofsky); Tsimane' woman preparing an herbal tea of <i>Triplaris americana</i> (<i>chij</i> in Tsimane' language), used to treat diarrhea (Á. Fernández-Llamazares); Rakiura muttonbirding expert, late John Wixon, demonstrates to Ngāti Awa birders on Moutohorā the process of plucking Grey-faced Petrel (<i>Pterodroma gouldi</i>) chicks (Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Awa).</p><p><a href="https://bioone.org/ContentImages/Journals/etbi/41/2/0278-0771-41.2.144/graphic/img-z7-1_144.jpg"></a></p></div><div><a></a><h3>Case Study 1. Indigenous Conservation of a Threatened Cultural Keystone Species: Pacific Herring</h3><p>The social-ecological history of Pacific herring (<i>Clupea pallasii</i>) on the northwest coast of North America illustrates the iterative and intertwined connections among threats to ILK and the catastrophic consequences of those losses for people and other biota<sup><a href="https://bioone.org/#fn02">1</a></sup>. Indigenous place names, oral traditions, archaeological records, and ethnohistoric and ethnographic accounts demonstrate the profound extent to which the once consistently abundant herring were woven into coastal biocultural systems (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr49">Gauvreau et al. 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr86">McKechnie et al. 2014</a>). Extensive bodies of ecological knowledge, explicit management practices, and intricate systems of marine tenure dictated how to respectfully and sustainably harvest herring fish and roe for daily and ceremonial consumption as well as for trade (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr49">Gauvreau et al. 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr119">Salomon et al. 2019</a>). These actions were situated within age-old laws and teachings that provided guidance about how to interact responsibly with other beings and ecosystems. In short, for millennia, this small forage fish was intertwined into the very identities of Indigenous communities throughout the northeastern Pacific.</p><p>These intimate, long-term, and sustainable relationships between coastal Indigenous Peoples and herring began to be eroded by industrial fisheries in the late nineteenth century and increasingly racialized and exclusionary policies in the twentieth century. Regulatory control of herring fisheries by federal fisheries agencies replaced the historically resilient systems of local management and governance, reducing community access to herring, prohibiting traditional harvesting methods (i.e., fish traps), and allowing commercial overfishing to deplete stocks (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr38">Essington et al. 2015</a>). Reduced herring populations had ramifying consequences through marine food webs and the decline in herring challenged the continuity of traditional systems of herring management, including mechanisms for sharing knowledge intergenerationally (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr49">Gauvreau et al. 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr119">Salomon et al. 2019</a>). Ultimately, reduced access to herring had significant impacts on the mental and physical health and well-being of Indigenous communities, including, for some, a deep and constant sadness at having lost access to this cultural staple. In addition, the persistent resistance on the part of fisheries managers and policymakers to fully recognize ILK of herring has enabled a shifted ecological baseline with respect to herring abundance and distribution.</p><p>In recent decades, coastal Indigenous communities have led actions to protect herring stocks and to redirect the ecological and social trajectory of losses associated with declines in herring. These actions include Supreme Court challenges, engaging with management agencies, enforcing moratoria on commercial herring fishing in traditional territories, direct actions to stop commercial fleets, and creating partnerships among Nations with similar biocultural goals. Indigenous communities are also demanding co-management of the fisheries, prioritizing conservation and Indigenous food, social, and ceremonial needs, and integrating customary governance systems (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr66">Jones et al. 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr119">Salomon et al. 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr149">von der Porten et al. 2016</a>, <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr148">2019</a>). These actions have transformed the modern policy environment in relation to herring management and conservation. Revitalizing Indigenous relationships with Pacific herring and restoring its ecological roles within the coastal ecosystems are profoundly linked (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr134">Thornton and Moss 2021</a>).</p></div><div><a></a><h3>Case Study 2. Ethnobotanical Knowledge is Essential for Tsimane' Health and Nutrition</h3><p>The Tsimane' people of the Bolivian Amazon have extensive ethnobotanical knowledge that is interwoven into their daily lives, creation stories, and rituals. This knowledge is not only essential for Tsimane' cultural identity and forest stewardship, but enhances the health, nutritional status, and well-being of Tsimane' knowledge-holders and their children (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr84">McDade et al. 2007</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr108">Reyes-García et al. 2010</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr131">Tanner et al. 2011</a>). Furthermore, Tsimane' ethnobotanical knowledge erosion could have important implications for health sovereignty (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr33">Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016</a>) and forest conservation (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr97">Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2018</a>).</p><p>Along with other aspects of their traditional livelihood, Tsimane' ethnobotanical knowledge has experienced profound changes since the 1950s. Changes in traditional livelihoods were stimulated by the arrival of missionaries, loggers, and highland agriculturalists, who pushed the Tsimane' to enter into the market economy and embrace formal settler education (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr111">Reyes-García et al. 2014</a>). These changes have pervasively influenced traditional pathways of intergenerational knowledge transmission (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr40">Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2015</a>), resulting in alarming losses of ethnobotanical knowledge, particularly among villages and individuals more exposed to the market economy (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr109">Reyes-García et al. 2013a</a>, <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr110">2013b</a>).</p><p>Several studies have documented the potential effects of ethnobotanical knowledge loss on Tsimane' health and nutritional status, for example, by precipitating a rapid dietary transition (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr112">Reyes-García et al. 2019</a>). A seminal study by McDade et al. (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr84">2007</a>) found that mothers with lower levels of ethnobotanical knowledge were more likely to have less healthy children (e.g., stunted growth, inflammation) than plant-savvy mothers, highlighting the crucial role of women as knowledge gatekeepers (see also <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr33">Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016</a>). Furthermore, Tsimane' villages with greater levels of ethnobotanical knowledge tend to be surrounded by healthier forest ecosystems than those where knowledge has been substantially eroded (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr97">Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr101">Pérez-Llorente et al. 2013</a>). Landscape fragmentation and deforestation exert impacts on both Tsimane' health and nutrition, as they reduce access to a diverse pool of wild foods and medicinal plants (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr33">Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr112">Reyes-García et al. 2019</a>).</p><p>The Tsimane' have taken several steps to document their ethnobotanical knowledge and to raise awareness of its values (e.g., radio programs, books, cultural exhibitions; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr41">Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2020</a>). The Tsimane' have also engaged in participatory mapping projects to defend their territory and have participated in marches in defence of Indigenous sovereignty (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr111">Reyes-García et al. 2014</a>) in an attempt to secure the territories on which their livelihoods, knowledge systems, and ethnomedicinal cabinets are grounded. Despite these efforts, the Tsimane' knowledge system is undergoing an accelerated process of transition, including profound losses in several ethnobotanical knowledge domains (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr110">Reyes-García et al. 2013b</a>). Such losses could have cascading effects on Tsimane' health and nutrition, paralleling similar trends among several Indigenous communities across the Amazon (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr24">Caballero-Serrano et al. 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr25">Cámara-Leret et al. 2019</a>).</p></div><div><a></a><h3>Case Study 3. Māori ILK and Customary Practices Support the Conservation and Sustainable Use of a Burrowing Seabird</h3><p>Burrowing petrels (e.g., Sooty Shear-water, <i>Ardenna grisea</i>, locally known as <i>tītī</i>; Grey-faced Petrel, <i>Pterodroma gouldi</i>, locally known as <i>oi</i>, <i>manu oi</i>, or <i>kuia</i>) are culturally significant species for some Māori tribes in New Zealand. The customary harvest of chicks for food from offshore islands link the people to other values such as tribal identity, connection to place, expressions of cultural heritage, and individual and community well-being, to name a few (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr79">Lyver et al. 2008</a>). Harvesting by families facilitates ILK transfer and provides opportunities for place-specific environmental and communal experiences to be shared across generations. The harvest contributes to the upholding of customary authority and guardianship responsibilities, including the maintenance, adaptation, and transfer of ILK. Traditional management practices also provide models for how to responsibly and sustainably harvest petrel species.</p><p>Delayed maturation and low reproductive rates of petrels mean they are less able to cope with predation by introduced mammalian predators (e.g., stoat [<i>Mustela erminea</i>] and Norway rat [<i>Rattus norvegicus</i>]) or over-exploitation by humans (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr64">Jones et al. 2011</a>). Aware of the petrel's demographic limitations, Māori harvesters have used a range of customary practices to minimize or distribute harvest pressure on breeding populations (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr70">Kitson and Moller 2008</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr81">Lyver et al. 2019b</a>). Access to the islands is restricted to the last half of the breeding season to avoid disturbance and abandonment of nests. Adults are never harvested because of the demographic impact of removing breeding birds from the population. Uniquely, some of these customary practices for petrel populations and their island habitats are also recognized in New Zealand law (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr92">New Zealand Government 1978</a>).</p><p>Temporary harvest moratoria can also be used to minimize population impacts. In the 1960s, one tribe placed a 50-year harvest moratorium over a harvest from one island because the harvesters were concerned that the extensive predation of eggs and chicks by Norway rats (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr59">Imber et al. 2000</a>) was causing petrel numbers to decline. In recent years, however, with the recovery of the petrel numbers in this breeding colony, the tribe has re-established a limited customary harvest to maintain the practice and culture and regenerate the knowledge and connections to the island and birds (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr65">Jones et al. 2015</a>).</p><p>As part of revitalizing these customary practices, southern birders were invited by a northern tribe to participate in the harvest and share knowledge relating to the catching and preparation of the chicks. This connection provided an opportunity for the northern harvesters to observe harvesting techniques used in the south, and to adapt the practices to their current circumstances. By regaining ILK, harvesters are re-establishing their cultural links to their petrels, the islands, and the wider marine environment.</p><p>These customary practices by Māori, however, contrast with the legislative prohibitions by successive governments in New Zealand which have indefinitely blocked communities from harvesting and accessing many native plants and animals over the last century (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr80">Lyver et al. 2019a</a>, <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr81">2019b</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr118">Ruru et al. 2017</a>). The resulting conservation and wildlife policies have had a pervasive impact on Māori ILK and culture. In some cases, national prohibition regulations were instituted by government agencies even when some species were still regionally abundant and hugely important to remote Māori communities for food and culture. Māori communities around New Zealand are still living with these policies and their ongoing cultural ramifications, including impacts on ILK systems.</p></div></div><div><a></a><h2>Addressing Challenges Faced by Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems</h2><p>Since the 1950s, numerous international efforts have emerged to recognize the rights and knowledge systems of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr20">Brondizio et al. 2021a</a>, <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr21">2021b</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr51">Golan et al. 2019</a>). These initiatives were spearheaded by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, often with the support of scientists, artists, and civil organizations. Together, they increased awareness about the interlocked plight of ILK systems, colonization, and environmental degradation.</p><p>Along with these global efforts, the past three decades have also witnessed the emergence of a myriad of on-the-ground initiatives focused on the conservation and revitalization of ILK systems (<a href="https://bioone.org/#f03">Figure 3</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr14">Benyei et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr50">Gavin et al. 2015</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr83">McCarter et al. 2014</a>). Such place-based initiatives are more inclusive but also more effective when articulated from the bottom-up and within a collaborative framework (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr19">Bowra et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr21">Brondizio et al. 2021b</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr126">Singh et al. 2010</a>). That is, while policies and legislation that address ILK loss are needed at multiple scales (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr130">Tang and Gavin 2016</a>), in situ place-based initiatives are crucial in leveraging those policies and legislation to tackle the underlying drivers of ILK deterioration (see <a href="https://bioone.org/#f01">Figure 1</a> for a list of drivers).</p><p>In the following, we identify 15 recommendations to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities to sustain and protect their knowledge systems and the lifeways connected to them (<a href="https://bioone.org/#t01">Table 1</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr57">Hill et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr156">Woodward et al. 2020</a>). Each recommendation is founded on a biocultural approach, acknowledging the idea that nature and culture can be mutually enriching, and recognizing the potential of ILK for better environmental stewardship of our planet (<a href="https://bioone.org/#f03">Figure 3</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr45">Frainer et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr50">Gavin et al. 2015</a>). All of our recommendations are consistent with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and many of its articles reflect the specific concerns identified here (see <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr143">United Nations 2011</a>). Our perspective is distinct in highlighting the interconnections between ILK, biodiversity, and ecosystem health in the context of processes driving transformations of those systems (<a href="https://bioone.org/#f01">Figure 1</a>), and in including local communities ( <a href="https://bioone.org/Journals/Journal-of-Ethnobiology/volume-41/issue-2/0278-0771-41.2.144/Scientists-Warning-to-Humanity-on-Threats-to-Indigenous-and-Local/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.144.full?tab=ArticleLinkSupplemental">Supplement A (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)</a>).</p><p>These recommendations are directed to decision-makers at all levels, from global and regional inter-governmental organizations, to national, sub-national, and local governments, the private sector (including local, national and transnational corporations), civil society (including citizens, community groups, and NGOs), donor agencies, and research and educational organizations. While several recommendations are oriented towards policy making, all of them should be nevertheless understood as a direct appeal to the decision-making power that individuals and communities hold in realizing transformative change. They are also an invitation to the global community to add their voices to the concerns raised in this warning and to advocate for the protection of Indigenous Peoples' rights, lifeways, territories, and knowledge systems across scales. We specifically highlight efforts led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities to address challenges to their knowledge systems as an inspiration for acting on our warning (<a href="https://bioone.org/#f03">Figure 3</a>). Supporting Indigenous Peoples and local communities to secure and strengthen collective systems of tenure, governance, and ways of life is one of the most powerful ways to safeguard ecosystems from intensive and/or unnecessary development and to maintain the biocultural integrity of the territories in which ILK is embedded (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr16">Berkes 2021</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr44">FPP et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr137">Turner 2020</a>). We offer these recommendations in the spirit of supporting Indigenous sovereignty, to enable and support Indigenous Peoples and local communities' control over and management of their traditional territories and engagement with their local ecosystems, and to create a context that nurtures social and environmental justice.</p><div><a></a><h2>Figure 3.</h2><p>Some of the many initiatives led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities to address challenges to their knowledge systems and lifeways. <b>A.</b> Since 1989, Indigenous groups from the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the US connect with their culture on Tribal Canoe Journeys (M. Wunsch); <b>B.</b> Maasai women in the Greater Amboseli Ecosystem (south Kenya) restore degraded rangelands with traditional grass varieties (J. de la Malla); <b>C.</b> The Hokotehi Moriori Trust database of traditional knowledge on Rehoku (Chatham Islands, New Zealand) records arborglyphs/living ancestors in a sacred grove; Moriori descendant, Nicole Whaitiri (R. Giblin, courtesy Hokotehi Moriori Trust); <b>D.</b> A book of folktales told by Daasanach storytellers in Ileret (North Kenya) is now used in local schools (J. de la Malla); <b>E.</b> The Cahuaza family in Soledad (Peru), from the Kanpu Piyapi (Shawi) cultural group, look at a plant book created at the behest of village authorities (G. Odonne); <b>F.</b> Bakhtiari woman in Khuzestan Province (Iran), weaving <i>chogha</i>, a traditional men's overcoat (A. Sharifian); <b>G.</b> Ainu leaders teach teachers and students in Hokkaido (Japan) how to prepare Ainu traditional foods (kp-studios.com); <b>H.</b> Hungarian traditional herders share their ecological knowledge with protected area managers, and local and foreign researchers to resolve conservation conflicts and improve agricultural regulations (A. Varga); <b>I.</b> In collaboration with the Island Food Community of Pohnpei, the Federated States of Micronesia issued stamps to encourage eating carotenoidrich bananas (Anne Vézina, ProMusa and Biodiversity International); <b>J.</b> The Shipibo-Konibo community of Santa Clara de Uchunya demand that Peru's Constitutional Court order the return of their lands that were dispossessed for oil palm expansion (FECONAU); <b>K.</b> Kānaka Maoli and Anishinaabek talk about responsibilities to protect Indigenous lands and languages at an Indigenous knowledge exchange, 2019 (N. Reo); <b>L.</b> Altar at the foot of Mauna Kea built and maintained by Native Hawaiians to honor this sacred place and their connections to it (P. Pascua). <b>M.</b> A community-based forest restoration project near Andasibe (east-central Madagascar) produces an annual average of 30,000 seedlings of 100 endemic tree species (J. de la Malla); <b>N.</b> Baka community members return from gathering non-timber forest products in East Cameroon (A. Surprenant); <b>O.</b> In this early season burn in the Mimal management area, Arnhem Land (NT, Australia), Lydia Lawrence is carrying on the age-old tradition of using fire to take care of the land (Mimal Rangers). See  <a href="https://bioone.org/Journals/Journal-of-Ethnobiology/volume-41/issue-2/0278-0771-41.2.144/Scientists-Warning-to-Humanity-on-Threats-to-Indigenous-and-Local/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.144.full?tab=ArticleLinkSupplemental">Supplemental Material C (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)</a> for additional reading about some of these initiatives.</p><p><a href="https://bioone.org/ContentImages/Journals/etbi/41/2/0278-0771-41.2.144/graphic/img-z11-1_144.jpg"></a></p></div><a></a><h2>Table 1. </h2><p>Six overlapping, integrative themes emerge from the 15 recommendations to support ILK systems and those who champion them. Some themes, such as “Protect and Monitor Cultural Heritage” were addressed broadly by all or most recommendations. Others were addressed by a more focussed subset of recommendations. We include under the theme heading “Support ILK in educational systems” only those aspects of educational systems that have been particularly targeted and/or affected by colonial institutions. Similarly, FPIC (#12) should be a core element of the application of all our recommendations, but we only include this recommendation in themes where ideas about FPIC and its standards of practice are a particular focus of attention.</p><p><a href="https://bioone.org/ContentImages/Journals/etbi/41/2/0278-0771-41.2.144/graphic/img-z12-1_144.gif"></a></p><p><b>1. Recognize the historical continuity, ongoing presence, and inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities on their traditional territories.</b> In many jurisdictions worldwide, the very presence and distinctness of Indigenous Peoples and local communities is denied and redressing this is fundamental to sustaining social and environmental well-being (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr06">Asch et al. 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr146">Vierros et al. 2020</a>). Collectively, societies globally must recognize the place-based rights, knowledge systems, and lifeways of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, including both access rights and collective choice rights to manage human-environment relationships on their own terms (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr123">Schlager and Ostrom 1993</a>). The most immediate and direct way of honoring ILK systems is by demarcating and returning lands to Indigenous Peoples and local communities, recognizing their rights, institutions, and governance authority on those lands, and removing obstacles to their ongoing and long-term relationships with their lands and waters, on their own terms (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr44">FPP et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr80">Lyver et al. 2019a</a>).</p><p><b>2. Ensure full and effective participation and engagement of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in regional, national, and international decision-making about land, ocean spaces, natural resource management, and climate change mitigation.</b> Indigenous Peoples and local communities should have a lead place at the table in forums and discussions about the state and future of our planet, and their knowledge systems and practices should be recognized as critical to global sustainability (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr16">Berkes 2021</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr47">Garnett et al. 2018</a>). Despite increased acknowledgment of the importance of ILK systems to environmental governance (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr60">IPBES 2019</a>), Indigenous Peoples and local communities face substantial barriers to participation in policy and planning for the lands and seas (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr35">Duncan et al. 2019</a>). The principle of “legal pluralism,” where a plurality of legal systems is recognized (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr56">Hendry and Tatum 2018</a>), provides a solid foundation for recognizing and enforcing Indigenous sovereignty, tenure, and governance.</p><p><b>3. Support biocultural approaches to conservation led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities.</b> The top-down implementation of conservation agendas has often led to displacement and disenfranchisement of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, often involving criminalization and restrictions on livelihood activities and access to culturally valued resources (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr10">Babai et al. 2015</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr12">Balée et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr71">Kohler and Brondizio 2017</a>). Indigenous-led, community-based, and biocultural conservation efforts (e.g., community conservancies, Indigenous Protected Areas) offer some of the most effective, equitable, and efficient ways to safeguard both biological and cultural diversity (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr05">Artelle et al. 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr50">Gavin et al. 2015</a>). However, these often remain poorly supported and are, thus, challenging to implement (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr107">Reo et al. 2017</a>). Conservation financing that supports local efforts in the context of such projects is often critical (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr115">Rodewald et al. 2020</a>). There are many examples around the world of successful land- and sea-based stewardship and monitoring programs that exemplify Indigenous Peoples and local communities taking a lead role in the ongoing operational management of conservation activities on their territories (see <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr44">FPP et al. 2020</a>).</p><p><b>4. Make a focus of restoring those areas that are critical for culturally significant landscapes, species, and practices.</b> In addition to focusing conservation efforts and funding toward rare species or ecosystems, restoration policies and planning should also prioritize cultural keystone species and landscapes on which Indigenous Peoples and local communities rely (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr13">Benner et al. 2021</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr29">Cuerrier et al. 2015</a>). As some Māori elders note, even if knowledge is lost by humans, it remains alive if species or ecosystems persist. This persistence also allows for relearning of lost information. Many Indigenous Peoples and local communities worldwide are taking action to restore ecosystems and species that are important to them (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr124">Senos et al. 2006</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr152">Wehi and Lord 2017</a>). As we enter the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, Indigenous Peoples and local communities should be recognized as critical stake-, rights-, and knowledge-holders in any roadmap for global ecosystem restoration (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr28">Chazdon et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr96">Ogar et al. 2020</a>).</p><p><b>5. Support community-led monitoring efforts that build on local cultural perspectives.</b> Indigenous Peoples and local communities are often subjected to policies with externally codified criteria and indicators for monitoring. Such monitoring does not effectively support communities in realizing their self-determined visions and often precludes tracking culturally appropriate indicators (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr129">Sterling et al. 2017</a>). Indicators lacking community-level input can discount, misrepresent, or undermine ILK systems (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr99">Pascua et al. 2017</a>). Supporting community-led monitoring programs will lead to indicators that better reflect the needs, views, and knowledge systems of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr31">David-Chavez and Gavin 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr90">Molnár and Babai 2021</a>).</p><p><b>6. Support initiatives that specifically recognize and promote gender-specific contributions to ILK maintenance.</b> Policies and initiatives seeking to maintain and revitalize ILK should pay attention to the importance of gender relations in defining access, use, and knowledge of natural resources (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr102">Pfeiffer and Butz 2005</a>); this entails acknowledging that people of different genders often interact with nature in different ways and, thus, will hold different aspects of ILK (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr100">Peluso 1991</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr147">Voeks 2007</a>). Recognizing gender-specific knowledge and expertise can help promote equity and social justice from a biocultural perspective, thereby contributing to reduce gendered inequalities (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr33">Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr151">Wall et al. 2018</a>).</p><p><b>7. Respect the spiritual practices and rituals of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.</b> Colonial-settler religious institutions have a legacy of ignoring or actively erasing the spiritual and ceremonial practices of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. We call for ethical spaces within and beyond religious organizations where Indigenous and local leaders can reevaluate and revitalize spiritual and ceremonial practices on their own terms. Support should be given to re-learning and restoring place- and history-based spiritual and ceremonial ILK, customs, norms, and rituals that inform respectful interactions with all beings (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr68">Kandari et al. 2014</a>) and those that enhance understanding of why these spiritual practices are important for environmental stewardship (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr18">Borrows 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr69">Kealiikanakaoleohaililani et al. 2018</a>).</p><p><b>8. Support Indigenous Peoples and local communities to ensure the intergenerational transmission of ILK systems.</b> ILK systems are maintained by transmission through diverse, culturally based, mutually reinforcing pathways. Ensuring that children and youth are able to interact with their cultural heritage and experience land-based learning with their elders are critical components of knowledge transmission (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr19">Bowra et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr127">Snively and Williams 2016</a>). ILK is often encoded in narratives, language, and art-based forms, such as dance, song, storytelling, ceremonies, and crafts (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr156">Woodward et al. 2020</a>). What is perceived as art is often a cultural blueprint that codifies law and protocols and maintains and mobilizes peoples' intimate relations with their local ecologies (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr42">Fernández-Llamazares and Lepofsky 2019</a>; Jackson, in press). As such, it is paramount to support the efforts of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in documenting and revitalizing their cultural traditions and languages. Examples include websites that archive oral histories in the communities' own words<sup><a href="https://bioone.org/#fn03">2</a></sup>, community-based eco-cultural reference books<sup><a href="https://bioone.org/#fn04">3</a></sup>, and Indigenous language revitalization programs (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr58">Hobson et al. 2010</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr104">Rehg and Campbell 2018</a>).</p><p><b>9. Support culturally appropriate educational curricula that are respectful, relevant, and accessible to Indigenous Peoples and local communities.</b> State and national educational systems are often predicated on colonial formats that do not fully recognize that ILK has been transmitted intergenerationally for millennia in learning contexts. In contrast, education programs initiated and managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities promote the maintenance of ILK systems (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr83">McCarter et al. 2014</a>). Recognition can take the form of incorporating novel approaches to teaching drawn from Indigenous ways of sharing knowledge (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr02">Archibald et al. 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr07">Atalay 2020</a>) and creating non-conventional teaching methods that go beyond academic silos and more fluidly reflect ILK and ways of knowing (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr67">Kana'iaupuni et al. 2017</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr83">McCarter et al. 2014</a>). State and national education standards should embrace multilingualism and include place-based knowledge and practices, as well as learning opportunities from elders. We encourage academic institutions to take a stronger stand on epistemic pluralism, by hiring Indigenous Peoples and local communities to teach ILK content, opening up spaces for ILK systems, and recognizing them as opportunities for innovation and excellence.</p><p><b>10. Recognize and protect tangible and non-tangible heritage related to ILK.</b> Around the world, there is ongoing and pervasive appropriation and destruction—both willful and unintentional—of the heritage of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Protection is required of objects and places, as well as the stories, relationships, responsibilities, and knowledge associated with them (Nicholas and Bell, in press). Recent developments in constitutional and international human rights law have set the stage for a reassessment and reformulation of ineffective heritage laws and policies, including a reassessment of culture-specific definitions of “heritage.” The shift in thinking about heritage as property to it being an essential aspect of human rights in international law is supported by findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and UNDRIP, among other initiatives.</p><p><b>11. Secure intellectual property rights associated with ILK through relevant legal mechanisms and standards, while respecting the cultural protocols, rituals, and institutions that regulate ILK transmission.</b> There is a long and sorry history of the misappropriation of intellectual property associated with ILK (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr136">Tuhiwai Smith 2012</a>) and international law often does not provide adequate protection of property rights associated with ILK (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr57">Hill et al. 2020</a>). Well-designed national and international laws and policies are urgently needed to protect the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities over their knowledge systems and their cultural heritage. Fundamental to preventing ILK misappropriation and, indeed, the continuance of ILK is the need for these laws and policies to embody respect for and legal recognition of community protocols, Indigenous institutions, and customary law (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr44">FPP et al. 2020</a>).</p><p><b>12. Promote and enforce the application of the principle of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC).</b> International human rights law protects the right of Indigenous Peoples to give or withhold their FPIC in relation to any projects in their territories or around their knowledge systems. While widely accepted in the research community, FPIC should be practiced broadly, including in any development interventions in the territories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (e.g., pipelines, mining, infrastructure expansion). FPIC is a key element of the broader rights to self-determination of Indigenous Peoples enshrined in UNDRIP and other international agreements (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr51">Golan et al. 2019</a>). Although the implementation of FPIC faces several challenges on the ground (e.g., <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr26">Cariño 2005</a>), its legal significance is gaining recognition at the global level and it lays a solid foundation for the protection of ILK systems against misappropriation. Collective rights to FPIC should also be extended to local communities who have long-term cultural connections to lands and waters.</p><p><b>13. Support Indigenous data sovereignty.</b> An integral part of securing intellectual property rights is recognizing the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to govern the collection, ownership, and access of data relating to their land base, community, and shared culture (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr73">Kukutai and Taylor 2016</a>). This includes the return of archived ILK records, as well as genetic, biological, and cultural materials (e.g., artifacts, seeds). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance<sup><a href="https://bioone.org/#fn05">4</a></sup>, as well as Canada's First Nations Principles of ownership, control, access, and possession (OCAP<sup><a href="https://bioone.org/#fn06">5</a></sup>) support Indigenous rights to self-governance and authority to control the cultural heritage embedded in their knowledge systems and practices. We likewise support the development of data governance principles driven by local communities.</p><p><b>14. Foster Indigenous-led, decolonizing, and participatory research and knowledge co-production, guided by respectful, ethical, and reciprocal relationships between researchers and ILK holders.</b> Historically, research on ILK was often undertaken with ethnocentric paradigms, colonizing methodologies, and tacitly oppressive research practices (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr85">McGregor et al. 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr136">Tuhiwai Smith 2012</a>). In contrast, there are now numerous examples of Indigenous-led, decolonizing, and/or participatory research practicessupportingtherightsandcapacities of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr90">Molnár and Babai 2021</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr156">Woodward et al. 2020</a>). Researchers working with ILK systems should abide to normative standards for responsible and ethical research practice, employ decolonizing methodologies, and be fully informed of local values and epistemologies, as well as obligations regarding intellectual property and benefit sharing (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr31">David-Chavez and Gavin 2018</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr154">Wheeler et al. 2020</a>). Similarly, it is critical to advance mechanisms for complementing ILK systems and science in transparent, constructive, and mutually enriching ways (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr133">Tengö et al. 2014</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr135">Torrents-Ticó et al. 2021</a>). These ways must ensure that ILK systems are not co-opted or assimilated by science and that researchers recognize ILK holders as legitimate representatives of distinct epistemic traditions (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr57">Hill et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr78">Ludwig and El-Hani 2020</a>).</p><p><b>15. Support ILK holders on the frontlines of conflict.</b> ILK holders are often leaders in struggles to defend traditional territories from resource development and other externally imposed activities (i.e., without FPIC). State-funded or state-supported projects often create landscapes of violence in which Indigenous Peoples and local communities are the first casualties and the last line of defense (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr03">Armstrong and Brown 2019</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr128">Spice 2018</a>). These conflicts can result in unlawful arrests, imprisonment, surveillance, and even death (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr122">Scheidel et al. 2020</a>). We call on humanity to stand up for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities and to protect environmental defenders from violence and repression.</p></div><div><a></a><h2>Moving Forward</h2><p>Our recommendations for action to the global community fall into six broad categories (<a href="https://bioone.org/#t01">Table 1</a>). The need to protect, monitor, and honor cultural heritage pervades all our recommendations and is a foundation for all other efforts. For people whose culture, heritage, lifestyle, health, and food systems depend on the local lands and waters around them, it is no surprise that actions focused on rights, access, and equity in land and resource management and decision-making are also a central focus of the recommendations. Collectively, the other recommendations illustrate the web of social, educational, governance, and ecological issues facing Indigenous Peoples and local communities and what can be done to begin to address them.</p><p>The cumulative, diverse, interacting, and pervasive pressures of the colonial and globalized post-colonial world continue to drive the loss of ILK systems worldwide, despite their resilience and adaptability. Such threats can only be addressed effectively through urgent and concerted efforts that foster transformative change, tackling deep structural interventions, systemic barriers, and leverage points in the current systems of decision-making. Our recommendations offer guidance for putting in place the seeds for this foundational, system-wide shift away from “business as usual” towards governance approaches rooted in, and informed by, ILK systems. We call on the global community to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities in safeguarding and restoring the cultural and ecological tapestries that ILK systems support and of which they are a part. This will entail a pervasive shift across sectors in how ILK systems, their knowledge holders, and their multiple expressions are recognized, honored, and sustained. Such actions are inextricably linked to global efforts to address biodiversity loss and climate change (<a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr44">FPP et al. 2020</a>; <a href="https://bioone.org/#bibr60">IPBES 2019</a>). They highlight the interpenetration of current social, cultural, ecological, and economic factors with historical issues of colonialism, social justice, and inequity.</p></div></div>||||I|||| Sign In View Cart Help










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 Home > Journals > Journal of Ethnobiology > Volume 41 > Issue 2 > Article
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 5 July 2021 Scientists' Warning to Humanity on Threats to Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems
 Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares , Dana Lepofsky , Ken Lertzman , Chelsey Geralda Armstrong , Eduardo S. Brondizio , Michael C. Gavin , Phil O'B. Lyver , George P. Nicholas , Pua'ala Pascua , Nicholas J. Reo , Victoria Reyes-García , Nancy J. Turner , Johanna Yletyinen , E. N. Anderson , William Balée , Joji Cariño , Dominique M. David-Chavez , Christopher P. Dunn , Stephen C. Garnett , Spencer Greening (La'goot) , Shain Jackson (Niniwum Selapem) , Harriet Kuhnlein , Zsolt Molnár , Guillaume Odonne , Gunn-Britt Retter , William J. Ripple , László Sáfián , Abolfazl Sharifian Bahraman , Miquel Torrents-Ticó , Mehana Blaich Vaughan
 Author Affiliations +


































 J. of Ethnobiology, 41(2):144-169 (2021). https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.144
 * ARTICLE
 + Introduction
 + Continuity, Change, and Resilience in Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems
 + The Multidimensionality of Threats to ILK Systems
 + Interwoven Challenges and Consequences: Three Case Studies
 + Case Study 1. Indigenous Conservation of a Threatened Cultural Keystone Species: Pacific Herring
 + Case Study 2. Ethnobotanical Knowledge is Essential for Tsimane' Health and Nutrition
 + Case Study 3. Māori ILK and Customary Practices Support the Conservation and Sustainable Use of a Burrowing Seabird
 + Addressing Challenges Faced by Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems
 + Moving Forward
 * FIGURES & TABLES
 * SUPPLEMENTAL CONTENT
 * REFERENCES
 * CITED BY
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 Abstract


 The knowledge systems and practices of Indigenous Peoples and local communities play critical roles in safeguarding the biological and cultural diversity of our planet. Globalization, government policies, capitalism, colonialism, and other rapid social-ecological changes threaten the relationships between Indigenous Peoples and local communities and their environments, thereby challenging the continuity and dynamism of Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK). In this article, we contribute to the “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity,” issued by the Alliance of World Scientists, by exploring opportunities for sustaining ILK systems on behalf of the future stewardship of our planet. Our warning raises the alarm about the pervasive and ubiquitous erosion of knowledge and practice and the social and ecological consequences of this erosion. While ILK systems can be adaptable and resilient, the foundations of these knowledge systems are compromised by ongoing suppression, misrepresentation, appropriation, assimilation, disconnection, and destruction of biocultural heritage. Three case studies illustrate these processes and how protecting ILK is central to biocultural conservation. We conclude with 15 recommendations that call for the recognition and support of Indigenous Peoples and local communities and their knowledge systems. Enacting these recommendations will entail a transformative and sustained shift in how ILK systems, their knowledge holders, and their multiple expressions in lands and waters are recognized, affirmed, and valued. We appeal for urgent action to support the efforts of Indigenous Peoples and local communities around the world to maintain their knowledge systems, languages, stewardship rights, ties to lands and waters, and the biocultural integrity of their territories—on which we all depend.


 Introduction

 Indigenous Peoples and local communities have long histories of place-based living and time-honored traditions generating intricate and complex systems of knowledge about the world around them (Berkes 2017; McGregor et al. 2018; Whyte 2013). Such sophisticated sets of knowledge and practice are broadly referred to as Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) (see Supplement A (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf) for a discussion of terminology). These systems of knowledge and practice have been passed down from generation to generation through oral transmission, expressive culture, rituals, hands-on place-based learning, and, more recently, in writing. Despite the wide diversity of ILK systems, they often share a strong emphasis on nurturing positive, reciprocal, and responsible relationships among humans and their non-human kin (Anderson 2014; Diver et al. 2019; Reo 2019), are grounded in lived experiences, and are anchored in Indigenous and local governance, cosmology, ideology, language, and religion (Turner 2020; Turner et al. 2008). ILK systems are an important part of humanity's heritage and an invaluable living repository of in-depth information on how to safeguard life on Earth (Dunn 2017; FPP et al. 2020; IPBES 2019).

 ILK systems worldwide are at risk of attrition as a direct result of the compounded forces of globalization, colonialism, political oppression, and economic interests on the territories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (Cámara-Leret et al. 2019; Lyver et al. 2019a; Tang and Gavin 2016; Figure 1). Although ILK is inherently dynamic and, to some extent, capable of adapting to changing political and social-ecological scenarios (Jackson 2018; Quinlan and Quinlan 2007), substantial bodies of ILK are being lost at alarming rates (Gaup Eira et al. 2018; Reyes-García et al. 2013a, 2013b; see also Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)). Such losses alter the foundations of peoples' cultures and livelihoods, and result in poverty, dispossession, and ongoing cultural erosion (Armstrong and Brown 2019; Ford et al. 2020; Reo et al. 2019). Consequently, Indigenous Peoples and local communities experience disproportionate impacts from social and environmental changes (Dunn 2017; Savo et al. 2016).

 It has been shown that ILK systems play a fundamental role in supporting and achieving local, regional, and planetary sustainability (Brondizio et al. 2021a; IPBES 2019). A substantial proportion of the world's wild and domesticated biodiversity lies on lands and in waters traditionally stewarded by Indigenous Peoples and local communities (Ellis et al. 2021; Garnett et al. 2018; Molnár and Babai 2021); these territories are strongholds for crucial environmental functions that contribute to human and non-human well-being, including mitigation of climate change (Fa et al. 2020; FPP et al. 2020; RRI 2018). Despite tremendous pressures from industrial resource extraction and other anthropogenic drivers, globally, biodiversity is declining less rapidly in the territories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities than in ecosystems outside of them (Díaz et al. 2019; FPP et al. 2020; IPBES 2019). The maintenance of much of this biodiversity is often due to the leadership of these communities fighting to keep these spaces free from intensive development and to maintain their ecological and cultural integrity (Armstrong and Brown 2019; Frainer et al. 2020; Spice 2018).

 In this article, we build on the manifesto “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity,” issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists (1992) and re-issued 25 years later by the Alliance of World Scientists and endorsed by more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries (Ripple et al. 2017). In the 2017 warning, humanity was urged to practice more environmentally sustainable alternatives to “business as usual” economic development to avoid irreversible impacts on our planet. Following the wide distribution of this warning, the Alliance of World Scientists called for follow-up papers on specific topics of global concern. We answer their call and explore critical means for sustaining ILK systems for better stewardship of our planet and for the well-being of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. In writing this, we seek to raise awareness among all humanity about the local, regional, and global importance of ILK systems—whether operating as individuals or communities, or as part of organizations in both the private and public sectors.

 We write this from our perspectives as ethnobiologists, environmental anthropologists, natural resource scientists, and conservation biologists. Our authorship is epistemically diverse and includes nine Indigenous community perspectives (i.e., Arawak Taíno, Coast Salish, Chippewa, Native Hawaiian, Ibaloi, Māori, Tsimshian, and Saami). Although our overall framing is heavily influenced by Western epistemic traditions, we address knowledge more as a social process than as a formal outcome. While ILK systems play an instrumental role in the protection of our planet's biological and cultural diversity, we view the maintenance of ILK systems and the lifeways in which they are embedded to be an inherent good in itself, irrespective of its contributions to safeguarding global public interests. Based on our experience, we largely focus on commonalities across ILK systems globally, while recognizing that distinct historical and contextual complexities underpin the myriad ways in which these systems are being pressured all over the world. Collectively, our goal is to raise the alarm about the interwoven social-ecological consequences of the active destruction of ILK and highlight strategic actions supporting Indigenous Peoples and local communities in sustaining their homelands and associated knowledge systems.

 Continuity, Change, and Resilience in Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems

 Despite myriad pressures on the lifeways of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, ILK systems demonstrate resilience to social-ecological changes (Ford et al. 2020; Vaughan 2018). This resilience is largely due to the inherently adaptive and dynamic nature of ILK systems (Athayde et al. 2017; Berkes et al. 2000; Lam et al. 2020). These systems have developed in the context of changing local environments and have been evaluated and modified in relation to new information and social challenges, often over millennia (Jackson 2018; Quinlan and Quinlan 2007; Vandebroek and Balick 2012). Resistance, adaptation, resilience, and transformation are all reflected in the histories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities as a result of their ongoing and arduous work to maintain their languages, cultural integrity, and ties to land, as well as diverse environmental stewardship practices (FPP et al. 2020; Mingorría 2021; Turner 2020). The adaptability and resilience of ILK systems is evident today in ecosystems around the world that bear evidence of millennia-old sustainable management by Indigenous Peoples and local communities (e.g., Balée et al. 2020; Lepofsky et al. 2017; Odonne et al. 2019). The specific practices involved are as varied as the ecosystems and the people from which they stem, and include the use of prescribed fire (e.g., Welch et al. 2013), terracing of steep or erodible slopes (e.g., Sandor and Homburg 2017), fertilizing and soil enhancement, thinning and pruning (e.g., Turner et al. 2013), and domestication of plants and animals (e.g., Aumeeruddy-Thomas et al. 2017), among many others. Across the vast majority of our planet, the historical and current land-uses of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, together with their interwoven practices and knowledge systems, are essential for understanding and sustaining our planet's biodiversity (Armstrong et al. 2021; Ellis et al. 2021).

 However, adaptive capacity and resilience are finite (see Walker et al. 2006), and mechanisms for absorbing change (e.g., flexibility in traditional practices, effective social networks) have been compromised by colonial settlement, land dispossession, state-sanctioned violence, and resource extraction (Figure 1), among many other processes (Galvin 2009; Par-lee et al. 2018; see also Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)). Furthermore, social-ecological changes happen today in many places at a rate that is incommensurate with intergenerational ILK transmission, experimentation, and development (Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2015; Salomon et al. 2019). Disruptions to social-ecological processes that integrate ILK into daily life (either implicitly or by force) have eroded and continue to impact the foundations of many ILK systems worldwide (e.g., Brosi et al. 2007; Bussmann et al. 2018; Hedges et al. 2020).

 While it is easy to focus on impacts to ecosystems and culture or on knowledge losses, this can overshadow other positive processes of change and adaptation (e.g., hybridization, innovation, revitalization) that are also present (Galvin 2009; Gómez-Baggethun and Reyes-García 2013). In particular, focusing on losses does not do justice to the immense and powerful continuity that is a hallmark of the cultures of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (McCarter et al. 2014; McMillen et al. 2017; Tareau et al. 2020). Similarly, the dynamic nature of ILK systems can be overlooked in culture “preservation” plans, which often purportedly aim to fix ILK in place and time (Gavin et al. 2015; Leonti 2011). Furthermore, the narrative framing ILK losses is also often problematic, as many communities affirm that their knowledge systems were not simply “lost,” but rather violently wrested from them and destroyed with intent (Simpson 2004). Other communities recognize this “lost” knowledge as dormant or “sleeping” (Hobson et al. 2010) or kept alive by the ancestors until it is ready to be re-awakened (Risling Baldy 2018). Additionally, framing of ILK systems in a constant state of loss and vulnerability can make some communities feel hopeless and hinder their efforts towards reclaiming, sustaining, and revitalizing their cultural traditions (see Haalboom and Natcher 2012). Thus, the challenge is to acknowledge and understand the different realities of loss, while affirming the ongoing struggle to nurture, revitalize, and enact deeply rooted cultural mechanisms of persistence, adaptation, and resilience.

 Figure 1.

 Some of the many threats to ILK systems and lifeways of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (outer boxes) and the interconnected consequences for social and ecological dimensions (central oval). Drivers of change can exert their influence quickly or over time in subtle and pernicious ways. Many of these linked threats and consequences are highlighted in this paper's case studies and 15 recommendations.

 The Multidimensionality of Threats to ILK Systems

 Threats to ILK systems ramify through complex pathways and result in diverse ecological and socio-cultural consequences. The factors that drive these pressures are familiar and replicated around the world and can be grouped in six main clusters (Figure 1): suppression of culture; misrepresentation of culture; appropriation of culture, land, and resources; assimilation; disconnection of people and their territories; and destruction of heritage, ecosystems, and ongoing violent displacement or even killing of the knowledge holders themselves. These socio-cultural impacts can be experienced by individuals, communities, and at regional scales, and can be gender- and age-specific (Turner and Turner 2008). The ecological consequences can manifest across scales of the biological hierarchy from genes to ecosystems and landscapes (Cámara-Leret et al. 2019; IPBES 2019).

 Losses of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity are inextricably linked and are often driven by the same pressures (Frainer et al. 2020; Gavin et al. 2015; Maffi 2005). For instance, it has been estimated that at least 40% of the world's 6700 languages are endangered (Moseley 2010), with two-thirds of all language extinctions occurring only in the past 60 years (Rehg and Campbell 2018). The majority of these endangered languages belong to Indigenous Peoples and local communities (Moseley 2010). Loss of language is often tied to broader losses of knowledge, collective identity, and cultural heritage (Dunn 2017; Frainer et al. 2020; Reo et al. 2019). Such losses largely arise via diverse pressures from settler colonial institutions and actions (Figure 1). These include assimilation policies (Haque and Patrick 2014), the theft and appropriation of traditional lands (Middleton 2011), the destruction of heritage sites (Nicholas and Smith 2020), the commodification of nature (Liverman 2004), and the rapid expansion of extractive frontiers (Scheidel et al. 2020; Spice 2018). These pressures impact both ILK holders, and the social and ecological spaces needed to enact and transmit such knowledge (Figure 1; Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)).

 These pressures can generate legacies of intergenerational trauma and reduced cultural engagement, leading to declines in peoples' physical and mental well-being, including feelings of shame and insignificance (Cunsolo Willox and Ellis 2018). Ultimately, these processes limit peoples' ability to engage in the many mutually reinforcing aspects of knowing and being. These include customary governance structures and institutions (Carson et al. 2018), the creation of arts, social gatherings (e.g., storytelling, music performances; Fernández-Llamazares and Lepofsky 2019), and the coming together for collecting and processing food (Kuhnlein et al. 2013), as well as for rituals and spiritual renewal (Kealiikanakaoleohaililani et al. 2018). Thus, loss of ILK can lead to declines in community cohesion, undermining prosocial behaviors that, among other things, help to prevent local resource depletion (Baggio et al. 2016).

 The erosion of ILK can lead to fracturing of the traditional values and management systems that have shaped and maintained ecosystems (Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2015; Jandreau and Berkes 2016; Lyver et al. 2019a). This includes the destabilizing of worldviews and norms that enforce and make sense of actions and beliefs about how to behave respectfully towards the environment and other beings (Turner et al. 2008; Umeek 2011; Whyte 2013). The resulting degradation of traditionally maintained ecosystems (e.g., through invasive species, overharvesting, pollution, changing flood and fire regimes, urbanization, soil erosion) has diverse cascading consequences. These include threats to human health and food security and sovereignty through reduced access to culturally important, locally available, healthy foods and other culturally valued resources (Kuhnlein et al. 2013; Reyes-García et al. 2019).

 Interwoven Challenges and Consequences: Three Case Studies

 In this section, we illustrate with three case studies the interwoven challenges facing ILK systems and the social and ecological consequences of these challenges. These examples are only a few of the very many ( Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)) in which ILK systems support the conservation of biological and cultural diversity and how a myriad of pressures (Figure 1) threaten the health of social-ecological systems (see also Rozzi et al. 2018; Tang and Gavin 2016; Turner and Turner 2008). They also illustrate how Indigenous Peoples and local communities are taking action to turn these trends around by applying ILK embedded in traditional management practices and governance. Collectively, the three case studies reflect a range of contexts where ILK is being challenged. The first focuses on a single species which is valued among several cultural groups, the second on a suite of species in one cultural group, and the third on one species in one cultural group (Figure 2).

 Figure 2.

 Images from three case studies illustrating the challenges facing ILK systems, the consequences of those challenges, and the role of ILK in maintaining healthy ecosystems. L to R: William Gladstone, long-time activist for Heiltsuk First Nation herring rights, holding traditionally harvested herring roe on hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) boughs (D. Lepofsky); Tsimane' woman preparing an herbal tea of Triplaris americana (chij in Tsimane' language), used to treat diarrhea (Á. Fernández-Llamazares); Rakiura muttonbirding expert, late John Wixon, demonstrates to Ngāti Awa birders on Moutohorā the process of plucking Grey-faced Petrel (Pterodroma gouldi) chicks (Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Awa).

 Case Study 1. Indigenous Conservation of a Threatened Cultural Keystone Species: Pacific Herring

 The social-ecological history of Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) on the northwest coast of North America illustrates the iterative and intertwined connections among threats to ILK and the catastrophic consequences of those losses for people and other biota1. Indigenous place names, oral traditions, archaeological records, and ethnohistoric and ethnographic accounts demonstrate the profound extent to which the once consistently abundant herring were woven into coastal biocultural systems (Gauvreau et al. 2017; McKechnie et al. 2014). Extensive bodies of ecological knowledge, explicit management practices, and intricate systems of marine tenure dictated how to respectfully and sustainably harvest herring fish and roe for daily and ceremonial consumption as well as for trade (e.g., Gauvreau et al. 2017; Salomon et al. 2019). These actions were situated within age-old laws and teachings that provided guidance about how to interact responsibly with other beings and ecosystems. In short, for millennia, this small forage fish was intertwined into the very identities of Indigenous communities throughout the northeastern Pacific.

 These intimate, long-term, and sustainable relationships between coastal Indigenous Peoples and herring began to be eroded by industrial fisheries in the late nineteenth century and increasingly racialized and exclusionary policies in the twentieth century. Regulatory control of herring fisheries by federal fisheries agencies replaced the historically resilient systems of local management and governance, reducing community access to herring, prohibiting traditional harvesting methods (i.e., fish traps), and allowing commercial overfishing to deplete stocks (Essington et al. 2015). Reduced herring populations had ramifying consequences through marine food webs and the decline in herring challenged the continuity of traditional systems of herring management, including mechanisms for sharing knowledge intergenerationally (Gauvreau et al. 2017; Salomon et al. 2019). Ultimately, reduced access to herring had significant impacts on the mental and physical health and well-being of Indigenous communities, including, for some, a deep and constant sadness at having lost access to this cultural staple. In addition, the persistent resistance on the part of fisheries managers and policymakers to fully recognize ILK of herring has enabled a shifted ecological baseline with respect to herring abundance and distribution.

 In recent decades, coastal Indigenous communities have led actions to protect herring stocks and to redirect the ecological and social trajectory of losses associated with declines in herring. These actions include Supreme Court challenges, engaging with management agencies, enforcing moratoria on commercial herring fishing in traditional territories, direct actions to stop commercial fleets, and creating partnerships among Nations with similar biocultural goals. Indigenous communities are also demanding co-management of the fisheries, prioritizing conservation and Indigenous food, social, and ceremonial needs, and integrating customary governance systems (Jones et al. 2017; Salomon et al. 2019; von der Porten et al. 2016, 2019). These actions have transformed the modern policy environment in relation to herring management and conservation. Revitalizing Indigenous relationships with Pacific herring and restoring its ecological roles within the coastal ecosystems are profoundly linked (Thornton and Moss 2021).

 Case Study 2. Ethnobotanical Knowledge is Essential for Tsimane' Health and Nutrition

 The Tsimane' people of the Bolivian Amazon have extensive ethnobotanical knowledge that is interwoven into their daily lives, creation stories, and rituals. This knowledge is not only essential for Tsimane' cultural identity and forest stewardship, but enhances the health, nutritional status, and well-being of Tsimane' knowledge-holders and their children (McDade et al. 2007; Reyes-García et al. 2010; Tanner et al. 2011). Furthermore, Tsimane' ethnobotanical knowledge erosion could have important implications for health sovereignty (Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016) and forest conservation (Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2018).

 Along with other aspects of their traditional livelihood, Tsimane' ethnobotanical knowledge has experienced profound changes since the 1950s. Changes in traditional livelihoods were stimulated by the arrival of missionaries, loggers, and highland agriculturalists, who pushed the Tsimane' to enter into the market economy and embrace formal settler education (Reyes-García et al. 2014). These changes have pervasively influenced traditional pathways of intergenerational knowledge transmission (Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2015), resulting in alarming losses of ethnobotanical knowledge, particularly among villages and individuals more exposed to the market economy (Reyes-García et al. 2013a, 2013b).

 Several studies have documented the potential effects of ethnobotanical knowledge loss on Tsimane' health and nutritional status, for example, by precipitating a rapid dietary transition (Reyes-García et al. 2019). A seminal study by McDade et al. (2007) found that mothers with lower levels of ethnobotanical knowledge were more likely to have less healthy children (e.g., stunted growth, inflammation) than plant-savvy mothers, highlighting the crucial role of women as knowledge gatekeepers (see also Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016). Furthermore, Tsimane' villages with greater levels of ethnobotanical knowledge tend to be surrounded by healthier forest ecosystems than those where knowledge has been substantially eroded (Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2018; Pérez-Llorente et al. 2013). Landscape fragmentation and deforestation exert impacts on both Tsimane' health and nutrition, as they reduce access to a diverse pool of wild foods and medicinal plants (Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016; Reyes-García et al. 2019).

 The Tsimane' have taken several steps to document their ethnobotanical knowledge and to raise awareness of its values (e.g., radio programs, books, cultural exhibitions; Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2020). The Tsimane' have also engaged in participatory mapping projects to defend their territory and have participated in marches in defence of Indigenous sovereignty (Reyes-García et al. 2014) in an attempt to secure the territories on which their livelihoods, knowledge systems, and ethnomedicinal cabinets are grounded. Despite these efforts, the Tsimane' knowledge system is undergoing an accelerated process of transition, including profound losses in several ethnobotanical knowledge domains (Reyes-García et al. 2013b). Such losses could have cascading effects on Tsimane' health and nutrition, paralleling similar trends among several Indigenous communities across the Amazon (e.g., Caballero-Serrano et al. 2019; Cámara-Leret et al. 2019).

 Case Study 3. Māori ILK and Customary Practices Support the Conservation and Sustainable Use of a Burrowing Seabird

 Burrowing petrels (e.g., Sooty Shear-water, Ardenna grisea, locally known as tītī; Grey-faced Petrel, Pterodroma gouldi, locally known as oi, manu oi, or kuia) are culturally significant species for some Māori tribes in New Zealand. The customary harvest of chicks for food from offshore islands link the people to other values such as tribal identity, connection to place, expressions of cultural heritage, and individual and community well-being, to name a few (Lyver et al. 2008). Harvesting by families facilitates ILK transfer and provides opportunities for place-specific environmental and communal experiences to be shared across generations. The harvest contributes to the upholding of customary authority and guardianship responsibilities, including the maintenance, adaptation, and transfer of ILK. Traditional management practices also provide models for how to responsibly and sustainably harvest petrel species.

 Delayed maturation and low reproductive rates of petrels mean they are less able to cope with predation by introduced mammalian predators (e.g., stoat [Mustela erminea] and Norway rat [Rattus norvegicus]) or over-exploitation by humans (Jones et al. 2011). Aware of the petrel's demographic limitations, Māori harvesters have used a range of customary practices to minimize or distribute harvest pressure on breeding populations (Kitson and Moller 2008; Lyver et al. 2019b). Access to the islands is restricted to the last half of the breeding season to avoid disturbance and abandonment of nests. Adults are never harvested because of the demographic impact of removing breeding birds from the population. Uniquely, some of these customary practices for petrel populations and their island habitats are also recognized in New Zealand law (e.g., New Zealand Government 1978).

 Temporary harvest moratoria can also be used to minimize population impacts. In the 1960s, one tribe placed a 50-year harvest moratorium over a harvest from one island because the harvesters were concerned that the extensive predation of eggs and chicks by Norway rats (Imber et al. 2000) was causing petrel numbers to decline. In recent years, however, with the recovery of the petrel numbers in this breeding colony, the tribe has re-established a limited customary harvest to maintain the practice and culture and regenerate the knowledge and connections to the island and birds (Jones et al. 2015).

 As part of revitalizing these customary practices, southern birders were invited by a northern tribe to participate in the harvest and share knowledge relating to the catching and preparation of the chicks. This connection provided an opportunity for the northern harvesters to observe harvesting techniques used in the south, and to adapt the practices to their current circumstances. By regaining ILK, harvesters are re-establishing their cultural links to their petrels, the islands, and the wider marine environment.

 These customary practices by Māori, however, contrast with the legislative prohibitions by successive governments in New Zealand which have indefinitely blocked communities from harvesting and accessing many native plants and animals over the last century (Lyver et al. 2019a, 2019b; Ruru et al. 2017). The resulting conservation and wildlife policies have had a pervasive impact on Māori ILK and culture. In some cases, national prohibition regulations were instituted by government agencies even when some species were still regionally abundant and hugely important to remote Māori communities for food and culture. Māori communities around New Zealand are still living with these policies and their ongoing cultural ramifications, including impacts on ILK systems.

 Addressing Challenges Faced by Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems

 Since the 1950s, numerous international efforts have emerged to recognize the rights and knowledge systems of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (Brondizio et al. 2021a, 2021b; Golan et al. 2019). These initiatives were spearheaded by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, often with the support of scientists, artists, and civil organizations. Together, they increased awareness about the interlocked plight of ILK systems, colonization, and environmental degradation.

 Along with these global efforts, the past three decades have also witnessed the emergence of a myriad of on-the-ground initiatives focused on the conservation and revitalization of ILK systems (Figure 3; Benyei et al. 2020; Gavin et al. 2015; McCarter et al. 2014). Such place-based initiatives are more inclusive but also more effective when articulated from the bottom-up and within a collaborative framework (e.g., Bowra et al. 2020; Brondizio et al. 2021b; Singh et al. 2010). That is, while policies and legislation that address ILK loss are needed at multiple scales (Tang and Gavin 2016), in situ place-based initiatives are crucial in leveraging those policies and legislation to tackle the underlying drivers of ILK deterioration (see Figure 1 for a list of drivers).

 In the following, we identify 15 recommendations to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities to sustain and protect their knowledge systems and the lifeways connected to them (Table 1; Hill et al. 2020; Woodward et al. 2020). Each recommendation is founded on a biocultural approach, acknowledging the idea that nature and culture can be mutually enriching, and recognizing the potential of ILK for better environmental stewardship of our planet (Figure 3; Frainer et al. 2020; Gavin et al. 2015). All of our recommendations are consistent with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and many of its articles reflect the specific concerns identified here (see United Nations 2011). Our perspective is distinct in highlighting the interconnections between ILK, biodiversity, and ecosystem health in the context of processes driving transformations of those systems (Figure 1), and in including local communities ( Supplement A (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)).

 These recommendations are directed to decision-makers at all levels, from global and regional inter-governmental organizations, to national, sub-national, and local governments, the private sector (including local, national and transnational corporations), civil society (including citizens, community groups, and NGOs), donor agencies, and research and educational organizations. While several recommendations are oriented towards policy making, all of them should be nevertheless understood as a direct appeal to the decision-making power that individuals and communities hold in realizing transformative change. They are also an invitation to the global community to add their voices to the concerns raised in this warning and to advocate for the protection of Indigenous Peoples' rights, lifeways, territories, and knowledge systems across scales. We specifically highlight efforts led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities to address challenges to their knowledge systems as an inspiration for acting on our warning (Figure 3). Supporting Indigenous Peoples and local communities to secure and strengthen collective systems of tenure, governance, and ways of life is one of the most powerful ways to safeguard ecosystems from intensive and/or unnecessary development and to maintain the biocultural integrity of the territories in which ILK is embedded (Berkes 2021; FPP et al. 2020; Turner 2020). We offer these recommendations in the spirit of supporting Indigenous sovereignty, to enable and support Indigenous Peoples and local communities' control over and management of their traditional territories and engagement with their local ecosystems, and to create a context that nurtures social and environmental justice.

 Figure 3.

 Some of the many initiatives led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities to address challenges to their knowledge systems and lifeways. A. Since 1989, Indigenous groups from the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the US connect with their culture on Tribal Canoe Journeys (M. Wunsch); B. Maasai women in the Greater Amboseli Ecosystem (south Kenya) restore degraded rangelands with traditional grass varieties (J. de la Malla); C. The Hokotehi Moriori Trust database of traditional knowledge on Rehoku (Chatham Islands, New Zealand) records arborglyphs/living ancestors in a sacred grove; Moriori descendant, Nicole Whaitiri (R. Giblin, courtesy Hokotehi Moriori Trust); D. A book of folktales told by Daasanach storytellers in Ileret (North Kenya) is now used in local schools (J. de la Malla); E. The Cahuaza family in Soledad (Peru), from the Kanpu Piyapi (Shawi) cultural group, look at a plant book created at the behest of village authorities (G. Odonne); F. Bakhtiari woman in Khuzestan Province (Iran), weaving chogha, a traditional men's overcoat (A. Sharifian); G. Ainu leaders teach teachers and students in Hokkaido (Japan) how to prepare Ainu traditional foods (kp-studios.com); H. Hungarian traditional herders share their ecological knowledge with protected area managers, and local and foreign researchers to resolve conservation conflicts and improve agricultural regulations (A. Varga); I. In collaboration with the Island Food Community of Pohnpei, the Federated States of Micronesia issued stamps to encourage eating carotenoidrich bananas (Anne Vézina, ProMusa and Biodiversity International); J. The Shipibo-Konibo community of Santa Clara de Uchunya demand that Peru's Constitutional Court order the return of their lands that were dispossessed for oil palm expansion (FECONAU); K. Kānaka Maoli and Anishinaabek talk about responsibilities to protect Indigenous lands and languages at an Indigenous knowledge exchange, 2019 (N. Reo); L. Altar at the foot of Mauna Kea built and maintained by Native Hawaiians to honor this sacred place and their connections to it (P. Pascua). M. A community-based forest restoration project near Andasibe (east-central Madagascar) produces an annual average of 30,000 seedlings of 100 endemic tree species (J. de la Malla); N. Baka community members return from gathering non-timber forest products in East Cameroon (A. Surprenant); O. In this early season burn in the Mimal management area, Arnhem Land (NT, Australia), Lydia Lawrence is carrying on the age-old tradition of using fire to take care of the land (Mimal Rangers). See Supplemental Material C (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf) for additional reading about some of these initiatives.

 Table 1.

 Six overlapping, integrative themes emerge from the 15 recommendations to support ILK systems and those who champion them. Some themes, such as “Protect and Monitor Cultural Heritage” were addressed broadly by all or most recommendations. Others were addressed by a more focussed subset of recommendations. We include under the theme heading “Support ILK in educational systems” only those aspects of educational systems that have been particularly targeted and/or affected by colonial institutions. Similarly, FPIC (#12) should be a core element of the application of all our recommendations, but we only include this recommendation in themes where ideas about FPIC and its standards of practice are a particular focus of attention.

 1. Recognize the historical continuity, ongoing presence, and inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities on their traditional territories. In many jurisdictions worldwide, the very presence and distinctness of Indigenous Peoples and local communities is denied and redressing this is fundamental to sustaining social and environmental well-being (Asch et al. 2018; Vierros et al. 2020). Collectively, societies globally must recognize the place-based rights, knowledge systems, and lifeways of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, including both access rights and collective choice rights to manage human-environment relationships on their own terms (e.g., Schlager and Ostrom 1993). The most immediate and direct way of honoring ILK systems is by demarcating and returning lands to Indigenous Peoples and local communities, recognizing their rights, institutions, and governance authority on those lands, and removing obstacles to their ongoing and long-term relationships with their lands and waters, on their own terms (FPP et al. 2020; Lyver et al. 2019a).

 2. Ensure full and effective participation and engagement of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in regional, national, and international decision-making about land, ocean spaces, natural resource management, and climate change mitigation. Indigenous Peoples and local communities should have a lead place at the table in forums and discussions about the state and future of our planet, and their knowledge systems and practices should be recognized as critical to global sustainability (Berkes 2021; Garnett et al. 2018). Despite increased acknowledgment of the importance of ILK systems to environmental governance (IPBES 2019), Indigenous Peoples and local communities face substantial barriers to participation in policy and planning for the lands and seas (Duncan et al. 2019). The principle of “legal pluralism,” where a plurality of legal systems is recognized (Hendry and Tatum 2018), provides a solid foundation for recognizing and enforcing Indigenous sovereignty, tenure, and governance.

 3. Support biocultural approaches to conservation led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. The top-down implementation of conservation agendas has often led to displacement and disenfranchisement of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, often involving criminalization and restrictions on livelihood activities and access to culturally valued resources (Babai et al. 2015; Balée et al. 2020; Kohler and Brondizio 2017). Indigenous-led, community-based, and biocultural conservation efforts (e.g., community conservancies, Indigenous Protected Areas) offer some of the most effective, equitable, and efficient ways to safeguard both biological and cultural diversity (e.g., Artelle et al. 2019; Gavin et al. 2015). However, these often remain poorly supported and are, thus, challenging to implement (Reo et al. 2017). Conservation financing that supports local efforts in the context of such projects is often critical (e.g., Rodewald et al. 2020). There are many examples around the world of successful land- and sea-based stewardship and monitoring programs that exemplify Indigenous Peoples and local communities taking a lead role in the ongoing operational management of conservation activities on their territories (see FPP et al. 2020).

 4. Make a focus of restoring those areas that are critical for culturally significant landscapes, species, and practices. In addition to focusing conservation efforts and funding toward rare species or ecosystems, restoration policies and planning should also prioritize cultural keystone species and landscapes on which Indigenous Peoples and local communities rely (Benner et al. 2021; Cuerrier et al. 2015). As some Māori elders note, even if knowledge is lost by humans, it remains alive if species or ecosystems persist. This persistence also allows for relearning of lost information. Many Indigenous Peoples and local communities worldwide are taking action to restore ecosystems and species that are important to them (e.g., Senos et al. 2006; Wehi and Lord 2017). As we enter the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, Indigenous Peoples and local communities should be recognized as critical stake-, rights-, and knowledge-holders in any roadmap for global ecosystem restoration (Chazdon et al. 2020; Ogar et al. 2020).

 5. Support community-led monitoring efforts that build on local cultural perspectives. Indigenous Peoples and local communities are often subjected to policies with externally codified criteria and indicators for monitoring. Such monitoring does not effectively support communities in realizing their self-determined visions and often precludes tracking culturally appropriate indicators (Sterling et al. 2017). Indicators lacking community-level input can discount, misrepresent, or undermine ILK systems (Pascua et al. 2017). Supporting community-led monitoring programs will lead to indicators that better reflect the needs, views, and knowledge systems of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (David-Chavez and Gavin 2018; Molnár and Babai 2021).

 6. Support initiatives that specifically recognize and promote gender-specific contributions to ILK maintenance. Policies and initiatives seeking to maintain and revitalize ILK should pay attention to the importance of gender relations in defining access, use, and knowledge of natural resources (Pfeiffer and Butz 2005); this entails acknowledging that people of different genders often interact with nature in different ways and, thus, will hold different aspects of ILK (e.g., Peluso 1991; Voeks 2007). Recognizing gender-specific knowledge and expertise can help promote equity and social justice from a biocultural perspective, thereby contributing to reduce gendered inequalities (Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016; Wall et al. 2018).

 7. Respect the spiritual practices and rituals of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Colonial-settler religious institutions have a legacy of ignoring or actively erasing the spiritual and ceremonial practices of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. We call for ethical spaces within and beyond religious organizations where Indigenous and local leaders can reevaluate and revitalize spiritual and ceremonial practices on their own terms. Support should be given to re-learning and restoring place- and history-based spiritual and ceremonial ILK, customs, norms, and rituals that inform respectful interactions with all beings (e.g., Kandari et al. 2014) and those that enhance understanding of why these spiritual practices are important for environmental stewardship (Borrows 2019; Kealiikanakaoleohaililani et al. 2018).

 8. Support Indigenous Peoples and local communities to ensure the intergenerational transmission of ILK systems. ILK systems are maintained by transmission through diverse, culturally based, mutually reinforcing pathways. Ensuring that children and youth are able to interact with their cultural heritage and experience land-based learning with their elders are critical components of knowledge transmission (Bowra et al. 2020; Snively and Williams 2016). ILK is often encoded in narratives, language, and art-based forms, such as dance, song, storytelling, ceremonies, and crafts (Woodward et al. 2020). What is perceived as art is often a cultural blueprint that codifies law and protocols and maintains and mobilizes peoples' intimate relations with their local ecologies (Fernández-Llamazares and Lepofsky 2019; Jackson, in press). As such, it is paramount to support the efforts of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in documenting and revitalizing their cultural traditions and languages. Examples include websites that archive oral histories in the communities' own words2, community-based eco-cultural reference books3, and Indigenous language revitalization programs (e.g., Hobson et al. 2010; Rehg and Campbell 2018).

 9. Support culturally appropriate educational curricula that are respectful, relevant, and accessible to Indigenous Peoples and local communities. State and national educational systems are often predicated on colonial formats that do not fully recognize that ILK has been transmitted intergenerationally for millennia in learning contexts. In contrast, education programs initiated and managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities promote the maintenance of ILK systems (McCarter et al. 2014). Recognition can take the form of incorporating novel approaches to teaching drawn from Indigenous ways of sharing knowledge (e.g., Archibald et al. 2019; Atalay 2020) and creating non-conventional teaching methods that go beyond academic silos and more fluidly reflect ILK and ways of knowing (e.g., Kana'iaupuni et al. 2017; McCarter et al. 2014). State and national education standards should embrace multilingualism and include place-based knowledge and practices, as well as learning opportunities from elders. We encourage academic institutions to take a stronger stand on epistemic pluralism, by hiring Indigenous Peoples and local communities to teach ILK content, opening up spaces for ILK systems, and recognizing them as opportunities for innovation and excellence.

 10. Recognize and protect tangible and non-tangible heritage related to ILK. Around the world, there is ongoing and pervasive appropriation and destruction—both willful and unintentional—of the heritage of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Protection is required of objects and places, as well as the stories, relationships, responsibilities, and knowledge associated with them (Nicholas and Bell, in press). Recent developments in constitutional and international human rights law have set the stage for a reassessment and reformulation of ineffective heritage laws and policies, including a reassessment of culture-specific definitions of “heritage.” The shift in thinking about heritage as property to it being an essential aspect of human rights in international law is supported by findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and UNDRIP, among other initiatives.

 11. Secure intellectual property rights associated with ILK through relevant legal mechanisms and standards, while respecting the cultural protocols, rituals, and institutions that regulate ILK transmission. There is a long and sorry history of the misappropriation of intellectual property associated with ILK (Tuhiwai Smith 2012) and international law often does not provide adequate protection of property rights associated with ILK (Hill et al. 2020). Well-designed national and international laws and policies are urgently needed to protect the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities over their knowledge systems and their cultural heritage. Fundamental to preventing ILK misappropriation and, indeed, the continuance of ILK is the need for these laws and policies to embody respect for and legal recognition of community protocols, Indigenous institutions, and customary law (FPP et al. 2020).

 12. Promote and enforce the application of the principle of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). International human rights law protects the right of Indigenous Peoples to give or withhold their FPIC in relation to any projects in their territories or around their knowledge systems. While widely accepted in the research community, FPIC should be practiced broadly, including in any development interventions in the territories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (e.g., pipelines, mining, infrastructure expansion). FPIC is a key element of the broader rights to self-determination of Indigenous Peoples enshrined in UNDRIP and other international agreements (Golan et al. 2019). Although the implementation of FPIC faces several challenges on the ground (e.g., Cariño 2005), its legal significance is gaining recognition at the global level and it lays a solid foundation for the protection of ILK systems against misappropriation. Collective rights to FPIC should also be extended to local communities who have long-term cultural connections to lands and waters.

 13. Support Indigenous data sovereignty. An integral part of securing intellectual property rights is recognizing the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to govern the collection, ownership, and access of data relating to their land base, community, and shared culture (Kukutai and Taylor 2016). This includes the return of archived ILK records, as well as genetic, biological, and cultural materials (e.g., artifacts, seeds). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance4, as well as Canada's First Nations Principles of ownership, control, access, and possession (OCAP5) support Indigenous rights to self-governance and authority to control the cultural heritage embedded in their knowledge systems and practices. We likewise support the development of data governance principles driven by local communities.

 14. Foster Indigenous-led, decolonizing, and participatory research and knowledge co-production, guided by respectful, ethical, and reciprocal relationships between researchers and ILK holders. Historically, research on ILK was often undertaken with ethnocentric paradigms, colonizing methodologies, and tacitly oppressive research practices (McGregor et al. 2018; Tuhiwai Smith 2012). In contrast, there are now numerous examples of Indigenous-led, decolonizing, and/or participatory research practicessupportingtherightsandcapacities of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (Molnár and Babai 2021; Woodward et al. 2020). Researchers working with ILK systems should abide to normative standards for responsible and ethical research practice, employ decolonizing methodologies, and be fully informed of local values and epistemologies, as well as obligations regarding intellectual property and benefit sharing (David-Chavez and Gavin 2018; Wheeler et al. 2020). Similarly, it is critical to advance mechanisms for complementing ILK systems and science in transparent, constructive, and mutually enriching ways (Tengö et al. 2014; Torrents-Ticó et al. 2021). These ways must ensure that ILK systems are not co-opted or assimilated by science and that researchers recognize ILK holders as legitimate representatives of distinct epistemic traditions (Hill et al. 2020; Ludwig and El-Hani 2020).

 15. Support ILK holders on the frontlines of conflict. ILK holders are often leaders in struggles to defend traditional territories from resource development and other externally imposed activities (i.e., without FPIC). State-funded or state-supported projects often create landscapes of violence in which Indigenous Peoples and local communities are the first casualties and the last line of defense (Armstrong and Brown 2019; Spice 2018). These conflicts can result in unlawful arrests, imprisonment, surveillance, and even death (Scheidel et al. 2020). We call on humanity to stand up for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities and to protect environmental defenders from violence and repression.

 Moving Forward

 Our recommendations for action to the global community fall into six broad categories (Table 1). The need to protect, monitor, and honor cultural heritage pervades all our recommendations and is a foundation for all other efforts. For people whose culture, heritage, lifestyle, health, and food systems depend on the local lands and waters around them, it is no surprise that actions focused on rights, access, and equity in land and resource management and decision-making are also a central focus of the recommendations. Collectively, the other recommendations illustrate the web of social, educational, governance, and ecological issues facing Indigenous Peoples and local communities and what can be done to begin to address them.

 The cumulative, diverse, interacting, and pervasive pressures of the colonial and globalized post-colonial world continue to drive the loss of ILK systems worldwide, despite their resilience and adaptability. Such threats can only be addressed effectively through urgent and concerted efforts that foster transformative change, tackling deep structural interventions, systemic barriers, and leverage points in the current systems of decision-making. Our recommendations offer guidance for putting in place the seeds for this foundational, system-wide shift away from “business as usual” towards governance approaches rooted in, and informed by, ILK systems. We call on the global community to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities in safeguarding and restoring the cultural and ecological tapestries that ILK systems support and of which they are a part. This will entail a pervasive shift across sectors in how ILK systems, their knowledge holders, and their multiple expressions are recognized, honored, and sustained. Such actions are inextricably linked to global efforts to address biodiversity loss and climate change (FPP et al. 2020; IPBES 2019). They highlight the interpenetration of current social, cultural, ecological, and economic factors with historical issues of colonialism, social justice, and inequity.

 Acknowledgments

 We dedicate this work to all the Indigenous Peoples and local communities who are working arduously to sustain their knowledge systems and connections to place. We hope that this piece serves to honor and support their efforts. We would also like to acknowledge the Society of Ethnobiology for providing a forum for learning, sharing, and ally-ship. It is through the Society that the seeds of this collective endeavor were planted. Our thanks to Journal of Ethnobiology editor, Robert Quinlan, for shepherding our paper through the review system, to the five peer reviewers, for their excellent suggestions, and to Louise Williams for help producing Figure 3 and for the many drafts of a figure that did not make the final cut. D. L. is grateful to the Northwest Coast reading group in the Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft. Á. F-Ll. acknowledges financial support from the Academy of Finland (grant nr. 311176), the Kone Foundation, and the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS). P. O'B. L and J. Y. were funded by New Zealand's Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment's Strategic Science Investment Funding. D. L. and K. L. would like to acknowledge David Lertzman, who devoted his life to protecting and honoring Indigenous knowledge.

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 Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares , Dana Lepofsky , Ken Lertzman , Chelsey Geralda Armstrong , Eduardo S. Brondizio , Michael C. Gavin , Phil O'B. Lyver , George P. Nicholas , Pua'ala Pascua , Nicholas J. Reo , Victoria Reyes-García , Nancy J. Turner , Johanna Yletyinen , E. N. Anderson , William Balée , Joji Cariño , Dominique M. David-Chavez , Christopher P. Dunn , Stephen C. Garnett , Spencer Greening (La'goot) , Shain Jackson (Niniwum Selapem) , Harriet Kuhnlein , Zsolt Molnár , Guillaume Odonne , Gunn-Britt Retter , William J. Ripple , László Sáfián , Abolfazl Sharifian Bahraman , Miquel Torrents-Ticó , and Mehana Blaich Vaughan "Scientists' Warning to Humanity on Threats to Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems," Journal of Ethnobiology 41(2), 144-169, (5 July 2021). https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.144


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 Journal of Ethnobiology
 Vol. 41 • No. 2
 July 2021
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Introduction Indigenous Peoples and local communities have long histories of place-based living and time-honored traditions generating intricate and complex systems of knowledge about the world around them (Berkes 2017; McGregor et al. 2018; Whyte 2013). Such sophisticated sets of knowledge and practice are broadly referred to as Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) (see  
Supplement A (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf) for a discussion of terminology). These systems of knowledge and practice have been passed down from generation to generation through oral transmission, expressive culture, rituals, hands-on place-based learning, and, more recently, in writing. Despite the wide diversity of ILK systems, they often share a strong emphasis on nurturing positive, reciprocal, and responsible relationships among humans and their non-human kin (Anderson 2014; Diver et al. 2019; Reo 2019), are grounded in lived experiences, and are anchored in Indigenous and local governance, cosmology, ideology, language, and religion (Turner 2020; Turner et al. 2008). ILK systems are an important part of humanity's heritage and an invaluable living repository of in-depth information on how to safeguard life on Earth (Dunn 2017; FPP et al. 2020; IPBES 2019). ILK systems worldwide are at risk of attrition as a direct result of the compounded forces of globalization, colonialism, political oppression, and economic interests on the territories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (Cámara-Leret et al. 2019; Lyver et al. 2019a; Tang and Gavin 2016; Figure 1). Although ILK is inherently dynamic and, to some extent, capable of adapting to changing political and social-ecological scenarios (Jackson 2018; Quinlan and Quinlan 2007), substantial bodies of ILK are being lost at alarming rates (Gaup Eira et al. 2018; Reyes-García et al. 2013a, 2013b; see also  Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)). Such losses alter the foundations of peoples' cultures and livelihoods, and result in poverty, dispossession, and ongoing cultural erosion (Armstrong and Brown 2019; Ford et al. 2020; Reo et al. 2019). Consequently, Indigenous Peoples and local communities experience disproportionate impacts from social and environmental changes (Dunn 2017; Savo et al. 2016). It has been shown that ILK systems play a fundamental role in supporting and achieving local, regional, and planetary sustainability (Brondizio et al. 2021a; IPBES 2019). A substantial proportion of the world's wild and domesticated biodiversity lies on lands and in waters traditionally stewarded by Indigenous Peoples and local communities (Ellis et al. 2021; Garnett et al. 2018; Molnár and Babai 2021); these territories are strongholds for crucial environmental functions that contribute to human and non-human well-being, including mitigation of climate change (Fa et al. 2020; FPP et al. 2020; RRI 2018). Despite tremendous pressures from industrial resource extraction and other anthropogenic drivers, globally, biodiversity is declining less rapidly in the territories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities than in ecosystems outside of them (Díaz et al. 2019; FPP et al. 2020; IPBES 2019). The maintenance of much of this biodiversity is often due to the leadership of these communities fighting to keep these spaces free from intensive development and to maintain their ecological and cultural integrity (Armstrong and Brown 2019; Frainer et al. 2020; Spice 2018). In this article, we build on the manifesto “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity,” issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists (1992) and re-issued 25 years later by the Alliance of World Scientists and endorsed by more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries (Ripple et al. 2017). In the 2017 warning, humanity was urged to practice more environmentally sustainable alternatives to “business as usual” economic development to avoid irreversible impacts on our planet. Following the wide distribution of this warning, the Alliance of World Scientists called for follow-up papers on specific topics of global concern. We answer their call and explore critical means for sustaining ILK systems for better stewardship of our planet and for the well-being of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. In writing this, we seek to raise awareness among all humanity about the local, regional, and global importance of ILK systems—whether operating as individuals or communities, or as part of organizations in both the private and public sectors. We write this from our perspectives as ethnobiologists, environmental anthropologists, natural resource scientists, and conservation biologists. Our authorship is epistemically diverse and includes nine Indigenous community perspectives (i.e., Arawak Taíno, Coast Salish, Chippewa, Native Hawaiian, Ibaloi, Māori, Tsimshian, and Saami). Although our overall framing is heavily influenced by Western epistemic traditions, we address knowledge more as a social process than as a formal outcome. While ILK systems play an instrumental role in the protection of our planet's biological and cultural diversity, we view the maintenance of ILK systems and the lifeways in which they are embedded to be an inherent good in itself, irrespective of its contributions to safeguarding global public interests. Based on our experience, we largely focus on commonalities across ILK systems globally, while recognizing that distinct historical and contextual complexities underpin the myriad ways in which these systems are being pressured all over the world. Collectively, our goal is to raise the alarm about the interwoven social-ecological consequences of the active destruction of ILK and highlight strategic actions supporting Indigenous Peoples and local communities in sustaining their homelands and associated knowledge systems.     Continuity, Change, and Resilience in Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems Despite myriad pressures on the lifeways of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, ILK systems demonstrate resilience to social-ecological changes (Ford et al. 2020; Vaughan 2018). This resilience is largely due to the inherently adaptive and dynamic nature of ILK systems (Athayde et al. 2017; Berkes et al. 2000; Lam et al. 2020). These systems have developed in the context of changing local environments and have been evaluated and modified in relation to new information and social challenges, often over millennia (Jackson 2018; Quinlan and Quinlan 2007; Vandebroek and Balick 2012). Resistance, adaptation, resilience, and transformation are all reflected in the histories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities as a result of their ongoing and arduous work to maintain their languages, cultural integrity, and ties to land, as well as diverse environmental stewardship practices (FPP et al. 2020; Mingorría 2021; Turner 2020). The adaptability and resilience of ILK systems is evident today in ecosystems around the world that bear evidence of millennia-old sustainable management by Indigenous Peoples and local communities (e.g., Balée et al. 2020; Lepofsky et al. 2017; Odonne et al. 2019). The specific practices involved are as varied as the ecosystems and the people from which they stem, and include the use of prescribed fire (e.g., Welch et al. 2013), terracing of steep or erodible slopes (e.g., Sandor and Homburg 2017), fertilizing and soil enhancement, thinning and pruning (e.g., Turner et al. 2013), and domestication of plants and animals (e.g., Aumeeruddy-Thomas et al. 2017), among many others. Across the vast majority of our planet, the historical and current land-uses of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, together with their interwoven practices and knowledge systems, are essential for understanding and sustaining our planet's biodiversity (Armstrong et al. 2021; Ellis et al. 2021). However, adaptive capacity and resilience are finite (see Walker et al. 2006), and mechanisms for absorbing change (e.g., flexibility in traditional practices, effective social networks) have been compromised by colonial settlement, land dispossession, state-sanctioned violence, and resource extraction (Figure 1), among many other processes (Galvin 2009; Par-lee et al. 2018; see also  Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)). Furthermore, social-ecological changes happen today in many places at a rate that is incommensurate with intergenerational ILK transmission, experimentation, and development (Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2015; Salomon et al. 2019). Disruptions to social-ecological processes that integrate ILK into daily life (either implicitly or by force) have eroded and continue to impact the foundations of many ILK systems worldwide (e.g., Brosi et al. 2007; Bussmann et al. 2018; Hedges et al. 2020). While it is easy to focus on impacts to ecosystems and culture or on knowledge losses, this can overshadow other positive processes of change and adaptation (e.g., hybridization, innovation, revitalization) that are also present (Galvin 2009; Gómez-Baggethun and Reyes-García 2013). In particular, focusing on losses does not do justice to the immense and powerful continuity that is a hallmark of the cultures of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (McCarter et al. 2014; McMillen et al. 2017; Tareau et al. 2020). Similarly, the dynamic nature of ILK systems can be overlooked in culture “preservation” plans, which often purportedly aim to fix ILK in place and time (Gavin et al. 2015; Leonti 2011). Furthermore, the narrative framing ILK losses is also often problematic, as many communities affirm that their knowledge systems were not simply “lost,” but rather violently wrested from them and destroyed with intent (Simpson 2004). Other communities recognize this “lost” knowledge as dormant or “sleeping” (Hobson et al. 2010) or kept alive by the ancestors until it is ready to be re-awakened (Risling Baldy 2018). Additionally, framing of ILK systems in a constant state of loss and vulnerability can make some communities feel hopeless and hinder their efforts towards reclaiming, sustaining, and revitalizing their cultural traditions (see Haalboom and Natcher 2012). Thus, the challenge is to acknowledge and understand the different realities of loss, while affirming the ongoing struggle to nurture, revitalize, and enact deeply rooted cultural mechanisms of persistence, adaptation, and resilience.    Figure 1. Some of the many threats to ILK systems and lifeways of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (outer boxes) and the interconnected consequences for social and ecological dimensions (central oval). Drivers of change can exert their influence quickly or over time in subtle and pernicious ways. Many of these linked threats and consequences are highlighted in this paper's case studies and 15 recommendations.          The Multidimensionality of Threats to ILK Systems Threats to ILK systems ramify through complex pathways and result in diverse ecological and socio-cultural consequences. The factors that drive these pressures are familiar and replicated around the world and can be grouped in six main clusters (Figure 1): suppression of culture; misrepresentation of culture; appropriation of culture, land, and resources; assimilation; disconnection of people and their territories; and destruction of heritage, ecosystems, and ongoing violent displacement or even killing of the knowledge holders themselves. These socio-cultural impacts can be experienced by individuals, communities, and at regional scales, and can be gender- and age-specific (Turner and Turner 2008). The ecological consequences can manifest across scales of the biological hierarchy from genes to ecosystems and landscapes (Cámara-Leret et al. 2019; IPBES 2019). Losses of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity are inextricably linked and are often driven by the same pressures (Frainer et al. 2020; Gavin et al. 2015; Maffi 2005). For instance, it has been estimated that at least 40% of the world's 6700 languages are endangered (Moseley 2010), with two-thirds of all language extinctions occurring only in the past 60 years (Rehg and Campbell 2018). The majority of these endangered languages belong to Indigenous Peoples and local communities (Moseley 2010). Loss of language is often tied to broader losses of knowledge, collective identity, and cultural heritage (Dunn 2017; Frainer et al. 2020; Reo et al. 2019). Such losses largely arise via diverse pressures from settler colonial institutions and actions (Figure 1). These include assimilation policies (Haque and Patrick 2014), the theft and appropriation of traditional lands (Middleton 2011), the destruction of heritage sites (Nicholas and Smith 2020), the commodification of nature (Liverman 2004), and the rapid expansion of extractive frontiers (Scheidel et al. 2020; Spice 2018). These pressures impact both ILK holders, and the social and ecological spaces needed to enact and transmit such knowledge (Figure 1;  Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)). These pressures can generate legacies of intergenerational trauma and reduced cultural engagement, leading to declines in peoples' physical and mental well-being, including feelings of shame and insignificance (Cunsolo Willox and Ellis 2018). Ultimately, these processes limit peoples' ability to engage in the many mutually reinforcing aspects of knowing and being. These include customary governance structures and institutions (Carson et al. 2018), the creation of arts, social gatherings (e.g., storytelling, music performances; Fernández-Llamazares and Lepofsky 2019), and the coming together for collecting and processing food (Kuhnlein et al. 2013), as well as for rituals and spiritual renewal (Kealiikanakaoleohaililani et al. 2018). Thus, loss of ILK can lead to declines in community cohesion, undermining prosocial behaviors that, among other things, help to prevent local resource depletion (Baggio et al. 2016). The erosion of ILK can lead to fracturing of the traditional values and management systems that have shaped and maintained ecosystems (Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2015; Jandreau and Berkes 2016; Lyver et al. 2019a). This includes the destabilizing of worldviews and norms that enforce and make sense of actions and beliefs about how to behave respectfully towards the environment and other beings (Turner et al. 2008; Umeek 2011; Whyte 2013). The resulting degradation of traditionally maintained ecosystems (e.g., through invasive species, overharvesting, pollution, changing flood and fire regimes, urbanization, soil erosion) has diverse cascading consequences. These include threats to human health and food security and sovereignty through reduced access to culturally important, locally available, healthy foods and other culturally valued resources (Kuhnlein et al. 2013; Reyes-García et al. 2019).     Interwoven Challenges and Consequences: Three Case Studies In this section, we illustrate with three case studies the interwoven challenges facing ILK systems and the social and ecological consequences of these challenges. These examples are only a few of the very many ( Supplement B (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)) in which ILK systems support the conservation of biological and cultural diversity and how a myriad of pressures (Figure 1) threaten the health of social-ecological systems (see also Rozzi et al. 2018; Tang and Gavin 2016; Turner and Turner 2008). They also illustrate how Indigenous Peoples and local communities are taking action to turn these trends around by applying ILK embedded in traditional management practices and governance. Collectively, the three case studies reflect a range of contexts where ILK is being challenged. The first focuses on a single species which is valued among several cultural groups, the second on a suite of species in one cultural group, and the third on one species in one cultural group (Figure 2).    Figure 2. Images from three case studies illustrating the challenges facing ILK systems, the consequences of those challenges, and the role of ILK in maintaining healthy ecosystems. L to R: William Gladstone, long-time activist for Heiltsuk First Nation herring rights, holding traditionally harvested herring roe on hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) boughs (D. Lepofsky); Tsimane' woman preparing an herbal tea of Triplaris americana (chij in Tsimane' language), used to treat diarrhea (Á. Fernández-Llamazares); Rakiura muttonbirding expert, late John Wixon, demonstrates to Ngāti Awa birders on Moutohorā the process of plucking Grey-faced Petrel (Pterodroma gouldi) chicks (Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Awa).         Case Study 1. Indigenous Conservation of a Threatened Cultural Keystone Species: Pacific Herring The social-ecological history of Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) on the northwest coast of North America illustrates the iterative and intertwined connections among threats to ILK and the catastrophic consequences of those losses for people and other biota 1 . Indigenous place names, oral traditions, archaeological records, and ethnohistoric and ethnographic accounts demonstrate the profound extent to which the once consistently abundant herring were woven into coastal biocultural systems (Gauvreau et al. 2017; McKechnie et al. 2014). Extensive bodies of ecological knowledge, explicit management practices, and intricate systems of marine tenure dictated how to respectfully and sustainably harvest herring fish and roe for daily and ceremonial consumption as well as for trade (e.g., Gauvreau et al. 2017; Salomon et al. 2019). These actions were situated within age-old laws and teachings that provided guidance about how to interact responsibly with other beings and ecosystems. In short, for millennia, this small forage fish was intertwined into the very identities of Indigenous communities throughout the northeastern Pacific. These intimate, long-term, and sustainable relationships between coastal Indigenous Peoples and herring began to be eroded by industrial fisheries in the late nineteenth century and increasingly racialized and exclusionary policies in the twentieth century. Regulatory control of herring fisheries by federal fisheries agencies replaced the historically resilient systems of local management and governance, reducing community access to herring, prohibiting traditional harvesting methods (i.e., fish traps), and allowing commercial overfishing to deplete stocks (Essington et al. 2015). Reduced herring populations had ramifying consequences through marine food webs and the decline in herring challenged the continuity of traditional systems of herring management, including mechanisms for sharing knowledge intergenerationally (Gauvreau et al. 2017; Salomon et al. 2019). Ultimately, reduced access to herring had significant impacts on the mental and physical health and well-being of Indigenous communities, including, for some, a deep and constant sadness at having lost access to this cultural staple. In addition, the persistent resistance on the part of fisheries managers and policymakers to fully recognize ILK of herring has enabled a shifted ecological baseline with respect to herring abundance and distribution. In recent decades, coastal Indigenous communities have led actions to protect herring stocks and to redirect the ecological and social trajectory of losses associated with declines in herring. These actions include Supreme Court challenges, engaging with management agencies, enforcing moratoria on commercial herring fishing in traditional territories, direct actions to stop commercial fleets, and creating partnerships among Nations with similar biocultural goals. Indigenous communities are also demanding co-management of the fisheries, prioritizing conservation and Indigenous food, social, and ceremonial needs, and integrating customary governance systems (Jones et al. 2017; Salomon et al. 2019; von der Porten et al. 2016, 2019). These actions have transformed the modern policy environment in relation to herring management and conservation. Revitalizing Indigenous relationships with Pacific herring and restoring its ecological roles within the coastal ecosystems are profoundly linked (Thornton and Moss 2021).     Case Study 2. Ethnobotanical Knowledge is Essential for Tsimane' Health and Nutrition The Tsimane' people of the Bolivian Amazon have extensive ethnobotanical knowledge that is interwoven into their daily lives, creation stories, and rituals. This knowledge is not only essential for Tsimane' cultural identity and forest stewardship, but enhances the health, nutritional status, and well-being of Tsimane' knowledge-holders and their children (McDade et al. 2007; Reyes-García et al. 2010; Tanner et al. 2011). Furthermore, Tsimane' ethnobotanical knowledge erosion could have important implications for health sovereignty (Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016) and forest conservation (Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2018). Along with other aspects of their traditional livelihood, Tsimane' ethnobotanical knowledge has experienced profound changes since the 1950s. Changes in traditional livelihoods were stimulated by the arrival of missionaries, loggers, and highland agriculturalists, who pushed the Tsimane' to enter into the market economy and embrace formal settler education (Reyes-García et al. 2014). These changes have pervasively influenced traditional pathways of intergenerational knowledge transmission (Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2015), resulting in alarming losses of ethnobotanical knowledge, particularly among villages and individuals more exposed to the market economy (Reyes-García et al. 2013a, 2013b). Several studies have documented the potential effects of ethnobotanical knowledge loss on Tsimane' health and nutritional status, for example, by precipitating a rapid dietary transition (Reyes-García et al. 2019). A seminal study by McDade et al. (2007) found that mothers with lower levels of ethnobotanical knowledge were more likely to have less healthy children (e.g., stunted growth, inflammation) than plant-savvy mothers, highlighting the crucial role of women as knowledge gatekeepers (see also Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016). Furthermore, Tsimane' villages with greater levels of ethnobotanical knowledge tend to be surrounded by healthier forest ecosystems than those where knowledge has been substantially eroded (Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2018; Pérez-Llorente et al. 2013). Landscape fragmentation and deforestation exert impacts on both Tsimane' health and nutrition, as they reduce access to a diverse pool of wild foods and medicinal plants (Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016; Reyes-García et al. 2019). The Tsimane' have taken several steps to document their ethnobotanical knowledge and to raise awareness of its values (e.g., radio programs, books, cultural exhibitions; Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2020). The Tsimane' have also engaged in participatory mapping projects to defend their territory and have participated in marches in defence of Indigenous sovereignty (Reyes-García et al. 2014) in an attempt to secure the territories on which their livelihoods, knowledge systems, and ethnomedicinal cabinets are grounded. Despite these efforts, the Tsimane' knowledge system is undergoing an accelerated process of transition, including profound losses in several ethnobotanical knowledge domains (Reyes-García et al. 2013b). Such losses could have cascading effects on Tsimane' health and nutrition, paralleling similar trends among several Indigenous communities across the Amazon (e.g., Caballero-Serrano et al. 2019; Cámara-Leret et al. 2019).     Case Study 3. Māori ILK and Customary Practices Support the Conservation and Sustainable Use of a Burrowing Seabird Burrowing petrels (e.g., Sooty Shear-water, Ardenna grisea, locally known as tītī; Grey-faced Petrel, Pterodroma gouldi, locally known as oi, manu oi, or kuia) are culturally significant species for some Māori tribes in New Zealand. The customary harvest of chicks for food from offshore islands link the people to other values such as tribal identity, connection to place, expressions of cultural heritage, and individual and community well-being, to name a few (Lyver et al. 2008). Harvesting by families facilitates ILK transfer and provides opportunities for place-specific environmental and communal experiences to be shared across generations. The harvest contributes to the upholding of customary authority and guardianship responsibilities, including the maintenance, adaptation, and transfer of ILK. Traditional management practices also provide models for how to responsibly and sustainably harvest petrel species. Delayed maturation and low reproductive rates of petrels mean they are less able to cope with predation by introduced mammalian predators (e.g., stoat [Mustela erminea] and Norway rat [Rattus norvegicus]) or over-exploitation by humans (Jones et al. 2011). Aware of the petrel's demographic limitations, Māori harvesters have used a range of customary practices to minimize or distribute harvest pressure on breeding populations (Kitson and Moller 2008; Lyver et al. 2019b). Access to the islands is restricted to the last half of the breeding season to avoid disturbance and abandonment of nests. Adults are never harvested because of the demographic impact of removing breeding birds from the population. Uniquely, some of these customary practices for petrel populations and their island habitats are also recognized in New Zealand law (e.g., New Zealand Government 1978). Temporary harvest moratoria can also be used to minimize population impacts. In the 1960s, one tribe placed a 50-year harvest moratorium over a harvest from one island because the harvesters were concerned that the extensive predation of eggs and chicks by Norway rats (Imber et al. 2000) was causing petrel numbers to decline. In recent years, however, with the recovery of the petrel numbers in this breeding colony, the tribe has re-established a limited customary harvest to maintain the practice and culture and regenerate the knowledge and connections to the island and birds (Jones et al. 2015). As part of revitalizing these customary practices, southern birders were invited by a northern tribe to participate in the harvest and share knowledge relating to the catching and preparation of the chicks. This connection provided an opportunity for the northern harvesters to observe harvesting techniques used in the south, and to adapt the practices to their current circumstances. By regaining ILK, harvesters are re-establishing their cultural links to their petrels, the islands, and the wider marine environment. These customary practices by Māori, however, contrast with the legislative prohibitions by successive governments in New Zealand which have indefinitely blocked communities from harvesting and accessing many native plants and animals over the last century (Lyver et al. 2019a, 2019b; Ruru et al. 2017). The resulting conservation and wildlife policies have had a pervasive impact on Māori ILK and culture. In some cases, national prohibition regulations were instituted by government agencies even when some species were still regionally abundant and hugely important to remote Māori communities for food and culture. Māori communities around New Zealand are still living with these policies and their ongoing cultural ramifications, including impacts on ILK systems.      Addressing Challenges Faced by Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems Since the 1950s, numerous international efforts have emerged to recognize the rights and knowledge systems of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (Brondizio et al. 2021a, 2021b; Golan et al. 2019). These initiatives were spearheaded by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, often with the support of scientists, artists, and civil organizations. Together, they increased awareness about the interlocked plight of ILK systems, colonization, and environmental degradation. Along with these global efforts, the past three decades have also witnessed the emergence of a myriad of on-the-ground initiatives focused on the conservation and revitalization of ILK systems (Figure 3; Benyei et al. 2020; Gavin et al. 2015; McCarter et al. 2014). Such place-based initiatives are more inclusive but also more effective when articulated from the bottom-up and within a collaborative framework (e.g., Bowra et al. 2020; Brondizio et al. 2021b; Singh et al. 2010). That is, while policies and legislation that address ILK loss are needed at multiple scales (Tang and Gavin 2016), in situ place-based initiatives are crucial in leveraging those policies and legislation to tackle the underlying drivers of ILK deterioration (see Figure 1 for a list of drivers). In the following, we identify 15 recommendations to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities to sustain and protect their knowledge systems and the lifeways connected to them (Table 1; Hill et al. 2020; Woodward et al. 2020). Each recommendation is founded on a biocultural approach, acknowledging the idea that nature and culture can be mutually enriching, and recognizing the potential of ILK for better environmental stewardship of our planet (Figure 3; Frainer et al. 2020; Gavin et al. 2015). All of our recommendations are consistent with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and many of its articles reflect the specific concerns identified here (see United Nations 2011). Our perspective is distinct in highlighting the interconnections between ILK, biodiversity, and ecosystem health in the context of processes driving transformations of those systems (Figure 1), and in including local communities ( Supplement A (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf)). These recommendations are directed to decision-makers at all levels, from global and regional inter-governmental organizations, to national, sub-national, and local governments, the private sector (including local, national and transnational corporations), civil society (including citizens, community groups, and NGOs), donor agencies, and research and educational organizations. While several recommendations are oriented towards policy making, all of them should be nevertheless understood as a direct appeal to the decision-making power that individuals and communities hold in realizing transformative change. They are also an invitation to the global community to add their voices to the concerns raised in this warning and to advocate for the protection of Indigenous Peoples' rights, lifeways, territories, and knowledge systems across scales. We specifically highlight efforts led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities to address challenges to their knowledge systems as an inspiration for acting on our warning (Figure 3). Supporting Indigenous Peoples and local communities to secure and strengthen collective systems of tenure, governance, and ways of life is one of the most powerful ways to safeguard ecosystems from intensive and/or unnecessary development and to maintain the biocultural integrity of the territories in which ILK is embedded (Berkes 2021; FPP et al. 2020; Turner 2020). We offer these recommendations in the spirit of supporting Indigenous sovereignty, to enable and support Indigenous Peoples and local communities' control over and management of their traditional territories and engagement with their local ecosystems, and to create a context that nurtures social and environmental justice.    Figure 3. Some of the many initiatives led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities to address challenges to their knowledge systems and lifeways. A. Since 1989, Indigenous groups from the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the US connect with their culture on Tribal Canoe Journeys (M. Wunsch); B. Maasai women in the Greater Amboseli Ecosystem (south Kenya) restore degraded rangelands with traditional grass varieties (J. de la Malla); C. The Hokotehi Moriori Trust database of traditional knowledge on Rehoku (Chatham Islands, New Zealand) records arborglyphs/living ancestors in a sacred grove; Moriori descendant, Nicole Whaitiri (R. Giblin, courtesy Hokotehi Moriori Trust); D. A book of folktales told by Daasanach storytellers in Ileret (North Kenya) is now used in local schools (J. de la Malla); E. The Cahuaza family in Soledad (Peru), from the Kanpu Piyapi (Shawi) cultural group, look at a plant book created at the behest of village authorities (G. Odonne); F. Bakhtiari woman in Khuzestan Province (Iran), weaving chogha, a traditional men's overcoat (A. Sharifian); G. Ainu leaders teach teachers and students in Hokkaido (Japan) how to prepare Ainu traditional foods (kp-studios.com); H. Hungarian traditional herders share their ecological knowledge with protected area managers, and local and foreign researchers to resolve conservation conflicts and improve agricultural regulations (A. Varga); I. In collaboration with the Island Food Community of Pohnpei, the Federated States of Micronesia issued stamps to encourage eating carotenoidrich bananas (Anne Vézina, ProMusa and Biodiversity International); J. The Shipibo-Konibo community of Santa Clara de Uchunya demand that Peru's Constitutional Court order the return of their lands that were dispossessed for oil palm expansion (FECONAU); K. Kānaka Maoli and Anishinaabek talk about responsibilities to protect Indigenous lands and languages at an Indigenous knowledge exchange, 2019 (N. Reo); L. Altar at the foot of Mauna Kea built and maintained by Native Hawaiians to honor this sacred place and their connections to it (P. Pascua). M. A community-based forest restoration project near Andasibe (east-central Madagascar) produces an annual average of 30,000 seedlings of 100 endemic tree species (J. de la Malla); N. Baka community members return from gathering non-timber forest products in East Cameroon (A. Surprenant); O. In this early season burn in the Mimal management area, Arnhem Land (NT, Australia), Lydia Lawrence is carrying on the age-old tradition of using fire to take care of the land (Mimal Rangers). See  Supplemental Material C (JETHNO_41n2_Fernandez-Llamazares_Supp.pdf) for additional reading about some of these initiatives.        Table 1.  Six overlapping, integrative themes emerge from the 15 recommendations to support ILK systems and those who champion them. Some themes, such as “Protect and Monitor Cultural Heritage” were addressed broadly by all or most recommendations. Others were addressed by a more focussed subset of recommendations. We include under the theme heading “Support ILK in educational systems” only those aspects of educational systems that have been particularly targeted and/or affected by colonial institutions. Similarly, FPIC (#12) should be a core element of the application of all our recommendations, but we only include this recommendation in themes where ideas about FPIC and its standards of practice are a particular focus of attention.      1. Recognize the historical continuity, ongoing presence, and inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities on their traditional territories. In many jurisdictions worldwide, the very presence and distinctness of Indigenous Peoples and local communities is denied and redressing this is fundamental to sustaining social and environmental well-being (Asch et al. 2018; Vierros et al. 2020). Collectively, societies globally must recognize the place-based rights, knowledge systems, and lifeways of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, including both access rights and collective choice rights to manage human-environment relationships on their own terms (e.g., Schlager and Ostrom 1993). The most immediate and direct way of honoring ILK systems is by demarcating and returning lands to Indigenous Peoples and local communities, recognizing their rights, institutions, and governance authority on those lands, and removing obstacles to their ongoing and long-term relationships with their lands and waters, on their own terms (FPP et al. 2020; Lyver et al. 2019a).  2. Ensure full and effective participation and engagement of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in regional, national, and international decision-making about land, ocean spaces, natural resource management, and climate change mitigation. Indigenous Peoples and local communities should have a lead place at the table in forums and discussions about the state and future of our planet, and their knowledge systems and practices should be recognized as critical to global sustainability (Berkes 2021; Garnett et al. 2018). Despite increased acknowledgment of the importance of ILK systems to environmental governance (IPBES 2019), Indigenous Peoples and local communities face substantial barriers to participation in policy and planning for the lands and seas (Duncan et al. 2019). The principle of “legal pluralism,” where a plurality of legal systems is recognized (Hendry and Tatum 2018), provides a solid foundation for recognizing and enforcing Indigenous sovereignty, tenure, and governance.  3. Support biocultural approaches to conservation led by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. The top-down implementation of conservation agendas has often led to displacement and disenfranchisement of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, often involving criminalization and restrictions on livelihood activities and access to culturally valued resources (Babai et al. 2015; Balée et al. 2020; Kohler and Brondizio 2017). Indigenous-led, community-based, and biocultural conservation efforts (e.g., community conservancies, Indigenous Protected Areas) offer some of the most effective, equitable, and efficient ways to safeguard both biological and cultural diversity (e.g., Artelle et al. 2019; Gavin et al. 2015). However, these often remain poorly supported and are, thus, challenging to implement (Reo et al. 2017). Conservation financing that supports local efforts in the context of such projects is often critical (e.g., Rodewald et al. 2020). There are many examples around the world of successful land- and sea-based stewardship and monitoring programs that exemplify Indigenous Peoples and local communities taking a lead role in the ongoing operational management of conservation activities on their territories (see FPP et al. 2020).  4. Make a focus of restoring those areas that are critical for culturally significant landscapes, species, and practices. In addition to focusing conservation efforts and funding toward rare species or ecosystems, restoration policies and planning should also prioritize cultural keystone species and landscapes on which Indigenous Peoples and local communities rely (Benner et al. 2021; Cuerrier et al. 2015). As some Māori elders note, even if knowledge is lost by humans, it remains alive if species or ecosystems persist. This persistence also allows for relearning of lost information. Many Indigenous Peoples and local communities worldwide are taking action to restore ecosystems and species that are important to them (e.g., Senos et al. 2006; Wehi and Lord 2017). As we enter the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, Indigenous Peoples and local communities should be recognized as critical stake-, rights-, and knowledge-holders in any roadmap for global ecosystem restoration (Chazdon et al. 2020; Ogar et al. 2020).  5. Support community-led monitoring efforts that build on local cultural perspectives. Indigenous Peoples and local communities are often subjected to policies with externally codified criteria and indicators for monitoring. Such monitoring does not effectively support communities in realizing their self-determined visions and often precludes tracking culturally appropriate indicators (Sterling et al. 2017). Indicators lacking community-level input can discount, misrepresent, or undermine ILK systems (Pascua et al. 2017). Supporting community-led monitoring programs will lead to indicators that better reflect the needs, views, and knowledge systems of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (David-Chavez and Gavin 2018; Molnár and Babai 2021).  6. Support initiatives that specifically recognize and promote gender-specific contributions to ILK maintenance. Policies and initiatives seeking to maintain and revitalize ILK should pay attention to the importance of gender relations in defining access, use, and knowledge of natural resources (Pfeiffer and Butz 2005); this entails acknowledging that people of different genders often interact with nature in different ways and, thus, will hold different aspects of ILK (e.g., Peluso 1991; Voeks 2007). Recognizing gender-specific knowledge and expertise can help promote equity and social justice from a biocultural perspective, thereby contributing to reduce gendered inequalities (Díaz-Reviriego et al. 2016; Wall et al. 2018).  7. Respect the spiritual practices and rituals of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Colonial-settler religious institutions have a legacy of ignoring or actively erasing the spiritual and ceremonial practices of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. We call for ethical spaces within and beyond religious organizations where Indigenous and local leaders can reevaluate and revitalize spiritual and ceremonial practices on their own terms. Support should be given to re-learning and restoring place- and history-based spiritual and ceremonial ILK, customs, norms, and rituals that inform respectful interactions with all beings (e.g., Kandari et al. 2014) and those that enhance understanding of why these spiritual practices are important for environmental stewardship (Borrows 2019; Kealiikanakaoleohaililani et al. 2018).  8. Support Indigenous Peoples and local communities to ensure the intergenerational transmission of ILK systems. ILK systems are maintained by transmission through diverse, culturally based, mutually reinforcing pathways. Ensuring that children and youth are able to interact with their cultural heritage and experience land-based learning with their elders are critical components of knowledge transmission (Bowra et al. 2020; Snively and Williams 2016). ILK is often encoded in narratives, language, and art-based forms, such as dance, song, storytelling, ceremonies, and crafts (Woodward et al. 2020). What is perceived as art is often a cultural blueprint that codifies law and protocols and maintains and mobilizes peoples' intimate relations with their local ecologies (Fernández-Llamazares and Lepofsky 2019; Jackson, in press). As such, it is paramount to support the efforts of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in documenting and revitalizing their cultural traditions and languages. Examples include websites that archive oral histories in the communities' own words 2 , community-based eco-cultural reference books 3 , and Indigenous language revitalization programs (e.g., Hobson et al. 2010; Rehg and Campbell 2018).  9. Support culturally appropriate educational curricula that are respectful, relevant, and accessible to Indigenous Peoples and local communities. State and national educational systems are often predicated on colonial formats that do not fully recognize that ILK has been transmitted intergenerationally for millennia in learning contexts. In contrast, education programs initiated and managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities promote the maintenance of ILK systems (McCarter et al. 2014). Recognition can take the form of incorporating novel approaches to teaching drawn from Indigenous ways of sharing knowledge (e.g., Archibald et al. 2019; Atalay 2020) and creating non-conventional teaching methods that go beyond academic silos and more fluidly reflect ILK and ways of knowing (e.g., Kana'iaupuni et al. 2017; McCarter et al. 2014). State and national education standards should embrace multilingualism and include place-based knowledge and practices, as well as learning opportunities from elders. We encourage academic institutions to take a stronger stand on epistemic pluralism, by hiring Indigenous Peoples and local communities to teach ILK content, opening up spaces for ILK systems, and recognizing them as opportunities for innovation and excellence.  10. Recognize and protect tangible and non-tangible heritage related to ILK. Around the world, there is ongoing and pervasive appropriation and destruction—both willful and unintentional—of the heritage of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Protection is required of objects and places, as well as the stories, relationships, responsibilities, and knowledge associated with them (Nicholas and Bell, in press). Recent developments in constitutional and international human rights law have set the stage for a reassessment and reformulation of ineffective heritage laws and policies, including a reassessment of culture-specific definitions of “heritage.” The shift in thinking about heritage as property to it being an essential aspect of human rights in international law is supported by findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and UNDRIP, among other initiatives.  11. Secure intellectual property rights associated with ILK through relevant legal mechanisms and standards, while respecting the cultural protocols, rituals, and institutions that regulate ILK transmission. There is a long and sorry history of the misappropriation of intellectual property associated with ILK (Tuhiwai Smith 2012) and international law often does not provide adequate protection of property rights associated with ILK (Hill et al. 2020). Well-designed national and international laws and policies are urgently needed to protect the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities over their knowledge systems and their cultural heritage. Fundamental to preventing ILK misappropriation and, indeed, the continuance of ILK is the need for these laws and policies to embody respect for and legal recognition of community protocols, Indigenous institutions, and customary law (FPP et al. 2020).  12. Promote and enforce the application of the principle of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). International human rights law protects the right of Indigenous Peoples to give or withhold their FPIC in relation to any projects in their territories or around their knowledge systems. While widely accepted in the research community, FPIC should be practiced broadly, including in any development interventions in the territories of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (e.g., pipelines, mining, infrastructure expansion). FPIC is a key element of the broader rights to self-determination of Indigenous Peoples enshrined in UNDRIP and other international agreements (Golan et al. 2019). Although the implementation of FPIC faces several challenges on the ground (e.g., Cariño 2005), its legal significance is gaining recognition at the global level and it lays a solid foundation for the protection of ILK systems against misappropriation. Collective rights to FPIC should also be extended to local communities who have long-term cultural connections to lands and waters.  13. Support Indigenous data sovereignty. An integral part of securing intellectual property rights is recognizing the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to govern the collection, ownership, and access of data relating to their land base, community, and shared culture (Kukutai and Taylor 2016). This includes the return of archived ILK records, as well as genetic, biological, and cultural materials (e.g., artifacts, seeds). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance 4 , as well as Canada's First Nations Principles of ownership, control, access, and possession (OCAP 5 ) support Indigenous rights to self-governance and authority to control the cultural heritage embedded in their knowledge systems and practices. We likewise support the development of data governance principles driven by local communities.  14. Foster Indigenous-led, decolonizing, and participatory research and knowledge co-production, guided by respectful, ethical, and reciprocal relationships between researchers and ILK holders. Historically, research on ILK was often undertaken with ethnocentric paradigms, colonizing methodologies, and tacitly oppressive research practices (McGregor et al. 2018; Tuhiwai Smith 2012). In contrast, there are now numerous examples of Indigenous-led, decolonizing, and/or participatory research practicessupportingtherightsandcapacities of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (Molnár and Babai 2021; Woodward et al. 2020). Researchers working with ILK systems should abide to normative standards for responsible and ethical research practice, employ decolonizing methodologies, and be fully informed of local values and epistemologies, as well as obligations regarding intellectual property and benefit sharing (David-Chavez and Gavin 2018; Wheeler et al. 2020). Similarly, it is critical to advance mechanisms for complementing ILK systems and science in transparent, constructive, and mutually enriching ways (Tengö et al. 2014; Torrents-Ticó et al. 2021). These ways must ensure that ILK systems are not co-opted or assimilated by science and that researchers recognize ILK holders as legitimate representatives of distinct epistemic traditions (Hill et al. 2020; Ludwig and El-Hani 2020).  15. Support ILK holders on the frontlines of conflict. ILK holders are often leaders in struggles to defend traditional territories from resource development and other externally imposed activities (i.e., without FPIC). State-funded or state-supported projects often create landscapes of violence in which Indigenous Peoples and local communities are the first casualties and the last line of defense (Armstrong and Brown 2019; Spice 2018). These conflicts can result in unlawful arrests, imprisonment, surveillance, and even death (Scheidel et al. 2020). We call on humanity to stand up for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities and to protect environmental defenders from violence and repression.     Moving Forward Our recommendations for action to the global community fall into six broad categories (Table 1). The need to protect, monitor, and honor cultural heritage pervades all our recommendations and is a foundation for all other efforts. For people whose culture, heritage, lifestyle, health, and food systems depend on the local lands and waters around them, it is no surprise that actions focused on rights, access, and equity in land and resource management and decision-making are also a central focus of the recommendations. Collectively, the other recommendations illustrate the web of social, educational, governance, and ecological issues facing Indigenous Peoples and local communities and what can be done to begin to address them. The cumulative, diverse, interacting, and pervasive pressures of the colonial and globalized post-colonial world continue to drive the loss of ILK systems worldwide, despite their resilience and adaptability. Such threats can only be addressed effectively through urgent and concerted efforts that foster transformative change, tackling deep structural interventions, systemic barriers, and leverage points in the current systems of decision-making. Our recommendations offer guidance for putting in place the seeds for this foundational, system-wide shift away from “business as usual” towards governance approaches rooted in, and informed by, ILK systems. We call on the global community to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities in safeguarding and restoring the cultural and ecological tapestries that ILK systems support and of which they are a part. This will entail a pervasive shift across sectors in how ILK systems, their knowledge holders, and their multiple expressions are recognized, honored, and sustained. Such actions are inextricably linked to global efforts to address biodiversity loss and climate change (FPP et al. 2020; IPBES 2019). They highlight the interpenetration of current social, cultural, ecological, and economic factors with historical issues of colonialism, social justice, and inequity.
Scientists' Warning to Humanity on Threats to Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems
https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-ethnobiology/volume-41/issue-2/0278-0771-41.2.144/Scientists-Warning-to-Humanity-on-Threats-to-Indigenous-and-Local/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.144.full
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-climate-change-is-still-the-greatest-threat-to-human-health
Why climate change is still the greatest threat to human health
2021-09-09
Amy McKeever
<div><section><article><div><p>People around the world are witnessing firsthand how <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/global-warming-effects">climate change</a> can wreak havoc on the planet. Steadily rising average temperatures fuel increasingly intense wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters that are now impossible to ignore. And while the world has been plunged into a deadly pandemic, scientists are sounding the alarm once more that <a href="https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20181218.278288/full/">climate change is still the greatest threat to human health in recorded history</a>.</p><p>As recently as August—when wildfires raged in the United States, Europe, and Siberia—World Health Organization Director-General <a href="https://www.facebook.com/DrTedros.Official/posts/4094461517289976">Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus</a> said in a statement that “the risks posed by climate change could dwarf those of any single disease.”</p><p>On September 5, more than 200 medical journals <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2113200">released an unprecedented joint editorial</a> that urged world leaders to act. “The science is unequivocal,” they write. “A global increase of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.”</p><p>Despite the acute dangers posed by COVID-19, the authors of the joint op-ed write that world governments “cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions.” Instead, they argue, everyone must treat climate change with the same urgency as they have COVID-19.</p><p>Here’s a look at the ways that climate change can affect your health—including some less obvious but still insidious effects—and why scientists say it’s not too late to avert catastrophe.</p><h2><b>Air pollution</b></h2><p>Climate change is caused by an increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, mostly from fossil fuel emissions. But burning fossil fuels can also have direct consequences for human health. That’s because the polluted air contains small particles that <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5836577/">can induce stroke and heart attacks</a> by penetrating the lungs and heart and even traveling into the bloodstream. Those particles might harm the organs directly or provoke an inflammatory response from the immune system as it tries to fight them off. Estimates suggest that air pollution causes anywhere between <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/116/15/7192">3.6 million</a> and <a href="https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel-emissions-higher-previously-thought">nine million</a> premature deaths a year.</p><p>“The numbers do vary,” says <a href="https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/aboutus/people/haines.andy">Andy Haines</a>, professor of environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and author of the <a href="http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2021/07/planetary-health-safeguarding-human-health-and-the-environment-in-the-anthropocene/">recently published</a> book <i>Planetary Health</i>. “But they all agree that it’s a big public health burden.”</p><p>People over the age of 65 are most susceptible to the harmful effects of air pollution, but many others are at risk too, says <a href="https://profiles.stanford.edu/kari-nadeau">Kari Nadeau</a>, director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University. People who smoke or vape are at increased risk, as are children with asthma.</p><p>Air pollution also has consequences for those with allergies. Carbon dioxide increases the acidity of the air, which then pulls more pollen out from plants. For some people, this might just mean that they face annoyingly long bouts of seasonal allergies. But for others, it could be life-threatening.</p><p>“For people who already have respiratory disease, boy is that a problem,” Nadeau says. When pollen gets into the respiratory pathway, the body creates mucus to get rid of it, which can then fill up and suffocate the lungs.</p><p>Even healthy people can have similar outcomes if pollen levels are especially intense. In 2016, in the Australian state of Victoria, a severe thunderstorm combined with high levels of pollen to induce what <i>The Lancet</i> <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(18)30120-7/fulltext">has described</a> as “the world’s largest and most catastrophic epidemic of thunderstorm asthma.” So many residents suffered asthma attacks that emergency rooms were overwhelmed—and at least 10 people died as a result.</p><p>Climate change is also causing wildfires to get worse, and wildfire smoke is especially toxic. As one recent study showed, fires <a>can account for 25 percent of dangerous air pollution in the U.S.</a> Nadeau explains that the smoke contains particles of everything that the fire has consumed along its path—from rubber tires to harmful chemicals. These particles are tiny and can penetrate even deeper into a person’s lungs and organs. (<a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/how-breathing-wildfire-smoke-affects-the-body"><i>Here’s how breathing wildfire smoke affects the body</i></a>.)</p><h2><b>Extreme heat</b></h2><p>Heat waves are deadly, but researchers at first didn’t see direct links between climate change and the harmful impacts of heat waves and other extreme weather events. Haines says the evidence base has been growing. “We have now got a number of studies which has shown that we can with high confidence attribute health outcomes to climate change,” he says.</p><p>Most recently, Haines points to <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01058-x">a study published earlier this year in <i>Nature Climate Change</i></a> that attributes more than a third of heat-related deaths to climate change. As <i>National Geographic</i> <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/heat-related-deaths-attributed-to-climate-change">reported at the time</a>, the study found that the human toll was even higher in some countries with less access to air conditioning or other factors that render people more vulnerable to heat. (<a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/heat-related-deaths-attributed-to-climate-change"><i>How climate change is making heat waves even deadlier</i></a>.)</p><p>That’s because the human body was not designed to cope with temperatures above 98.6°F, Nadeau says. Heat can break down muscles. The body does have some ways to deal with the heat—such as sweating. “But when it’s hot outside all the time, you cannot cope with that, and your heart muscles and cells start to literally die and degrade,” she says.</p><p>If you’re exposed to extreme heat for too long and are unable to adequately release that heat, the stress can cause a cascade of problems throughout the body. The heart has to work harder to pump blood to the rest of the organs, while sweat leeches the body of necessary minerals such as sodium and potassium. The combination <a href="https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heat-is-hard-on-the-heart-simple-precautions-can-ease-the-strain-201107223180">can result in heart attacks and strokes</a>.</p><p>Dehydration from heat exposure can also cause serious damage to the kidneys, which rely on water to function properly. For people whose kidneys are already beginning to fail—particularly older adults—Nadeau says that extreme heat can be a death sentence. “This is happening more and more,” she says.</p><p>Studies have also <a href="https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/extreme-temperatures-could-increase-preterm-birth-risk">drawn</a> <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32059147/">links</a> between higher temperatures and preterm birth and other pregnancy complications. It’s unclear why, but Haines says that one hypothesis is that extreme heat reduces blood flow to the fetus.</p><h2><b>Food insecurity</b></h2><p>One of the less direct—but no less harmful—ways that climate change can affect health is by disrupting the world’s supply of food.</p><p>Climate change both reduces the amount of food that’s available <i>and</i> makes it less nutritious.  <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/chapter-5/">According to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report</a>, crop yields have already begun to decline as a result of rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events. Meanwhile, studies <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4810679/">have shown</a> that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can leech plants of zinc, iron, and protein—nutrients that humans need to survive.</p><p>Malnutrition is linked to a variety of illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. It can also increase the risk of stunting, <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/19-11-2015-stunting-in-a-nutshell">or impaired growth</a>, in children, which can harm cognitive function.</p><p>Climate change also imperils what we eat from the sea. Rising ocean temperatures have led many fish species to migrate toward Earth’s poles in search of cooler waters. Haines says that the resulting decline of fish stocks in subtropic regions “has big implications for nutrition,” because many of those coastal communities depend on fish for a substantial amount of the protein in their diets.</p><p>This effect is likely to be particularly harmful for Indigenous communities, says Tiff-Annie Kenny, a professor in the faculty of medicine at Laval University in Quebec who studies climate change and food security in the Canadian Arctic. It’s much more difficult for these communities to find alternative sources of protein, she says, either because it’s not there or because it’s too expensive. “So what are people going to eat instead?” she asks.</p><h2><b>Infectious diseases </b></h2><p>As the planet gets hotter, the geographic region where ticks and mosquitoes like to live is getting wider. These animals are well-known vectors of diseases such as the Zika virus, dengue fever, and malaria. As they cross the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, Nadeau says, mosquitoes and ticks bring more opportunities for <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/how-do-animals-pass-dangerous-zoonotic-diseases-to-humans-zoonoses-coronavirus">these diseases</a> to infect greater swaths of the world.</p><p>“It used to be that they stayed in those little sectors near the Equator, but now unfortunately because of the warming of northern Europe and Canada, you can find Zika in places you wouldn’t have expected,” Nadeau says.</p><p>In addition, climate conditions such as temperature and humidity can impact the life cycle of mosquitoes. Haines says there’s particularly good evidence showing that, in some regions, climate change <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7068348/">has altered these conditions in ways that increase the risk of mosquitos transmitting dengue</a>.</p><p>There are also several ways in which climate change is increasing the risk of diseases that can be transmitted through water, such as cholera, typhoid fever, and parasites. Sometimes that’s fairly direct, such as when people interact with dirty floodwaters. But Haines says that drought can have indirect impacts when people, say, can’t wash their hands or are forced to drink from dodgier sources of freshwater.</p><h2><b>Mental health</b></h2><p>A common result of any climate-linked disaster is the toll on mental health. The distress caused by drastic environmental change is so significant that it has been given its own name—<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/10398560701701288?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&amp;rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&amp;rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed&amp;">solastalgia</a>.</p><p>Nadeau says that the effects on mental health have been apparent in her studies of emergency room visits arising from wildfires in the western U.S. People lose their homes, their jobs, and sometimes their loved ones, and that takes an immediate toll. “What’s the fastest acute issue that develops? It’s psychological,” she says. Extreme weather events such as wildfires and hurricanes cause so much stress and anxiety that they can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder and even suicide in the long run.</p><p>Another common factor is that climate change causes disproportionate harm to the world’s most vulnerable people. On September 2, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an analysis showing that <a href="https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-report-shows-disproportionate-impacts-climate-change-socially-vulnerable">racial and ethnic minority communities are particularly at risk</a>. According to the report, if temperatures rise by 2°C (3.6°F), Black people are 40 percent more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in related deaths. Another 34 percent are more likely to live in areas with a rise in childhood asthma.</p><p>Further, the effects of climate change don’t occur in isolation. At any given time, a community might face air pollution, food insecurity, disease, and extreme heat all at once. Kenny says that’s particularly devastating in communities where the prevalence of food insecurity and poverty are already high. This situation hasn’t been adequately studied, she says, because “it’s difficult to capture these shocks that climate can bring.”</p><h2><b>Why there’s reason for hope</b></h2><p>In recent years, scientists and environmental activists have begun to push for more research into the myriad health effects of climate change. “One of the striking things is there’s been a real dearth of funding for climate change and health,” Haines says. “For that reason, some of the evidence we have is still fragmentary.”</p><p>Still, hope is not lost. In the Paris Agreement, countries around the world have <a href="https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement">pledged to limit global warming</a> to below 2°C (3.6°F)—and preferably to 1.5°C (2.7°F)—by cutting their emissions. “When you reduce those emissions, you benefit health as well as the planet,” Haines says.</p><p>Meanwhile, scientists and environmental activists have put forward solutions that can help people adapt to the health effects of climate change. These include early heat warnings and dedicated cooling centers, more resilient supply chains, and freeing healthcare facilities from dependence on the electric grid.</p><p>Nadeau argues that the COVID-19 pandemic also presents an opportunity for world leaders to think bigger and more strategically. For example, the pandemic has laid bare problems with efficiency and equity that have many countries restructuring their healthcare facilities. In the process, she says, they can look for new ways to reduce waste and emissions, such as getting more hospitals using renewable energy.</p><p>“This is in our hands to do,” Nadeau says. “If we don’t do anything, that would be cataclysmic.”</p></div></article></section>||||I|||| Skip to content
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 Why climate change is still the greatest threat to human health

 Polluted air and steadily rising temperatures are linked to health effects ranging from increased heart attacks and strokes to the spread of infectious diseases and psychological trauma.

 Workers fumigate for mosquitoes on a city street in New Delhi, India, as a preventive measure against the spread of dengue, malaria, and chikungunya. The impact of vector-borne diseases will increase as global temperatures rise. An editorial co-published in hundreds of medical journals called for urgent action to reduce emissions.
 Photograph by Raj K Raj, Hindustan Times via Getty Images
 By Amy McKeever
 Published September 9, 2021
 • 14 min read
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 People around the world are witnessing firsthand how climate change can wreak havoc on the planet. Steadily rising average temperatures fuel increasingly intense wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters that are now impossible to ignore. And while the world has been plunged into a deadly pandemic, scientists are sounding the alarm once more that climate change is still the greatest threat to human health in recorded history.

 As recently as August—when wildfires raged in the United States, Europe, and Siberia—World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement that “the risks posed by climate change could dwarf those of any single disease.”

 On September 5, more than 200 medical journals released an unprecedented joint editorial that urged world leaders to act. “The science is unequivocal,” they write. “A global increase of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.”

 Despite the acute dangers posed by COVID-19, the authors of the joint op-ed write that world governments “cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions.” Instead, they argue, everyone must treat climate change with the same urgency as they have COVID-19.

 Here’s a look at the ways that climate change can affect your health—including some less obvious but still insidious effects—and why scientists say it’s not too late to avert catastrophe.

 Air pollution

 Climate change is caused by an increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, mostly from fossil fuel emissions. But burning fossil fuels can also have direct consequences for human health. That’s because the polluted air contains small particles that can induce stroke and heart attacks by penetrating the lungs and heart and even traveling into the bloodstream. Those particles might harm the organs directly or provoke an inflammatory response from the immune system as it tries to fight them off. Estimates suggest that air pollution causes anywhere between 3.6 million and nine million premature deaths a year.

 “The numbers do vary,” says Andy Haines, professor of environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and author of the recently published book Planetary Health. “But they all agree that it’s a big public health burden.”

 A family has dinner in their flooded home in Central Java, Indonesia. For over 40 years, they witnessed their productive agricultural land slowly disappear under the sea. They have physically raised everything in their home to cope.
 Photograph by Aji Styawan, National Geographic

 Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.

 People over the age of 65 are most susceptible to the harmful effects of air pollution, but many others are at risk too, says Kari Nadeau, director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University. People who smoke or vape are at increased risk, as are children with asthma.

 Air pollution also has consequences for those with allergies. Carbon dioxide increases the acidity of the air, which then pulls more pollen out from plants. For some people, this might just mean that they face annoyingly long bouts of seasonal allergies. But for others, it could be life-threatening.

 “For people who already have respiratory disease, boy is that a problem,” Nadeau says. When pollen gets into the respiratory pathway, the body creates mucus to get rid of it, which can then fill up and suffocate the lungs.

 Even healthy people can have similar outcomes if pollen levels are especially intense. In 2016, in the Australian state of Victoria, a severe thunderstorm combined with high levels of pollen to induce what The Lancet has described as “the world’s largest and most catastrophic epidemic of thunderstorm asthma.” So many residents suffered asthma attacks that emergency rooms were overwhelmed—and at least 10 people died as a result.

 Climate change is also causing wildfires to get worse, and wildfire smoke is especially toxic. As one recent study showed, fires can account for 25 percent of dangerous air pollution in the U.S. Nadeau explains that the smoke contains particles of everything that the fire has consumed along its path—from rubber tires to harmful chemicals. These particles are tiny and can penetrate even deeper into a person’s lungs and organs. (Here’s how breathing wildfire smoke affects the body.)

 Extreme heat

 Heat waves are deadly, but researchers at first didn’t see direct links between climate change and the harmful impacts of heat waves and other extreme weather events. Haines says the evidence base has been growing. “We have now got a number of studies which has shown that we can with high confidence attribute health outcomes to climate change,” he says.

 Workers pick tomatoes in a field in Los Baños, California, under a scorching sun. Not only are rising temperatures impacting people's health and ability to work, agriculture in California is threatened by drought.
 Photograph by Karla Gachet, National Geographic

 Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.

 Most recently, Haines points to a study published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change that attributes more than a third of heat-related deaths to climate change. As National Geographic reported at the time, the study found that the human toll was even higher in some countries with less access to air conditioning or other factors that render people more vulnerable to heat. (How climate change is making heat waves even deadlier.)

 That’s because the human body was not designed to cope with temperatures above 98.6°F, Nadeau says. Heat can break down muscles. The body does have some ways to deal with the heat—such as sweating. “But when it’s hot outside all the time, you cannot cope with that, and your heart muscles and cells start to literally die and degrade,” she says.

 If you’re exposed to extreme heat for too long and are unable to adequately release that heat, the stress can cause a cascade of problems throughout the body. The heart has to work harder to pump blood to the rest of the organs, while sweat leeches the body of necessary minerals such as sodium and potassium. The combination can result in heart attacks and strokes.

 Dehydration from heat exposure can also cause serious damage to the kidneys, which rely on water to function properly. For people whose kidneys are already beginning to fail—particularly older adults—Nadeau says that extreme heat can be a death sentence. “This is happening more and more,” she says.

 Studies have also drawn links between higher temperatures and preterm birth and other pregnancy complications. It’s unclear why, but Haines says that one hypothesis is that extreme heat reduces blood flow to the fetus.

 Food insecurity

 One of the less direct—but no less harmful—ways that climate change can affect health is by disrupting the world’s supply of food.

 Climate change both reduces the amount of food that’s available and makes it less nutritious. According to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report, crop yields have already begun to decline as a result of rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events. Meanwhile, studies have shown that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can leech plants of zinc, iron, and protein—nutrients that humans need to survive.

 A woman faces heavy winds during a seasonal sandstorm in Beijing, China. Scientists believe that desertification and climate change are playing a role in their frequency and intensity. Air pollution is detrimental to human health.
 Photograph by Kevin Frayer, Getty Images

 Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.

 Malnutrition is linked to a variety of illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. It can also increase the risk of stunting, or impaired growth, in children, which can harm cognitive function.

 Climate change also imperils what we eat from the sea. Rising ocean temperatures have led many fish species to migrate toward Earth’s poles in search of cooler waters. Haines says that the resulting decline of fish stocks in subtropic regions “has big implications for nutrition,” because many of those coastal communities depend on fish for a substantial amount of the protein in their diets.

 This effect is likely to be particularly harmful for Indigenous communities, says Tiff-Annie Kenny, a professor in the faculty of medicine at Laval University in Quebec who studies climate change and food security in the Canadian Arctic. It’s much more difficult for these communities to find alternative sources of protein, she says, either because it’s not there or because it’s too expensive. “So what are people going to eat instead?” she asks.

 Infectious diseases

 As the planet gets hotter, the geographic region where ticks and mosquitoes like to live is getting wider. These animals are well-known vectors of diseases such as the Zika virus, dengue fever, and malaria. As they cross the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, Nadeau says, mosquitoes and ticks bring more opportunities for these diseases to infect greater swaths of the world.

 “It used to be that they stayed in those little sectors near the Equator, but now unfortunately because of the warming of northern Europe and Canada, you can find Zika in places you wouldn’t have expected,” Nadeau says.

 In addition, climate conditions such as temperature and humidity can impact the life cycle of mosquitoes. Haines says there’s particularly good evidence showing that, in some regions, climate change has altered these conditions in ways that increase the risk of mosquitos transmitting dengue.

 There are also several ways in which climate change is increasing the risk of diseases that can be transmitted through water, such as cholera, typhoid fever, and parasites. Sometimes that’s fairly direct, such as when people interact with dirty floodwaters. But Haines says that drought can have indirect impacts when people, say, can’t wash their hands or are forced to drink from dodgier sources of freshwater.

 Mental health

 A common result of any climate-linked disaster is the toll on mental health. The distress caused by drastic environmental change is so significant that it has been given its own name—solastalgia.

 Solar and wind farms west of Mojave, California, provide a glimpse of the future. The Biden administration announced a plan to scale up production and installation of solar panels from 3 percent of the nation’s electricity to 45 percent over the next three decades to reduce the carbon emissions contributing to global warming.
 Photograph by David Guttenfelder, National Geographic

 Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.

 Nadeau says that the effects on mental health have been apparent in her studies of emergency room visits arising from wildfires in the western U.S. People lose their homes, their jobs, and sometimes their loved ones, and that takes an immediate toll. “What’s the fastest acute issue that develops? It’s psychological,” she says. Extreme weather events such as wildfires and hurricanes cause so much stress and anxiety that they can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder and even suicide in the long run.

 Another common factor is that climate change causes disproportionate harm to the world’s most vulnerable people. On September 2, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an analysis showing that racial and ethnic minority communities are particularly at risk. According to the report, if temperatures rise by 2°C (3.6°F), Black people are 40 percent more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in related deaths. Another 34 percent are more likely to live in areas with a rise in childhood asthma.

 Further, the effects of climate change don’t occur in isolation. At any given time, a community might face air pollution, food insecurity, disease, and extreme heat all at once. Kenny says that’s particularly devastating in communities where the prevalence of food insecurity and poverty are already high. This situation hasn’t been adequately studied, she says, because “it’s difficult to capture these shocks that climate can bring.”

 Why there’s reason for hope

 In recent years, scientists and environmental activists have begun to push for more research into the myriad health effects of climate change. “One of the striking things is there’s been a real dearth of funding for climate change and health,” Haines says. “For that reason, some of the evidence we have is still fragmentary.”

 Still, hope is not lost. In the Paris Agreement, countries around the world have pledged to limit global warming to below 2°C (3.6°F)—and preferably to 1.5°C (2.7°F)—by cutting their emissions. “When you reduce those emissions, you benefit health as well as the planet,” Haines says.

 Meanwhile, scientists and environmental activists have put forward solutions that can help people adapt to the health effects of climate change. These include early heat warnings and dedicated cooling centers, more resilient supply chains, and freeing healthcare facilities from dependence on the electric grid.

 Nadeau argues that the COVID-19 pandemic also presents an opportunity for world leaders to think bigger and more strategically. For example, the pandemic has laid bare problems with efficiency and equity that have many countries restructuring their healthcare facilities. In the process, she says, they can look for new ways to reduce waste and emissions, such as getting more hospitals using renewable energy.

 “This is in our hands to do,” Nadeau says. “If we don’t do anything, that would be cataclysmic.”

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 United States (Change)

 Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society Copyright © 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

People around the world are witnessing firsthand how climate change can wreak havoc on the planet. Steadily rising average temperatures fuel increasingly intense wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters that are now impossible to ignore. And while the world has been plunged into a deadly pandemic, scientists are sounding the alarm once more that climate change is still the greatest threat to human health in recorded history. As recently as August—when wildfires raged in the United States, Europe, and Siberia—World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement that “the risks posed by climate change could dwarf those of any single disease.” On September 5, more than 200 medical journals released an unprecedented joint editorial that urged world leaders to act. “The science is unequivocal,” they write. “A global increase of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.” Despite the acute dangers posed by COVID-19, the authors of the joint op-ed write that world governments “cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions.” Instead, they argue, everyone must treat climate change with the same urgency as they have COVID-19. Here’s a look at the ways that climate change can affect your health—including some less obvious but still insidious effects—and why scientists say it’s not too late to avert catastrophe.  Air pollution  Climate change is caused by an increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, mostly from fossil fuel emissions. But burning fossil fuels can also have direct consequences for human health. That’s because the polluted air contains small particles that can induce stroke and heart attacks by penetrating the lungs and heart and even traveling into the bloodstream. Those particles might harm the organs directly or provoke an inflammatory response from the immune system as it tries to fight them off. Estimates suggest that air pollution causes anywhere between 3.6 million and nine million premature deaths a year. “The numbers do vary,” says Andy Haines, professor of environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and author of the recently published book Planetary Health. “But they all agree that it’s a big public health burden.” People over the age of 65 are most susceptible to the harmful effects of air pollution, but many others are at risk too, says Kari Nadeau, director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University. People who smoke or vape are at increased risk, as are children with asthma. Air pollution also has consequences for those with allergies. Carbon dioxide increases the acidity of the air, which then pulls more pollen out from plants. For some people, this might just mean that they face annoyingly long bouts of seasonal allergies. But for others, it could be life-threatening. “For people who already have respiratory disease, boy is that a problem,” Nadeau says. When pollen gets into the respiratory pathway, the body creates mucus to get rid of it, which can then fill up and suffocate the lungs. Even healthy people can have similar outcomes if pollen levels are especially intense. In 2016, in the Australian state of Victoria, a severe thunderstorm combined with high levels of pollen to induce what The Lancet has described as “the world’s largest and most catastrophic epidemic of thunderstorm asthma.” So many residents suffered asthma attacks that emergency rooms were overwhelmed—and at least 10 people died as a result. Climate change is also causing wildfires to get worse, and wildfire smoke is especially toxic. As one recent study showed, fires can account for 25 percent of dangerous air pollution in the U.S. Nadeau explains that the smoke contains particles of everything that the fire has consumed along its path—from rubber tires to harmful chemicals. These particles are tiny and can penetrate even deeper into a person’s lungs and organs. ( Here’s how breathing wildfire smoke affects the body .)  Extreme heat  Heat waves are deadly, but researchers at first didn’t see direct links between climate change and the harmful impacts of heat waves and other extreme weather events. Haines says the evidence base has been growing. “We have now got a number of studies which has shown that we can with high confidence attribute health outcomes to climate change,” he says. Most recently, Haines points to a study published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change  that attributes more than a third of heat-related deaths to climate change. As National Geographic reported at the time, the study found that the human toll was even higher in some countries with less access to air conditioning or other factors that render people more vulnerable to heat. ( How climate change is making heat waves even deadlier .) That’s because the human body was not designed to cope with temperatures above 98.6°F, Nadeau says. Heat can break down muscles. The body does have some ways to deal with the heat—such as sweating. “But when it’s hot outside all the time, you cannot cope with that, and your heart muscles and cells start to literally die and degrade,” she says. If you’re exposed to extreme heat for too long and are unable to adequately release that heat, the stress can cause a cascade of problems throughout the body. The heart has to work harder to pump blood to the rest of the organs, while sweat leeches the body of necessary minerals such as sodium and potassium. The combination can result in heart attacks and strokes. Dehydration from heat exposure can also cause serious damage to the kidneys, which rely on water to function properly. For people whose kidneys are already beginning to fail—particularly older adults—Nadeau says that extreme heat can be a death sentence. “This is happening more and more,” she says. Studies have also drawn links between higher temperatures and preterm birth and other pregnancy complications. It’s unclear why, but Haines says that one hypothesis is that extreme heat reduces blood flow to the fetus.  Food insecurity  One of the less direct—but no less harmful—ways that climate change can affect health is by disrupting the world’s supply of food. Climate change both reduces the amount of food that’s available and makes it less nutritious.  According to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report, crop yields have already begun to decline as a result of rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events. Meanwhile, studies have shown that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can leech plants of zinc, iron, and protein—nutrients that humans need to survive. Malnutrition is linked to a variety of illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. It can also increase the risk of stunting, or impaired growth, in children, which can harm cognitive function. Climate change also imperils what we eat from the sea. Rising ocean temperatures have led many fish species to migrate toward Earth’s poles in search of cooler waters. Haines says that the resulting decline of fish stocks in subtropic regions “has big implications for nutrition,” because many of those coastal communities depend on fish for a substantial amount of the protein in their diets. This effect is likely to be particularly harmful for Indigenous communities, says Tiff-Annie Kenny, a professor in the faculty of medicine at Laval University in Quebec who studies climate change and food security in the Canadian Arctic. It’s much more difficult for these communities to find alternative sources of protein, she says, either because it’s not there or because it’s too expensive. “So what are people going to eat instead?” she asks.  Infectious diseases   As the planet gets hotter, the geographic region where ticks and mosquitoes like to live is getting wider. These animals are well-known vectors of diseases such as the Zika virus, dengue fever, and malaria. As they cross the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, Nadeau says, mosquitoes and ticks bring more opportunities for these diseases to infect greater swaths of the world. “It used to be that they stayed in those little sectors near the Equator, but now unfortunately because of the warming of northern Europe and Canada, you can find Zika in places you wouldn’t have expected,” Nadeau says. In addition, climate conditions such as temperature and humidity can impact the life cycle of mosquitoes. Haines says there’s particularly good evidence showing that, in some regions, climate change has altered these conditions in ways that increase the risk of mosquitos transmitting dengue. There are also several ways in which climate change is increasing the risk of diseases that can be transmitted through water, such as cholera, typhoid fever, and parasites. Sometimes that’s fairly direct, such as when people interact with dirty floodwaters. But Haines says that drought can have indirect impacts when people, say, can’t wash their hands or are forced to drink from dodgier sources of freshwater.  Mental health  A common result of any climate-linked disaster is the toll on mental health. The distress caused by drastic environmental change is so significant that it has been given its own name—solastalgia. Nadeau says that the effects on mental health have been apparent in her studies of emergency room visits arising from wildfires in the western U.S. People lose their homes, their jobs, and sometimes their loved ones, and that takes an immediate toll. “What’s the fastest acute issue that develops? It’s psychological,” she says. Extreme weather events such as wildfires and hurricanes cause so much stress and anxiety that they can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder and even suicide in the long run. Another common factor is that climate change causes disproportionate harm to the world’s most vulnerable people. On September 2, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an analysis showing that racial and ethnic minority communities are particularly at risk. According to the report, if temperatures rise by 2°C (3.6°F), Black people are 40 percent more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in related deaths. Another 34 percent are more likely to live in areas with a rise in childhood asthma. Further, the effects of climate change don’t occur in isolation. At any given time, a community might face air pollution, food insecurity, disease, and extreme heat all at once. Kenny says that’s particularly devastating in communities where the prevalence of food insecurity and poverty are already high. This situation hasn’t been adequately studied, she says, because “it’s difficult to capture these shocks that climate can bring.”  Why there’s reason for hope  In recent years, scientists and environmental activists have begun to push for more research into the myriad health effects of climate change. “One of the striking things is there’s been a real dearth of funding for climate change and health,” Haines says. “For that reason, some of the evidence we have is still fragmentary.” Still, hope is not lost. In the Paris Agreement, countries around the world have pledged to limit global warming to below 2°C (3.6°F)—and preferably to 1.5°C (2.7°F)—by cutting their emissions. “When you reduce those emissions, you benefit health as well as the planet,” Haines says. Meanwhile, scientists and environmental activists have put forward solutions that can help people adapt to the health effects of climate change. These include early heat warnings and dedicated cooling centers, more resilient supply chains, and freeing healthcare facilities from dependence on the electric grid. Nadeau argues that the COVID-19 pandemic also presents an opportunity for world leaders to think bigger and more strategically. For example, the pandemic has laid bare problems with efficiency and equity that have many countries restructuring their healthcare facilities. In the process, she says, they can look for new ways to reduce waste and emissions, such as getting more hospitals using renewable energy. “This is in our hands to do,” Nadeau says. “If we don’t do anything, that would be cataclysmic.”
Why climate change is still the greatest threat to human health
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-climate-change-is-still-the-greatest-threat-to-human-health
https://press.un.org/en/2021/sc14445.doc.htm
Climate Change ‘Biggest Threat Modern Humans Have Ever Faced’, World-Renowned Naturalist Tells Security Council, Calls for Greater Global Cooperation
2021-02-23
None
<div><div><p>Climate change is a “crisis multiplier” that has profound implications for international peace and stability, Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council today, amid calls for deep partnerships within and beyond the United Nations system to blunt its acute effects on food security, natural resources and migration patterns fuelling tensions across countries and regions.</p>
<p>Throughout the morning, the Council’s high-level open debate on climate and security heard from a range of influential voices, including naturalist David Attenborough, who called climate change “the biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced”.  In video remarks telecast at the outset, he warned that concentrations of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere have not been equalled for millions of years.</p>
<p>“If we continue on our current path, we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security,” he said:  food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature and ocean food chains.  The poorest — those with the least security — are certain to suffer.  “Our duty right now is surely to do all we can to help those in the most immediate danger.”</p>
<p>While the world will never return to the stable climate that gave birth to civilization, he said that, if Governments attending the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in November recognize climate change as a global security threat, “we may yet act proportionately — and in time”.</p>
<p>Climate change can only be dealt with by unparalleled levels of global cooperation, he said.  It will compel countries to question economic models, invent new industries and recognize the moral responsibility that wealthy nations have to the rest of the world, placing a value on nature that “goes far beyond money”.  He challenged the international community to finally create a stable, healthy world where resources are equally shared and where — for the first time in history — people “come to know what it feels like to be secure”.</p>
<p>Mr. Guterres echoed those calls, describing the climate emergency as “the defining issue of our time”.  Noting that the last decade was the hottest in human history, he said wildfires, cyclones, floods and droughts are now the new normal.  “These shocks not only damage the environment on which we depend, they also weaken our political, economic and social systems,” he said.</p>
<p>Indeed, where climate change dries up rivers, reduces harvests, destroys critical infrastructure and displaces communities, it exacerbates the risks of conflict, he said.  A study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that 8 of the 10 countries hosting the largest multilateral peace operations in 2018 were in areas highly exposed to climate change.</p>
<p>The impact is greatest where fragility and conflict have weakened coping mechanisms, he said, where people depend on natural capital for their livelihoods and where women — who bear the greatest burden of the climate emergency — do not enjoy equal rights.  He highlighted examples in Afghanistan, where reduced harvests have pushed people into poverty, leaving them susceptible to recruitment by armed groups, and across West Africa and the Sahel, where changes in grazing patterns have fostered conflict between pastoralists and farmers.  In some Pacific small island nations, entire communities have been forced to relocate.</p>
<p>“The forced movement of larger numbers of people around the world will clearly increase the potential for conflict and insecurity,” he observed.  He called for greater efforts to address climate‑related security risks, starting with a focus on prevention, and creating a global coalition committed to achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century.  The United Nations is asking companies, cities and financial institutions to prepare credible decarbonization plans.</p>
<p>In addition, immediate actions are needed to protect countries from increasingly frequent and severe climate effects.  He urged donors and multilateral and national development banks to increase the share of adaptation and resilience finance to at least 50 per cent of their climate finance support.  Developed countries, too, must keep their pledge to channel $100 billion annually to the global South.  “They have already missed the deadline of 2020,” he acknowledged.</p>
<p>Above all, he called for embracing a concept of security that places people at its centre, stressing that COVID-19 has laid bare the devastation that non‑traditional security threats can cause on a global scale.  In all such efforts, it will be essential to build on the strengths of the Security Council, Peacebuilding Commission, international financial institutions, regional organizations, civil society, the private sector, academia and others.</p>
<p>Issuing a call to action, Nisreen Elsaim, Chair of the Youth Organization on Climate Change and the United Nations Youth Advisory Group, said young people around the globe are watching the Security Council as it grapples with climate change.  Each of the organ’s four meetings on the issue — in 2007, 2011, 2018 and 2019 — have referenced serious climate-related security risks in Somalia, Darfur, West Africa and the Sahel, Mali and the Lake Chad Basin.  “Science has forecasted many more countries will join this list if we did not take the right measures now, and if we did not start adaptation specially in Africa,” she said, adding that, in her country, “we are living in continuous insecurity due to many factors that put Sudan on the top of the list when it comes to climate vulnerability”.</p>
<p>She recalled that, in a 2018 Council resolution on Sudan, members recognized the adverse effects of climate change, ecological changes and natural hazards on the situation in Darfur, focusing specifically on drought, desertification, land degradation and food insecurity.  “Human survival, in a situation of resources degradation, hunger, poverty and uncontrolled climate migration, will make conflict an inevitable result,” she said.  Moreover, climate-related emergencies cause major disruptions in access to health, life-saving sexual and reproductive health services, and result in loss of livelihoods and drive displacement and migration.  They also increase the risk of gender-based violence and harmful practices and force young people to flee in search of a decent life.</p>
<p>Welcoming the Council’s recent deployment of a new special political mission, the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in the Sudan (UNITAMS), she said it has a historic opportunity to speak to the root causes of the conflict.  Climate change and youth participation is mentioned twice in the Mission’s mandate, and climate change challenges are included in the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement.  Emphasizing that young people must be part of the solution, she declared:  “We are the present, we have the future, let’s not repeat previous generations’ lapse.”</p>
<p>In the ensuing dialogue, Heads of State and Government, along with ministers and other senior officials described national actions to attenuate the negative impact of climate change and offered their views on the related security risks.  Some pressed the Council to broaden its thinking about non-traditional security threats.  Several — including leaders from Kenya and Niger — stressed that the link between climate and conflict could not be more evident, while others explored the ability of Governments to meet people’s basic needs, and still others cast doubt on the assertion that the relationship between climate and conflict is causal, instead pointing to political and economic factors that are known to drive tensions.</p>
<p>Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the <u>United Kingdom</u> and Council President for February, speaking in his national capacity, said the Council, while imperfect, has been willing to lead the way in confronting threats to international security.  “That is exactly what climate change represents,” he said, acknowledging that, while there are some who disagree, these cynics “could not be more wrong”.  While the causes of climate change may not sit within the Council’s traditional purview, its effects most certainly do.  He asked delegates to consider the young man forced onto the road when his once‑fertile home becomes a desert — one of the 16 million people displaced by weather-related disasters each year — who becomes easy prey for violent extremists, or the girl who drops out of school because her daily search for water takes her away from her family — and into the sights of the human traffickers.</p>
<p>“If such scenes were triggered by the actions of some despotic warlord or internecine conflict, few would question this Council’s right to act or its duty to do so,” he assured.  “This is not a subject from which we should shy away.”  The world must move from 51 billion metric tons of greenhouse‑gas emissions each year to net zero, so that the increase in global temperatures remains within manageable levels.  For its part, the United Kingdom Parliament passed a law committing to net zero by 2050, he said, drawing attention to his pledge that the nation would slash emissions by 68 per cent by 2030.  He urged the Council to act, “because climate change is a geopolitical issue every bit as much as an environmental one”, stressing that, if it is to succeed in maintaining peace and security worldwide, it must galvanize and support the United Nations family of agencies into a swift and effective response.</p>
<p>Kaïs Saïed, President of <u>Tunisia</u>, agreed with Ms. Elsaim that the world must listen to youth on climate change.  More broadly, humans — and not money — must be placed at the centre of the issue.  Voicing support for the Secretary-General’s 2021 priorities, especially his efforts to galvanize Member States to confront the multiple impacts of climate change, he described it as ironic that humans are, at the same time, the phenomenon’s drivers and its greatest victims.  “It is no one’s right to […] to commit all of humanity to death,” he stressed, noting that Council resolution 2532 (2020) confirmed that insecurity can be driven by a multitude of factors, not just armed conflict.  One such driver is the deepening poverty and resource scarcity resulting from a changing climate, particularly in Africa.  Climate factors often prolong conflict and create conditions conducive to deprivation, exclusion, terrorism and organized crime.</p>
<p>Calling on the Council to adopt a new, more comprehensive approach and for sufficient resources for all specialized agencies related to climate change, he underlined the need for early warning systems and better prevention strategies.  Noting that the COVID-19 pandemic and other recent crises have once again revealed the need for States to strengthen their solidarity, he emphasized the need for prompt action while stressing that the burden borne by States must be differentiated based on their degree of responsibility for causing the crisis.  Moreover, mitigation cannot be at the expense of developing countries, he said.</p>
<p>Uhuru Kenyatta, President of <u>Kenya</u>, said that new approaches to investment by the public and private sector need to reach the countries and regions worst hit by climate change.  Persistent droughts, constant sea‑level rise and increasingly frequent extreme weather patterns are reversing economic growth and development gains achieved over decades.  The result is increased fragility to instability and armed conflict that then come to the attention of this Security Council.  The implementation of the Council’s mandate to maintain global peace and security will only get more difficult with time if climate change remains on its present course.  Rather than wait for a future tipping point, we must redouble the efforts to direct all the resources and multilateral frameworks of our rules-based international order to mitigate the effects of climate change.  While the bulk of this work is happening outside the Council, no body with such a strong mandate should step aside from this challenge.</p>
<p>The climate-security nexus is already impacting Africa.  “Listen to us Africans when we tell you that the link is clear, its impact tangible and the need for solutions urgent,” he said.  Making recommendations, he said that the Council must do more when crafting mandates for conflict resolution and post-conflict resolution to ensure they dovetail with the efforts to deploy climate change mitigation and adaptation measures.  In this regard, he applauded Council resolutions 2349 (2017) and 2502 (2019), respectively on Lake Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that have integrated measures to address the impact of climate change.  The 15-member organ can also act strongly against illicit financial outflows, illicit resource exploitation, terrorism financing and money‑laundering in the most fragile regions in Africa.  Doing so immediately boosts the resources available to Governments to undertake climate change mitigation and offer the public services and goods needed to consolidate and protect peace.</p>
<p>Brigi Rafini, Prime Minister of <u>Niger</u>, agreed that the impact of climate change on peace and security is increasingly evident, stressing that water scarcity exacerbated by climate change could see gross domestic product (GDP) in the Sahel fall by 6 per cent and hunger increase 20 per cent by 2050.  Climate change has increased competition for diminished land and water resources, ramping up tensions between livestock owners and others.  He underscored the collective responsibility to tackle this existential challenge, stressing that “climate change and land degradation are no longer purely environmental matters”.  Rather, they are part of a broader view that links environmental goals with those for economic and social development, and the pursuit of international peace and stability.</p>
<p>“We need to consider climate change as a threat to peace and security,” he said, urging the Council to shore up its understanding of impact on security and to systematically consider climate change in its resolutions pertaining to specific country and regional contexts.  In such efforts, it should rely on the advisory role of the Peacebuilding Commission, and the Informal Expert Group on Climate and Security, co-chaired by Niger and Ireland.  The appointment of a Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Climate and Security likewise will raise the profile of this dimension within the Council’s work.</p>
<p>Nguyễn Xuân Phúc, Prime Minister of <u>Viet Nam</u>, said the Earth’s recent calamities have placed great burdens on the political and socioeconomic life of many countries, causing unemployment and poverty, creating instability and exacerbating current conflicts.  Against that backdrop, the Council should galvanize the international community’s collective efforts with an approach that is balanced between traditional and non-traditional security challenges.  That includes addressing the root causes of conflicts such as poverty, inequality, power politics and unilateral interference and coercion.</p>
<p>Calling for strict adherence to the Charter of the United Nations and international law, he said the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement on climate change must guide the way, and greater resources are needed to support developing countries, least developed countries, small island developing States and landlocked countries.  The Council should also enhance its early warning capacity, bolster its mediation and conflict prevention roles, work more closely with regional organizations and fully respect States’ sovereignty and national ownership.  Noting that Viet Nam is among the six countries most severely affected by climate change, he outlined various national efforts to address the challenge while requesting more international assistance.</p>
<p>Erna Solberg, Prime Minister of <u>Norway</u>, emphasized that climate change is redefining the global security landscape.  “We must rethink and adapt the Council’s approaches to peacebuilding and sustaining peace in three ways,” she said.  First, the Council needs better information on climate-related security risks.  International research networks and the informal expert group will be important in that regard.  Norway has helped establish a Nordic-Baltic expert network.  Second, the Council should discuss climate risks in specific country contexts, based on country reporting and briefings.  The United Nations must be at the forefront of preventive diplomacy.  To achieve sustainable solutions, peace diplomacy must be climate-sensitive, and climate action must be conflict‑sensitive.  Third, it is imperative to strengthen partnerships within and beyond the United Nations system, including with affected States and regional organizations.  The active participation of diverse groups, including women and youth, is also vital.</p>
<p>The national security communities in many countries have understood the security risks posed by climate change, she continued.  While climate change can lead to hard security challenges, there are no hard security solutions.  The first line of defence is ambitious climate action.  It must begin with the full implementation of the Paris Agreement and 2030 Agenda.  Climate action depends on multilateral cooperation.  By shouldering a common responsibility to counter climate change, the Council will be better prepared to maintain international peace and stability.</p>
<p>Ralph E. Gonsalves, Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs of <u>Saint Vincent and the Grenadines</u>, emphasizing that the Council has a responsibility to address the consequences of climate change, said a failure to do so would be, in part, “an abdication of our duty”.  It is time for the organ to seriously consider drafting a resolution on the matter and to map out a coherent approach, aiming for a working consensus.  Affirming UNFCCC’s role as the primary body for dealing with climate change and the Paris Agreement as a major part of the rules-based international system, he said the Council should play its role without encroaching on the work of UNFCCC’s inclusive decision-making body.  It should also engage with the Peacebuilding Commission and the General Assembly on climate and security risks that touch on issues of humanitarian support, sustainable development, health pandemics, peace and security.</p>
<p>Stressing that the first step to prevent or contain climate-security risks is for the major, and historical, emitters to fulfil — and indeed exceed — the commitments made in the Paris Agreement, he underlined the principle of common but differentiated responsibility.  Climate change is an existential threat that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable, especially small island developing States such as Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.  “It has become distressingly commonplace for an entire year’s [gross domestic product] to be washed away by a hurricane overnight, even as we are hindered by a lack of a sufficient inclusion, on favourable terms, into the global financial architecture,” he said.  Citing the many natural hazards in Haiti, in particular, he also drew attention to the Sahel region and the battle for dwindling resources.  However, no country is immune to such human-made challenges and all must stand in solidarity, with the Council paying close attention to climate change as it crafts its mandates, he said.</p>
<p>Kaja Kallas, Prime Minister of <u>Estonia</u>, said 7 of the 10 countries most vulnerable and least prepared to deal with climate change host a United Nations peacekeeping operation or a special political mission — a fact the Council cannot ignore.  She expressed support for the statement to be delivered by Germany’s Foreign Minister on behalf of like-minded countries pointing the way forward for the Council, stressing that “we need to acknowledge that the climate emergency can pose a danger to peace — and we must make it a part of our security policy planning and discussions here”.  She pressed the Council to “do more” to fully</p>
<p>aspects of its work, noting that the Secretary-General must receive a mandate to collect data and coordinate policy to this aim.</p>
<p>Among other efforts, she said that Estonia cooperates with small island States and least developed countries in green technology solutions and know-how transfer.  The Government also recently launched the Data for the Environment Alliance, a coalition of State and non-State actors that will support the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in developing a global environmental data strategy by 2025.</p>
<p>Simon Coveney, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence of <u>Ireland</u>, said that climate change has many complex impacts, not least on international peace and security, the very business of this Council.  Climate change is already causing upheaval, affecting peace and security and the stability of societies.  Pointing out that the relationship between climate and security works in complex ways, he said political instability undermines efforts to build climate resilience, and the impact of climactic shocks is compounded when institutions are strained.  Ireland is proud to join the Weathering Risk Project to help guide action at the Security Council and beyond, and is keen to understand better not just how climate change contributes to insecurity but how climate action can build peace.  Ireland chairs the Informal Expert Group of Member States on this topic, together with Niger, also partnering with Nauru and Germany, as Chairs of the Group of Friends on Climate and Security.</p>
<p>Ireland’s core message today is that the inclusion of climate in Council discussions and actions will strengthen conflict prevention and support peacebuilding efforts.  Stressing the need to ensure the full, equal and meaningful participation of women and youth in decision-making processes related to climate issues and the management of natural resources, he declared:  “But, in listening to and understanding the concerns and insights of future generations, we cannot abrogate our responsibility to provide leadership today”.</p>
<p>Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón, Minister for Foreign Affairs of <u>Mexico</u>, said the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that international peace and security can no longer be viewed through a single lens, but must also consider multiple drivers of insecurity.  Food insecurity, water scarcity and droughts — all exacerbated by climate change — have reached severe levels in several regions of the world.  Pledging Mexico’s support to the next Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC in Glasgow, later in 2021, he said climate change requires a comprehensive global response with a focus on ecosystem preservations.  Mexico recently submitted its own national plan in that arena, which is coupled with a focus on prevention and adaptation, as well as efforts to reduce inequality and strengthen communities.  Stressing that all efforts must be taken in line with the 2030 Agenda, he welcomed the Council’s creation of an informal group to monitor the links between climate and peace and security as a timely measure.  Underlining the importance of ensuring sustainable peacebuilding and protecting livelihoods, he agreed with the Secretary-General that post-pandemic recovery efforts are an opportunity to “build back better” and build more egalitarian, adaptable societies.</p>
<p>Emmanuel Macron, President of <u>France</u>, said protecting the environment has, in recent years, meant recognizing climate change as a peace and security issue.  Of the 20 countries most affected by conflict in the world, 12 are also severely impacted by climate change, he said, spotlighting the impacts of desertification, the increase in forced migration and agricultural challenges — all of which have resulted in such fallout as the advent of climate refugees and growing conflicts over land and water.  Endorsing the initiative to address such matters under the auspices of the Council, he echoed calls for the appointment of a United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Security, as well as for an annual Secretary-General’s report with relevant recommendations.</p>
<p>Recognizing that the effects of climate change are unfairly distributed worldwide, he recalled his recent call for France’s contribution to the Green Climate Fund to be increased to one third of its total.  France strongly supports the creation of a “Great Green Wall” in Africa, which aims to restore 250 million hectares of land for agriculture, create 10 million green new jobs and sequester carbon.  He also pledged France’s commitment to accelerating the preservation of biodiversity, while calling for strengthened dialogue between the African Union and the United Nations on climate and security.  Turning to the Pacific, where many nations are struggling to implement mitigation measures, he called for additional international support and an easing of geopolitical tensions across the region.</p>
<p>Prakash Javadekar, Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change of <u>India</u>, recalled the global democratic effort to take climate action in a nationally determined manner, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities.  He cautioned the Council against building a parallel climate track where such principles are “brushed aside”.  Noting that there is no common, widely accepted methodology for assessing the links between climate change, conflict and fragility, he said fragility and climate impact are highly context‑specific.  In fragile contexts, where Governments struggle to provide basic services, emergency conditions are largely driven by political violence disrupting harvests and aid supplies, rather than by climate factors alone.  “A complete picture of climate vulnerability only emerges with an assessment of the State’s capacity to be the primary responder to interrelated environmental, social, economic and security dynamics,” he said.  While climate change does not directly cause violent conflict, its interaction with other social, political and economic factors can exacerbate conflict drivers.  He called for the building of robust governance structures at local, national and regional levels to address climate‑ and fragility-related risks, pressing donor countries to provide greater financial, technological and capacity-building assistance to help fragile States enact adaption and mitigation strategies.</p>
<p>John F. Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate of the <u>United States</u>, thanked European and other countries for their leadership on climate change during what he described as the United States “inexcusable absence” from the debate over the past four years.  Though climate change is indeed an existential threat, the world has yet to adequately respond to it.  Noting that the question of climate change is no longer one for debate, he declared:  “The evidence, the science, is screaming at us.”  Many of the world’s regions most impacted by climate change are also projected to become future conflict hotspots.  Therefore, the issue must feature in all of the Council’s work and reporting.  Emphasizing that President Joseph R. Biden understands that “we do not have a moment to waste”, he cited his new coordinated, whole-of-Government approach which aims to elevate the issue and put the United States on the path to sustainability that can never be reversed by any future President or demagogue.</p>
<p>Addressing climate change will require every country to step up and boost their level of ambition, he said, noting that the world’s largest carbon emitters bear the greatest responsibility.  First and foremost will be the need to reduce the use of coal globally.  “Inaction comes with a far higher price tag than action,” he said, stressing that, not since the industrial revolution has there been such potential to build back better in every part of the globe.  Just by doing nothing, humanity will march forward in what is tantamount to a mutual suicide pact, he warned, spotlighting the importance of the climate summit to be hosted by President Biden in the coming weeks, as well as the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC to be held in Glasgow later in 2021.  The United States will also work with like-minded countries in the Council, he said, urging Member States to begin treating climate change as the security crisis that it is.</p>
<p>Xie Zhenhua, Special Envoy for Climate Change of <u>China</u>, said that, even as global climate governance enters a new and crucial phase, the spread of COVID-19 poses serious threats to the global response.  Given the differences in historical responsibility and development levels between States, he underscored the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and urged developed nations to lead the way.  In building back after the pandemic, countries should respect nature, protect biodiversity, champion green lifestyles and “avoid old paths of giving without taking” from the Earth.  In that context, he described climate change as a development issue, urging the international community to support developing nations, least developed countries and small island developing States in implementing mitigation and adaptation measures.</p>
<p>“We need to stay committed to multilateralism,” he stressed, underlining the importance of UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement as the main channels for those critical discussions.  Any role to be played by the Security Council on climate change must fall under its purview, he added.  Outlining China’s commitment to fulfilling its responsibilities under the Paris Agreement, he spotlighted its recently announced plan to have national CO<sub>2</sub> emissions peak before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality prior to 2060.  He also pointed out that the country’s forest cover has been rising steadily for many years, that it leads the world in green power generation and that it tops the list of clean energy patents registered.</p>
<p>The representative of the <u>Russian Federation</u> agreed that addressing climate change requires a global approach that is coordinated, targeted at reducing emissions and implementing effective adaptation measures, especially through UNFCCC.  Noting that the Council has discussed climate change on several occasions, he said the issue is often presented as a fundamental threat to stability and as a root cause of problems, particularly in Africa, with warnings about the increasing risks of conflict.  While he agreed that climate change can exacerbate conflict, he questioned whether it is the root cause of violence.  “There are serious doubts,” he said.  The connection between climate and conflict can be examined only in certain countries and regions.  Discussing it in the global context is not relevant.  “Not all conflicts are threats to international peace and security,” he explained.  In addition, considering climate as a root cause of security issues distracts from the true root causes, and thus, hinders solutions.  Political and socioeconomic factors, which have a greater influence on conflict risk, cannot be ignored, he said, pointing out that COVID-19 has exacerbated inequalities within and between countries and sparked an uptick in hunger — including in countries that were already in conflict.  He urged donors to address the problem of “green protectionism”, seen in their refusal to exchange technology that would allow others to adapt.   While discussing climate issues in the Council is seen as beneficial, the “real work” of improving coordination of international activities would be better accomplished in the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and UNFCC.  Conflicts — in and of themselves — reduce the ability of States to adapt to climate change, he said, explaining that the increased security risks in the Sahel are, in fact, caused by countries pursuing regime change in Libya.</p>
<p>Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera, President of <u>Malawi</u>, speaking for the least developed countries, said building resilience to mitigate the security risks associated with climate change must begin with reflections on COVID-19, as Governments have relegated many other priorities in the quest to fight the virus.  Describing the impact of the nexus between climate change and security is “indiscriminate and consequential”, he said water scarcity, desertification and cyclones all foster competition for resources, and in the process, turn people into climate refugees.  Least developed countries bear the brunt of these phenomena, despite that their emissions are 30 times lower than those of high‑income countries.  Stressing that recovery from the coronavirus must be aligned with efforts to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, he pressed developed countries to approach the 2021 UNFCC meeting with more ambition than in years past, as their current commitments to cut emissions remain “woefully inadequate”.  They must fulfil their pledges to provide $100 billion in climate financing annually, answer the call to earmark 50 per cent of financing in the Green Climate Fund for adaptation, especially in least developed countries, and to meaningfully transfer climate‑friendly technologies to help least developed countries accelerate their green development efforts.</p>
<p>Gaston Alphonso Browne, Prime Minister and Minister for Finance and Corporate Governance of <u>Antigua and Barbuda</u>, spoke on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States, declaring:  “Make no mistake […] climate change’s existential threat to our own survival is not a future consideration, but a current reality.”  For the past 30 years, the Alliance has been the single most consistent advocate on climate, he said, highlighting the often-overlooked threats faced by small island developing States.  He urged the international community to simultaneously plan and operationalize a system to address inevitable loss and damage which uproot peace and security of small island developing States.  Equitable solutions are needed to systematically address difficult issues, such as climate change displacement, including the treatment of climate refugees, and loss of territory. For the past three decades, small island and low-lying States have been sounding the alarm, sending the SOS distress signal.  They are losing their territories, populations, resources and very existence due to climate change.  The Secretary-General recently stated:  “Without nature’s help, we will not thrive or even survive[…] For too long, we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature.”  Sadly, small island developing States continue to be the front line for this war.  “Our appeal for the Council is to take this threat very seriously before it is too late,” he said.</p>
<p>Heiko Maas, Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs of <u>Germany</u>, speaking for the Group of Friends of Climate and Security, said those countries are united by the common belief that climate change is the fundamental challenge of our time.  The poorest and most vulnerable are suffering the most, with entire islands at risk of disappearing.  “We are putting their future, their safety and their well‑being at risk if we don’t act,” he stressed, calling for concerted efforts by the United Nations in making climate change its top priority.  Agreeing with other speakers that the issue has major implications for peace and security, he said it therefore belongs firmly on the Council’s agenda.  In July 2020, the Nauru delegation presented the organ with a plan of action, including calling for the appointment of a Special Envoy on Climate and Security; regular reporting to the Council; climate‑sensitive peacebuilding; and more cooperation with civil society, regional and national actors on climate-related security risks.  Now, it is time for the Council to adopt a strong resolution reflecting each of those points, he said.</p></div>||||I||||Skip to main content
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 United Nations

 SC/14445
 23 February 2021

 Climate Change ‘Biggest Threat Modern Humans Have Ever Faced’, World-Renowned Naturalist Tells Security Council, Calls for Greater Global Cooperation

 Climate change is a “crisis multiplier” that has profound implications for international peace and stability, Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council today, amid calls for deep partnerships within and beyond the United Nations system to blunt its acute effects on food security, natural resources and migration patterns fuelling tensions across countries and regions.

 Throughout the morning, the Council’s high-level open debate on climate and security heard from a range of influential voices, including naturalist David Attenborough, who called climate change “the biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced”. In video remarks telecast at the outset, he warned that concentrations of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere have not been equalled for millions of years.

 “If we continue on our current path, we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security,” he said: food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature and ocean food chains. The poorest — those with the least security — are certain to suffer. “Our duty right now is surely to do all we can to help those in the most immediate danger.”

 While the world will never return to the stable climate that gave birth to civilization, he said that, if Governments attending the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in November recognize climate change as a global security threat, “we may yet act proportionately — and in time”.

 Climate change can only be dealt with by unparalleled levels of global cooperation, he said. It will compel countries to question economic models, invent new industries and recognize the moral responsibility that wealthy nations have to the rest of the world, placing a value on nature that “goes far beyond money”. He challenged the international community to finally create a stable, healthy world where resources are equally shared and where — for the first time in history — people “come to know what it feels like to be secure”.

 Mr. Guterres echoed those calls, describing the climate emergency as “the defining issue of our time”. Noting that the last decade was the hottest in human history, he said wildfires, cyclones, floods and droughts are now the new normal. “These shocks not only damage the environment on which we depend, they also weaken our political, economic and social systems,” he said.

 Indeed, where climate change dries up rivers, reduces harvests, destroys critical infrastructure and displaces communities, it exacerbates the risks of conflict, he said. A study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that 8 of the 10 countries hosting the largest multilateral peace operations in 2018 were in areas highly exposed to climate change.

 The impact is greatest where fragility and conflict have weakened coping mechanisms, he said, where people depend on natural capital for their livelihoods and where women — who bear the greatest burden of the climate emergency — do not enjoy equal rights. He highlighted examples in Afghanistan, where reduced harvests have pushed people into poverty, leaving them susceptible to recruitment by armed groups, and across West Africa and the Sahel, where changes in grazing patterns have fostered conflict between pastoralists and farmers. In some Pacific small island nations, entire communities have been forced to relocate.

 “The forced movement of larger numbers of people around the world will clearly increase the potential for conflict and insecurity,” he observed. He called for greater efforts to address climate‑related security risks, starting with a focus on prevention, and creating a global coalition committed to achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century. The United Nations is asking companies, cities and financial institutions to prepare credible decarbonization plans.

 In addition, immediate actions are needed to protect countries from increasingly frequent and severe climate effects. He urged donors and multilateral and national development banks to increase the share of adaptation and resilience finance to at least 50 per cent of their climate finance support. Developed countries, too, must keep their pledge to channel $100 billion annually to the global South. “They have already missed the deadline of 2020,” he acknowledged.

 Above all, he called for embracing a concept of security that places people at its centre, stressing that COVID-19 has laid bare the devastation that non‑traditional security threats can cause on a global scale. In all such efforts, it will be essential to build on the strengths of the Security Council, Peacebuilding Commission, international financial institutions, regional organizations, civil society, the private sector, academia and others.

 Issuing a call to action, Nisreen Elsaim, Chair of the Youth Organization on Climate Change and the United Nations Youth Advisory Group, said young people around the globe are watching the Security Council as it grapples with climate change. Each of the organ’s four meetings on the issue — in 2007, 2011, 2018 and 2019 — have referenced serious climate-related security risks in Somalia, Darfur, West Africa and the Sahel, Mali and the Lake Chad Basin. “Science has forecasted many more countries will join this list if we did not take the right measures now, and if we did not start adaptation specially in Africa,” she said, adding that, in her country, “we are living in continuous insecurity due to many factors that put Sudan on the top of the list when it comes to climate vulnerability”.

 She recalled that, in a 2018 Council resolution on Sudan, members recognized the adverse effects of climate change, ecological changes and natural hazards on the situation in Darfur, focusing specifically on drought, desertification, land degradation and food insecurity. “Human survival, in a situation of resources degradation, hunger, poverty and uncontrolled climate migration, will make conflict an inevitable result,” she said. Moreover, climate-related emergencies cause major disruptions in access to health, life-saving sexual and reproductive health services, and result in loss of livelihoods and drive displacement and migration. They also increase the risk of gender-based violence and harmful practices and force young people to flee in search of a decent life.

 Welcoming the Council’s recent deployment of a new special political mission, the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in the Sudan (UNITAMS), she said it has a historic opportunity to speak to the root causes of the conflict. Climate change and youth participation is mentioned twice in the Mission’s mandate, and climate change challenges are included in the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement. Emphasizing that young people must be part of the solution, she declared: “We are the present, we have the future, let’s not repeat previous generations’ lapse.”

 In the ensuing dialogue, Heads of State and Government, along with ministers and other senior officials described national actions to attenuate the negative impact of climate change and offered their views on the related security risks. Some pressed the Council to broaden its thinking about non-traditional security threats. Several — including leaders from Kenya and Niger — stressed that the link between climate and conflict could not be more evident, while others explored the ability of Governments to meet people’s basic needs, and still others cast doubt on the assertion that the relationship between climate and conflict is causal, instead pointing to political and economic factors that are known to drive tensions.

 Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Council President for February, speaking in his national capacity, said the Council, while imperfect, has been willing to lead the way in confronting threats to international security. “That is exactly what climate change represents,” he said, acknowledging that, while there are some who disagree, these cynics “could not be more wrong”. While the causes of climate change may not sit within the Council’s traditional purview, its effects most certainly do. He asked delegates to consider the young man forced onto the road when his once‑fertile home becomes a desert — one of the 16 million people displaced by weather-related disasters each year — who becomes easy prey for violent extremists, or the girl who drops out of school because her daily search for water takes her away from her family — and into the sights of the human traffickers.

 “If such scenes were triggered by the actions of some despotic warlord or internecine conflict, few would question this Council’s right to act or its duty to do so,” he assured. “This is not a subject from which we should shy away.” The world must move from 51 billion metric tons of greenhouse‑gas emissions each year to net zero, so that the increase in global temperatures remains within manageable levels. For its part, the United Kingdom Parliament passed a law committing to net zero by 2050, he said, drawing attention to his pledge that the nation would slash emissions by 68 per cent by 2030. He urged the Council to act, “because climate change is a geopolitical issue every bit as much as an environmental one”, stressing that, if it is to succeed in maintaining peace and security worldwide, it must galvanize and support the United Nations family of agencies into a swift and effective response.

 Kaïs Saïed, President of Tunisia, agreed with Ms. Elsaim that the world must listen to youth on climate change. More broadly, humans — and not money — must be placed at the centre of the issue. Voicing support for the Secretary-General’s 2021 priorities, especially his efforts to galvanize Member States to confront the multiple impacts of climate change, he described it as ironic that humans are, at the same time, the phenomenon’s drivers and its greatest victims. “It is no one’s right to […] to commit all of humanity to death,” he stressed, noting that Council resolution 2532 (2020) confirmed that insecurity can be driven by a multitude of factors, not just armed conflict. One such driver is the deepening poverty and resource scarcity resulting from a changing climate, particularly in Africa. Climate factors often prolong conflict and create conditions conducive to deprivation, exclusion, terrorism and organized crime.

 Calling on the Council to adopt a new, more comprehensive approach and for sufficient resources for all specialized agencies related to climate change, he underlined the need for early warning systems and better prevention strategies. Noting that the COVID-19 pandemic and other recent crises have once again revealed the need for States to strengthen their solidarity, he emphasized the need for prompt action while stressing that the burden borne by States must be differentiated based on their degree of responsibility for causing the crisis. Moreover, mitigation cannot be at the expense of developing countries, he said.

 Uhuru Kenyatta, President of Kenya, said that new approaches to investment by the public and private sector need to reach the countries and regions worst hit by climate change. Persistent droughts, constant sea‑level rise and increasingly frequent extreme weather patterns are reversing economic growth and development gains achieved over decades. The result is increased fragility to instability and armed conflict that then come to the attention of this Security Council. The implementation of the Council’s mandate to maintain global peace and security will only get more difficult with time if climate change remains on its present course. Rather than wait for a future tipping point, we must redouble the efforts to direct all the resources and multilateral frameworks of our rules-based international order to mitigate the effects of climate change. While the bulk of this work is happening outside the Council, no body with such a strong mandate should step aside from this challenge.

 The climate-security nexus is already impacting Africa. “Listen to us Africans when we tell you that the link is clear, its impact tangible and the need for solutions urgent,” he said. Making recommendations, he said that the Council must do more when crafting mandates for conflict resolution and post-conflict resolution to ensure they dovetail with the efforts to deploy climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. In this regard, he applauded Council resolutions 2349 (2017) and 2502 (2019), respectively on Lake Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that have integrated measures to address the impact of climate change. The 15-member organ can also act strongly against illicit financial outflows, illicit resource exploitation, terrorism financing and money‑laundering in the most fragile regions in Africa. Doing so immediately boosts the resources available to Governments to undertake climate change mitigation and offer the public services and goods needed to consolidate and protect peace.

 Brigi Rafini, Prime Minister of Niger, agreed that the impact of climate change on peace and security is increasingly evident, stressing that water scarcity exacerbated by climate change could see gross domestic product (GDP) in the Sahel fall by 6 per cent and hunger increase 20 per cent by 2050. Climate change has increased competition for diminished land and water resources, ramping up tensions between livestock owners and others. He underscored the collective responsibility to tackle this existential challenge, stressing that “climate change and land degradation are no longer purely environmental matters”. Rather, they are part of a broader view that links environmental goals with those for economic and social development, and the pursuit of international peace and stability.

 “We need to consider climate change as a threat to peace and security,” he said, urging the Council to shore up its understanding of impact on security and to systematically consider climate change in its resolutions pertaining to specific country and regional contexts. In such efforts, it should rely on the advisory role of the Peacebuilding Commission, and the Informal Expert Group on Climate and Security, co-chaired by Niger and Ireland. The appointment of a Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Climate and Security likewise will raise the profile of this dimension within the Council’s work.

 Nguyễn Xuân Phúc, Prime Minister of Viet Nam, said the Earth’s recent calamities have placed great burdens on the political and socioeconomic life of many countries, causing unemployment and poverty, creating instability and exacerbating current conflicts. Against that backdrop, the Council should galvanize the international community’s collective efforts with an approach that is balanced between traditional and non-traditional security challenges. That includes addressing the root causes of conflicts such as poverty, inequality, power politics and unilateral interference and coercion.

 Calling for strict adherence to the Charter of the United Nations and international law, he said the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement on climate change must guide the way, and greater resources are needed to support developing countries, least developed countries, small island developing States and landlocked countries. The Council should also enhance its early warning capacity, bolster its mediation and conflict prevention roles, work more closely with regional organizations and fully respect States’ sovereignty and national ownership. Noting that Viet Nam is among the six countries most severely affected by climate change, he outlined various national efforts to address the challenge while requesting more international assistance.

 Erna Solberg, Prime Minister of Norway, emphasized that climate change is redefining the global security landscape. “We must rethink and adapt the Council’s approaches to peacebuilding and sustaining peace in three ways,” she said. First, the Council needs better information on climate-related security risks. International research networks and the informal expert group will be important in that regard. Norway has helped establish a Nordic-Baltic expert network. Second, the Council should discuss climate risks in specific country contexts, based on country reporting and briefings. The United Nations must be at the forefront of preventive diplomacy. To achieve sustainable solutions, peace diplomacy must be climate-sensitive, and climate action must be conflict‑sensitive. Third, it is imperative to strengthen partnerships within and beyond the United Nations system, including with affected States and regional organizations. The active participation of diverse groups, including women and youth, is also vital.

 The national security communities in many countries have understood the security risks posed by climate change, she continued. While climate change can lead to hard security challenges, there are no hard security solutions. The first line of defence is ambitious climate action. It must begin with the full implementation of the Paris Agreement and 2030 Agenda. Climate action depends on multilateral cooperation. By shouldering a common responsibility to counter climate change, the Council will be better prepared to maintain international peace and stability.

 Ralph E. Gonsalves, Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, emphasizing that the Council has a responsibility to address the consequences of climate change, said a failure to do so would be, in part, “an abdication of our duty”. It is time for the organ to seriously consider drafting a resolution on the matter and to map out a coherent approach, aiming for a working consensus. Affirming UNFCCC’s role as the primary body for dealing with climate change and the Paris Agreement as a major part of the rules-based international system, he said the Council should play its role without encroaching on the work of UNFCCC’s inclusive decision-making body. It should also engage with the Peacebuilding Commission and the General Assembly on climate and security risks that touch on issues of humanitarian support, sustainable development, health pandemics, peace and security.

 Stressing that the first step to prevent or contain climate-security risks is for the major, and historical, emitters to fulfil — and indeed exceed — the commitments made in the Paris Agreement, he underlined the principle of common but differentiated responsibility. Climate change is an existential threat that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable, especially small island developing States such as Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. “It has become distressingly commonplace for an entire year’s [gross domestic product] to be washed away by a hurricane overnight, even as we are hindered by a lack of a sufficient inclusion, on favourable terms, into the global financial architecture,” he said. Citing the many natural hazards in Haiti, in particular, he also drew attention to the Sahel region and the battle for dwindling resources. However, no country is immune to such human-made challenges and all must stand in solidarity, with the Council paying close attention to climate change as it crafts its mandates, he said.

 Kaja Kallas, Prime Minister of Estonia, said 7 of the 10 countries most vulnerable and least prepared to deal with climate change host a United Nations peacekeeping operation or a special political mission — a fact the Council cannot ignore. She expressed support for the statement to be delivered by Germany’s Foreign Minister on behalf of like-minded countries pointing the way forward for the Council, stressing that “we need to acknowledge that the climate emergency can pose a danger to peace — and we must make it a part of our security policy planning and discussions here”. She pressed the Council to “do more” to fully

 aspects of its work, noting that the Secretary-General must receive a mandate to collect data and coordinate policy to this aim.

 Among other efforts, she said that Estonia cooperates with small island States and least developed countries in green technology solutions and know-how transfer. The Government also recently launched the Data for the Environment Alliance, a coalition of State and non-State actors that will support the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in developing a global environmental data strategy by 2025.

 Simon Coveney, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence of Ireland, said that climate change has many complex impacts, not least on international peace and security, the very business of this Council. Climate change is already causing upheaval, affecting peace and security and the stability of societies. Pointing out that the relationship between climate and security works in complex ways, he said political instability undermines efforts to build climate resilience, and the impact of climactic shocks is compounded when institutions are strained. Ireland is proud to join the Weathering Risk Project to help guide action at the Security Council and beyond, and is keen to understand better not just how climate change contributes to insecurity but how climate action can build peace. Ireland chairs the Informal Expert Group of Member States on this topic, together with Niger, also partnering with Nauru and Germany, as Chairs of the Group of Friends on Climate and Security.

 Ireland’s core message today is that the inclusion of climate in Council discussions and actions will strengthen conflict prevention and support peacebuilding efforts. Stressing the need to ensure the full, equal and meaningful participation of women and youth in decision-making processes related to climate issues and the management of natural resources, he declared: “But, in listening to and understanding the concerns and insights of future generations, we cannot abrogate our responsibility to provide leadership today”.

 Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Mexico, said the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that international peace and security can no longer be viewed through a single lens, but must also consider multiple drivers of insecurity. Food insecurity, water scarcity and droughts — all exacerbated by climate change — have reached severe levels in several regions of the world. Pledging Mexico’s support to the next Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC in Glasgow, later in 2021, he said climate change requires a comprehensive global response with a focus on ecosystem preservations. Mexico recently submitted its own national plan in that arena, which is coupled with a focus on prevention and adaptation, as well as efforts to reduce inequality and strengthen communities. Stressing that all efforts must be taken in line with the 2030 Agenda, he welcomed the Council’s creation of an informal group to monitor the links between climate and peace and security as a timely measure. Underlining the importance of ensuring sustainable peacebuilding and protecting livelihoods, he agreed with the Secretary-General that post-pandemic recovery efforts are an opportunity to “build back better” and build more egalitarian, adaptable societies.

 Emmanuel Macron, President of France, said protecting the environment has, in recent years, meant recognizing climate change as a peace and security issue. Of the 20 countries most affected by conflict in the world, 12 are also severely impacted by climate change, he said, spotlighting the impacts of desertification, the increase in forced migration and agricultural challenges — all of which have resulted in such fallout as the advent of climate refugees and growing conflicts over land and water. Endorsing the initiative to address such matters under the auspices of the Council, he echoed calls for the appointment of a United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Security, as well as for an annual Secretary-General’s report with relevant recommendations.

 Recognizing that the effects of climate change are unfairly distributed worldwide, he recalled his recent call for France’s contribution to the Green Climate Fund to be increased to one third of its total. France strongly supports the creation of a “Great Green Wall” in Africa, which aims to restore 250 million hectares of land for agriculture, create 10 million green new jobs and sequester carbon. He also pledged France’s commitment to accelerating the preservation of biodiversity, while calling for strengthened dialogue between the African Union and the United Nations on climate and security. Turning to the Pacific, where many nations are struggling to implement mitigation measures, he called for additional international support and an easing of geopolitical tensions across the region.

 Prakash Javadekar, Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change of India, recalled the global democratic effort to take climate action in a nationally determined manner, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities. He cautioned the Council against building a parallel climate track where such principles are “brushed aside”. Noting that there is no common, widely accepted methodology for assessing the links between climate change, conflict and fragility, he said fragility and climate impact are highly context‑specific. In fragile contexts, where Governments struggle to provide basic services, emergency conditions are largely driven by political violence disrupting harvests and aid supplies, rather than by climate factors alone. “A complete picture of climate vulnerability only emerges with an assessment of the State’s capacity to be the primary responder to interrelated environmental, social, economic and security dynamics,” he said. While climate change does not directly cause violent conflict, its interaction with other social, political and economic factors can exacerbate conflict drivers. He called for the building of robust governance structures at local, national and regional levels to address climate‑ and fragility-related risks, pressing donor countries to provide greater financial, technological and capacity-building assistance to help fragile States enact adaption and mitigation strategies.

 John F. Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate of the United States, thanked European and other countries for their leadership on climate change during what he described as the United States “inexcusable absence” from the debate over the past four years. Though climate change is indeed an existential threat, the world has yet to adequately respond to it. Noting that the question of climate change is no longer one for debate, he declared: “The evidence, the science, is screaming at us.” Many of the world’s regions most impacted by climate change are also projected to become future conflict hotspots. Therefore, the issue must feature in all of the Council’s work and reporting. Emphasizing that President Joseph R. Biden understands that “we do not have a moment to waste”, he cited his new coordinated, whole-of-Government approach which aims to elevate the issue and put the United States on the path to sustainability that can never be reversed by any future President or demagogue.

 Addressing climate change will require every country to step up and boost their level of ambition, he said, noting that the world’s largest carbon emitters bear the greatest responsibility. First and foremost will be the need to reduce the use of coal globally. “Inaction comes with a far higher price tag than action,” he said, stressing that, not since the industrial revolution has there been such potential to build back better in every part of the globe. Just by doing nothing, humanity will march forward in what is tantamount to a mutual suicide pact, he warned, spotlighting the importance of the climate summit to be hosted by President Biden in the coming weeks, as well as the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC to be held in Glasgow later in 2021. The United States will also work with like-minded countries in the Council, he said, urging Member States to begin treating climate change as the security crisis that it is.

 Xie Zhenhua, Special Envoy for Climate Change of China, said that, even as global climate governance enters a new and crucial phase, the spread of COVID-19 poses serious threats to the global response. Given the differences in historical responsibility and development levels between States, he underscored the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and urged developed nations to lead the way. In building back after the pandemic, countries should respect nature, protect biodiversity, champion green lifestyles and “avoid old paths of giving without taking” from the Earth. In that context, he described climate change as a development issue, urging the international community to support developing nations, least developed countries and small island developing States in implementing mitigation and adaptation measures.

 “We need to stay committed to multilateralism,” he stressed, underlining the importance of UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement as the main channels for those critical discussions. Any role to be played by the Security Council on climate change must fall under its purview, he added. Outlining China’s commitment to fulfilling its responsibilities under the Paris Agreement, he spotlighted its recently announced plan to have national CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality prior to 2060. He also pointed out that the country’s forest cover has been rising steadily for many years, that it leads the world in green power generation and that it tops the list of clean energy patents registered.

 The representative of the Russian Federation agreed that addressing climate change requires a global approach that is coordinated, targeted at reducing emissions and implementing effective adaptation measures, especially through UNFCCC. Noting that the Council has discussed climate change on several occasions, he said the issue is often presented as a fundamental threat to stability and as a root cause of problems, particularly in Africa, with warnings about the increasing risks of conflict. While he agreed that climate change can exacerbate conflict, he questioned whether it is the root cause of violence. “There are serious doubts,” he said. The connection between climate and conflict can be examined only in certain countries and regions. Discussing it in the global context is not relevant. “Not all conflicts are threats to international peace and security,” he explained. In addition, considering climate as a root cause of security issues distracts from the true root causes, and thus, hinders solutions. Political and socioeconomic factors, which have a greater influence on conflict risk, cannot be ignored, he said, pointing out that COVID-19 has exacerbated inequalities within and between countries and sparked an uptick in hunger — including in countries that were already in conflict. He urged donors to address the problem of “green protectionism”, seen in their refusal to exchange technology that would allow others to adapt. While discussing climate issues in the Council is seen as beneficial, the “real work” of improving coordination of international activities would be better accomplished in the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and UNFCC. Conflicts — in and of themselves — reduce the ability of States to adapt to climate change, he said, explaining that the increased security risks in the Sahel are, in fact, caused by countries pursuing regime change in Libya.

 Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera, President of Malawi, speaking for the least developed countries, said building resilience to mitigate the security risks associated with climate change must begin with reflections on COVID-19, as Governments have relegated many other priorities in the quest to fight the virus. Describing the impact of the nexus between climate change and security is “indiscriminate and consequential”, he said water scarcity, desertification and cyclones all foster competition for resources, and in the process, turn people into climate refugees. Least developed countries bear the brunt of these phenomena, despite that their emissions are 30 times lower than those of high‑income countries. Stressing that recovery from the coronavirus must be aligned with efforts to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, he pressed developed countries to approach the 2021 UNFCC meeting with more ambition than in years past, as their current commitments to cut emissions remain “woefully inadequate”. They must fulfil their pledges to provide $100 billion in climate financing annually, answer the call to earmark 50 per cent of financing in the Green Climate Fund for adaptation, especially in least developed countries, and to meaningfully transfer climate‑friendly technologies to help least developed countries accelerate their green development efforts.

 Gaston Alphonso Browne, Prime Minister and Minister for Finance and Corporate Governance of Antigua and Barbuda, spoke on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States, declaring: “Make no mistake […] climate change’s existential threat to our own survival is not a future consideration, but a current reality.” For the past 30 years, the Alliance has been the single most consistent advocate on climate, he said, highlighting the often-overlooked threats faced by small island developing States. He urged the international community to simultaneously plan and operationalize a system to address inevitable loss and damage which uproot peace and security of small island developing States. Equitable solutions are needed to systematically address difficult issues, such as climate change displacement, including the treatment of climate refugees, and loss of territory. For the past three decades, small island and low-lying States have been sounding the alarm, sending the SOS distress signal. They are losing their territories, populations, resources and very existence due to climate change. The Secretary-General recently stated: “Without nature’s help, we will not thrive or even survive[…] For too long, we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature.” Sadly, small island developing States continue to be the front line for this war. “Our appeal for the Council is to take this threat very seriously before it is too late,” he said.

 Heiko Maas, Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs of Germany, speaking for the Group of Friends of Climate and Security, said those countries are united by the common belief that climate change is the fundamental challenge of our time. The poorest and most vulnerable are suffering the most, with entire islands at risk of disappearing. “We are putting their future, their safety and their well‑being at risk if we don’t act,” he stressed, calling for concerted efforts by the United Nations in making climate change its top priority. Agreeing with other speakers that the issue has major implications for peace and security, he said it therefore belongs firmly on the Council’s agenda. In July 2020, the Nauru delegation presented the organ with a plan of action, including calling for the appointment of a Special Envoy on Climate and Security; regular reporting to the Council; climate‑sensitive peacebuilding; and more cooperation with civil society, regional and national actors on climate-related security risks. Now, it is time for the Council to adopt a strong resolution reflecting each of those points, he said.

 Environmental issues and sustainable development

 Highlights

 Security Council 2022 Round-Up
 New York, 2022
 Highlights of General Assembly 77th Session
 New York, 21 Sep. - 30 Dec. 2022
 High-level meetings of the 77th session of the General Assembly
 New York, 20-26 September 2022

 Daily Noon Briefing

 3 February 2023

 The Food and Agriculture Organization, in its January Food Price Index, said that world food commodity prices declined for the tenth consecutive month and that low domestic prices could result in a small cutback in the Russian Federation’s wheat plantings while Ukraine’s winter wheat area plantings could reduce by about 40 per cent.

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Climate change is a “crisis multiplier” that has profound implications for international peace and stability, Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council today, amid calls for deep partnerships within and beyond the United Nations system to blunt its acute effects on food security, natural resources and migration patterns fuelling tensions across countries and regions.
Throughout the morning, the Council’s high-level open debate on climate and security heard from a range of influential voices, including naturalist David Attenborough, who called climate change “the biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced”.  In video remarks telecast at the outset, he warned that concentrations of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere have not been equalled for millions of years.
“If we continue on our current path, we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security,” he said:  food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature and ocean food chains.  The poorest — those with the least security — are certain to suffer.  “Our duty right now is surely to do all we can to help those in the most immediate danger.”
While the world will never return to the stable climate that gave birth to civilization, he said that, if Governments attending the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in November recognize climate change as a global security threat, “we may yet act proportionately — and in time”.
Climate change can only be dealt with by unparalleled levels of global cooperation, he said.  It will compel countries to question economic models, invent new industries and recognize the moral responsibility that wealthy nations have to the rest of the world, placing a value on nature that “goes far beyond money”.  He challenged the international community to finally create a stable, healthy world where resources are equally shared and where — for the first time in history — people “come to know what it feels like to be secure”.
Mr. Guterres echoed those calls, describing the climate emergency as “the defining issue of our time”.  Noting that the last decade was the hottest in human history, he said wildfires, cyclones, floods and droughts are now the new normal.  “These shocks not only damage the environment on which we depend, they also weaken our political, economic and social systems,” he said.
Indeed, where climate change dries up rivers, reduces harvests, destroys critical infrastructure and displaces communities, it exacerbates the risks of conflict, he said.  A study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that 8 of the 10 countries hosting the largest multilateral peace operations in 2018 were in areas highly exposed to climate change.
The impact is greatest where fragility and conflict have weakened coping mechanisms, he said, where people depend on natural capital for their livelihoods and where women — who bear the greatest burden of the climate emergency — do not enjoy equal rights.  He highlighted examples in Afghanistan, where reduced harvests have pushed people into poverty, leaving them susceptible to recruitment by armed groups, and across West Africa and the Sahel, where changes in grazing patterns have fostered conflict between pastoralists and farmers.  In some Pacific small island nations, entire communities have been forced to relocate.
“The forced movement of larger numbers of people around the world will clearly increase the potential for conflict and insecurity,” he observed.  He called for greater efforts to address climate‑related security risks, starting with a focus on prevention, and creating a global coalition committed to achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century.  The United Nations is asking companies, cities and financial institutions to prepare credible decarbonization plans.
In addition, immediate actions are needed to protect countries from increasingly frequent and severe climate effects.  He urged donors and multilateral and national development banks to increase the share of adaptation and resilience finance to at least 50 per cent of their climate finance support.  Developed countries, too, must keep their pledge to channel $100 billion annually to the global South.  “They have already missed the deadline of 2020,” he acknowledged.
Above all, he called for embracing a concept of security that places people at its centre, stressing that COVID-19 has laid bare the devastation that non‑traditional security threats can cause on a global scale.  In all such efforts, it will be essential to build on the strengths of the Security Council, Peacebuilding Commission, international financial institutions, regional organizations, civil society, the private sector, academia and others.
Issuing a call to action, Nisreen Elsaim, Chair of the Youth Organization on Climate Change and the United Nations Youth Advisory Group, said young people around the globe are watching the Security Council as it grapples with climate change.  Each of the organ’s four meetings on the issue — in 2007, 2011, 2018 and 2019 — have referenced serious climate-related security risks in Somalia, Darfur, West Africa and the Sahel, Mali and the Lake Chad Basin.  “Science has forecasted many more countries will join this list if we did not take the right measures now, and if we did not start adaptation specially in Africa,” she said, adding that, in her country, “we are living in continuous insecurity due to many factors that put Sudan on the top of the list when it comes to climate vulnerability”.
She recalled that, in a 2018 Council resolution on Sudan, members recognized the adverse effects of climate change, ecological changes and natural hazards on the situation in Darfur, focusing specifically on drought, desertification, land degradation and food insecurity.  “Human survival, in a situation of resources degradation, hunger, poverty and uncontrolled climate migration, will make conflict an inevitable result,” she said.  Moreover, climate-related emergencies cause major disruptions in access to health, life-saving sexual and reproductive health services, and result in loss of livelihoods and drive displacement and migration.  They also increase the risk of gender-based violence and harmful practices and force young people to flee in search of a decent life.
Welcoming the Council’s recent deployment of a new special political mission, the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in the Sudan (UNITAMS), she said it has a historic opportunity to speak to the root causes of the conflict.  Climate change and youth participation is mentioned twice in the Mission’s mandate, and climate change challenges are included in the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement.  Emphasizing that young people must be part of the solution, she declared:  “We are the present, we have the future, let’s not repeat previous generations’ lapse.”
In the ensuing dialogue, Heads of State and Government, along with ministers and other senior officials described national actions to attenuate the negative impact of climate change and offered their views on the related security risks.  Some pressed the Council to broaden its thinking about non-traditional security threats.  Several — including leaders from Kenya and Niger — stressed that the link between climate and conflict could not be more evident, while others explored the ability of Governments to meet people’s basic needs, and still others cast doubt on the assertion that the relationship between climate and conflict is causal, instead pointing to political and economic factors that are known to drive tensions.
Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Council President for February, speaking in his national capacity, said the Council, while imperfect, has been willing to lead the way in confronting threats to international security.  “That is exactly what climate change represents,” he said, acknowledging that, while there are some who disagree, these cynics “could not be more wrong”.  While the causes of climate change may not sit within the Council’s traditional purview, its effects most certainly do.  He asked delegates to consider the young man forced onto the road when his once‑fertile home becomes a desert — one of the 16 million people displaced by weather-related disasters each year — who becomes easy prey for violent extremists, or the girl who drops out of school because her daily search for water takes her away from her family — and into the sights of the human traffickers.
“If such scenes were triggered by the actions of some despotic warlord or internecine conflict, few would question this Council’s right to act or its duty to do so,” he assured.  “This is not a subject from which we should shy away.”  The world must move from 51 billion metric tons of greenhouse‑gas emissions each year to net zero, so that the increase in global temperatures remains within manageable levels.  For its part, the United Kingdom Parliament passed a law committing to net zero by 2050, he said, drawing attention to his pledge that the nation would slash emissions by 68 per cent by 2030.  He urged the Council to act, “because climate change is a geopolitical issue every bit as much as an environmental one”, stressing that, if it is to succeed in maintaining peace and security worldwide, it must galvanize and support the United Nations family of agencies into a swift and effective response.
Kaïs Saïed, President of Tunisia, agreed with Ms. Elsaim that the world must listen to youth on climate change.  More broadly, humans — and not money — must be placed at the centre of the issue.  Voicing support for the Secretary-General’s 2021 priorities, especially his efforts to galvanize Member States to confront the multiple impacts of climate change, he described it as ironic that humans are, at the same time, the phenomenon’s drivers and its greatest victims.  “It is no one’s right to […] to commit all of humanity to death,” he stressed, noting that Council resolution 2532 (2020) confirmed that insecurity can be driven by a multitude of factors, not just armed conflict.  One such driver is the deepening poverty and resource scarcity resulting from a changing climate, particularly in Africa.  Climate factors often prolong conflict and create conditions conducive to deprivation, exclusion, terrorism and organized crime.
Calling on the Council to adopt a new, more comprehensive approach and for sufficient resources for all specialized agencies related to climate change, he underlined the need for early warning systems and better prevention strategies.  Noting that the COVID-19 pandemic and other recent crises have once again revealed the need for States to strengthen their solidarity, he emphasized the need for prompt action while stressing that the burden borne by States must be differentiated based on their degree of responsibility for causing the crisis.  Moreover, mitigation cannot be at the expense of developing countries, he said.
Uhuru Kenyatta, President of Kenya, said that new approaches to investment by the public and private sector need to reach the countries and regions worst hit by climate change.  Persistent droughts, constant sea‑level rise and increasingly frequent extreme weather patterns are reversing economic growth and development gains achieved over decades.  The result is increased fragility to instability and armed conflict that then come to the attention of this Security Council.  The implementation of the Council’s mandate to maintain global peace and security will only get more difficult with time if climate change remains on its present course.  Rather than wait for a future tipping point, we must redouble the efforts to direct all the resources and multilateral frameworks of our rules-based international order to mitigate the effects of climate change.  While the bulk of this work is happening outside the Council, no body with such a strong mandate should step aside from this challenge.
The climate-security nexus is already impacting Africa.  “Listen to us Africans when we tell you that the link is clear, its impact tangible and the need for solutions urgent,” he said.  Making recommendations, he said that the Council must do more when crafting mandates for conflict resolution and post-conflict resolution to ensure they dovetail with the efforts to deploy climate change mitigation and adaptation measures.  In this regard, he applauded Council resolutions 2349 (2017) and 2502 (2019), respectively on Lake Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that have integrated measures to address the impact of climate change.  The 15-member organ can also act strongly against illicit financial outflows, illicit resource exploitation, terrorism financing and money‑laundering in the most fragile regions in Africa.  Doing so immediately boosts the resources available to Governments to undertake climate change mitigation and offer the public services and goods needed to consolidate and protect peace.
Brigi Rafini, Prime Minister of Niger, agreed that the impact of climate change on peace and security is increasingly evident, stressing that water scarcity exacerbated by climate change could see gross domestic product (GDP) in the Sahel fall by 6 per cent and hunger increase 20 per cent by 2050.  Climate change has increased competition for diminished land and water resources, ramping up tensions between livestock owners and others.  He underscored the collective responsibility to tackle this existential challenge, stressing that “climate change and land degradation are no longer purely environmental matters”.  Rather, they are part of a broader view that links environmental goals with those for economic and social development, and the pursuit of international peace and stability.
“We need to consider climate change as a threat to peace and security,” he said, urging the Council to shore up its understanding of impact on security and to systematically consider climate change in its resolutions pertaining to specific country and regional contexts.  In such efforts, it should rely on the advisory role of the Peacebuilding Commission, and the Informal Expert Group on Climate and Security, co-chaired by Niger and Ireland.  The appointment of a Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Climate and Security likewise will raise the profile of this dimension within the Council’s work.
Nguyễn Xuân Phúc, Prime Minister of Viet Nam, said the Earth’s recent calamities have placed great burdens on the political and socioeconomic life of many countries, causing unemployment and poverty, creating instability and exacerbating current conflicts.  Against that backdrop, the Council should galvanize the international community’s collective efforts with an approach that is balanced between traditional and non-traditional security challenges.  That includes addressing the root causes of conflicts such as poverty, inequality, power politics and unilateral interference and coercion.
Calling for strict adherence to the Charter of the United Nations and international law, he said the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement on climate change must guide the way, and greater resources are needed to support developing countries, least developed countries, small island developing States and landlocked countries.  The Council should also enhance its early warning capacity, bolster its mediation and conflict prevention roles, work more closely with regional organizations and fully respect States’ sovereignty and national ownership.  Noting that Viet Nam is among the six countries most severely affected by climate change, he outlined various national efforts to address the challenge while requesting more international assistance.
Erna Solberg, Prime Minister of Norway, emphasized that climate change is redefining the global security landscape.  “We must rethink and adapt the Council’s approaches to peacebuilding and sustaining peace in three ways,” she said.  First, the Council needs better information on climate-related security risks.  International research networks and the informal expert group will be important in that regard.  Norway has helped establish a Nordic-Baltic expert network.  Second, the Council should discuss climate risks in specific country contexts, based on country reporting and briefings.  The United Nations must be at the forefront of preventive diplomacy.  To achieve sustainable solutions, peace diplomacy must be climate-sensitive, and climate action must be conflict‑sensitive.  Third, it is imperative to strengthen partnerships within and beyond the United Nations system, including with affected States and regional organizations.  The active participation of diverse groups, including women and youth, is also vital.
The national security communities in many countries have understood the security risks posed by climate change, she continued.  While climate change can lead to hard security challenges, there are no hard security solutions.  The first line of defence is ambitious climate action.  It must begin with the full implementation of the Paris Agreement and 2030 Agenda.  Climate action depends on multilateral cooperation.  By shouldering a common responsibility to counter climate change, the Council will be better prepared to maintain international peace and stability.
Ralph E. Gonsalves, Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, emphasizing that the Council has a responsibility to address the consequences of climate change, said a failure to do so would be, in part, “an abdication of our duty”.  It is time for the organ to seriously consider drafting a resolution on the matter and to map out a coherent approach, aiming for a working consensus.  Affirming UNFCCC’s role as the primary body for dealing with climate change and the Paris Agreement as a major part of the rules-based international system, he said the Council should play its role without encroaching on the work of UNFCCC’s inclusive decision-making body.  It should also engage with the Peacebuilding Commission and the General Assembly on climate and security risks that touch on issues of humanitarian support, sustainable development, health pandemics, peace and security.
Stressing that the first step to prevent or contain climate-security risks is for the major, and historical, emitters to fulfil — and indeed exceed — the commitments made in the Paris Agreement, he underlined the principle of common but differentiated responsibility.  Climate change is an existential threat that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable, especially small island developing States such as Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.  “It has become distressingly commonplace for an entire year’s [gross domestic product] to be washed away by a hurricane overnight, even as we are hindered by a lack of a sufficient inclusion, on favourable terms, into the global financial architecture,” he said.  Citing the many natural hazards in Haiti, in particular, he also drew attention to the Sahel region and the battle for dwindling resources.  However, no country is immune to such human-made challenges and all must stand in solidarity, with the Council paying close attention to climate change as it crafts its mandates, he said.
Kaja Kallas, Prime Minister of Estonia, said 7 of the 10 countries most vulnerable and least prepared to deal with climate change host a United Nations peacekeeping operation or a special political mission — a fact the Council cannot ignore.  She expressed support for the statement to be delivered by Germany’s Foreign Minister on behalf of like-minded countries pointing the way forward for the Council, stressing that “we need to acknowledge that the climate emergency can pose a danger to peace — and we must make it a part of our security policy planning and discussions here”.  She pressed the Council to “do more” to fully
aspects of its work, noting that the Secretary-General must receive a mandate to collect data and coordinate policy to this aim.
Among other efforts, she said that Estonia cooperates with small island States and least developed countries in green technology solutions and know-how transfer.  The Government also recently launched the Data for the Environment Alliance, a coalition of State and non-State actors that will support the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in developing a global environmental data strategy by 2025.
Simon Coveney, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence of Ireland, said that climate change has many complex impacts, not least on international peace and security, the very business of this Council.  Climate change is already causing upheaval, affecting peace and security and the stability of societies.  Pointing out that the relationship between climate and security works in complex ways, he said political instability undermines efforts to build climate resilience, and the impact of climactic shocks is compounded when institutions are strained.  Ireland is proud to join the Weathering Risk Project to help guide action at the Security Council and beyond, and is keen to understand better not just how climate change contributes to insecurity but how climate action can build peace.  Ireland chairs the Informal Expert Group of Member States on this topic, together with Niger, also partnering with Nauru and Germany, as Chairs of the Group of Friends on Climate and Security.
Ireland’s core message today is that the inclusion of climate in Council discussions and actions will strengthen conflict prevention and support peacebuilding efforts.  Stressing the need to ensure the full, equal and meaningful participation of women and youth in decision-making processes related to climate issues and the management of natural resources, he declared:  “But, in listening to and understanding the concerns and insights of future generations, we cannot abrogate our responsibility to provide leadership today”.
Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Mexico, said the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that international peace and security can no longer be viewed through a single lens, but must also consider multiple drivers of insecurity.  Food insecurity, water scarcity and droughts — all exacerbated by climate change — have reached severe levels in several regions of the world.  Pledging Mexico’s support to the next Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC in Glasgow, later in 2021, he said climate change requires a comprehensive global response with a focus on ecosystem preservations.  Mexico recently submitted its own national plan in that arena, which is coupled with a focus on prevention and adaptation, as well as efforts to reduce inequality and strengthen communities.  Stressing that all efforts must be taken in line with the 2030 Agenda, he welcomed the Council’s creation of an informal group to monitor the links between climate and peace and security as a timely measure.  Underlining the importance of ensuring sustainable peacebuilding and protecting livelihoods, he agreed with the Secretary-General that post-pandemic recovery efforts are an opportunity to “build back better” and build more egalitarian, adaptable societies.
Emmanuel Macron, President of France, said protecting the environment has, in recent years, meant recognizing climate change as a peace and security issue.  Of the 20 countries most affected by conflict in the world, 12 are also severely impacted by climate change, he said, spotlighting the impacts of desertification, the increase in forced migration and agricultural challenges — all of which have resulted in such fallout as the advent of climate refugees and growing conflicts over land and water.  Endorsing the initiative to address such matters under the auspices of the Council, he echoed calls for the appointment of a United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Security, as well as for an annual Secretary-General’s report with relevant recommendations.
Recognizing that the effects of climate change are unfairly distributed worldwide, he recalled his recent call for France’s contribution to the Green Climate Fund to be increased to one third of its total.  France strongly supports the creation of a “Great Green Wall” in Africa, which aims to restore 250 million hectares of land for agriculture, create 10 million green new jobs and sequester carbon.  He also pledged France’s commitment to accelerating the preservation of biodiversity, while calling for strengthened dialogue between the African Union and the United Nations on climate and security.  Turning to the Pacific, where many nations are struggling to implement mitigation measures, he called for additional international support and an easing of geopolitical tensions across the region.
Prakash Javadekar, Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change of India, recalled the global democratic effort to take climate action in a nationally determined manner, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities.  He cautioned the Council against building a parallel climate track where such principles are “brushed aside”.  Noting that there is no common, widely accepted methodology for assessing the links between climate change, conflict and fragility, he said fragility and climate impact are highly context‑specific.  In fragile contexts, where Governments struggle to provide basic services, emergency conditions are largely driven by political violence disrupting harvests and aid supplies, rather than by climate factors alone.  “A complete picture of climate vulnerability only emerges with an assessment of the State’s capacity to be the primary responder to interrelated environmental, social, economic and security dynamics,” he said.  While climate change does not directly cause violent conflict, its interaction with other social, political and economic factors can exacerbate conflict drivers.  He called for the building of robust governance structures at local, national and regional levels to address climate‑ and fragility-related risks, pressing donor countries to provide greater financial, technological and capacity-building assistance to help fragile States enact adaption and mitigation strategies.
John F. Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate of the United States, thanked European and other countries for their leadership on climate change during what he described as the United States “inexcusable absence” from the debate over the past four years.  Though climate change is indeed an existential threat, the world has yet to adequately respond to it.  Noting that the question of climate change is no longer one for debate, he declared:  “The evidence, the science, is screaming at us.”  Many of the world’s regions most impacted by climate change are also projected to become future conflict hotspots.  Therefore, the issue must feature in all of the Council’s work and reporting.  Emphasizing that President Joseph R. Biden understands that “we do not have a moment to waste”, he cited his new coordinated, whole-of-Government approach which aims to elevate the issue and put the United States on the path to sustainability that can never be reversed by any future President or demagogue.
Addressing climate change will require every country to step up and boost their level of ambition, he said, noting that the world’s largest carbon emitters bear the greatest responsibility.  First and foremost will be the need to reduce the use of coal globally.  “Inaction comes with a far higher price tag than action,” he said, stressing that, not since the industrial revolution has there been such potential to build back better in every part of the globe.  Just by doing nothing, humanity will march forward in what is tantamount to a mutual suicide pact, he warned, spotlighting the importance of the climate summit to be hosted by President Biden in the coming weeks, as well as the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC to be held in Glasgow later in 2021.  The United States will also work with like-minded countries in the Council, he said, urging Member States to begin treating climate change as the security crisis that it is.
Xie Zhenhua, Special Envoy for Climate Change of China, said that, even as global climate governance enters a new and crucial phase, the spread of COVID-19 poses serious threats to the global response.  Given the differences in historical responsibility and development levels between States, he underscored the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and urged developed nations to lead the way.  In building back after the pandemic, countries should respect nature, protect biodiversity, champion green lifestyles and “avoid old paths of giving without taking” from the Earth.  In that context, he described climate change as a development issue, urging the international community to support developing nations, least developed countries and small island developing States in implementing mitigation and adaptation measures.
“We need to stay committed to multilateralism,” he stressed, underlining the importance of UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement as the main channels for those critical discussions.  Any role to be played by the Security Council on climate change must fall under its purview, he added.  Outlining China’s commitment to fulfilling its responsibilities under the Paris Agreement, he spotlighted its recently announced plan to have national CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality prior to 2060.  He also pointed out that the country’s forest cover has been rising steadily for many years, that it leads the world in green power generation and that it tops the list of clean energy patents registered.
The representative of the Russian Federation agreed that addressing climate change requires a global approach that is coordinated, targeted at reducing emissions and implementing effective adaptation measures, especially through UNFCCC.  Noting that the Council has discussed climate change on several occasions, he said the issue is often presented as a fundamental threat to stability and as a root cause of problems, particularly in Africa, with warnings about the increasing risks of conflict.  While he agreed that climate change can exacerbate conflict, he questioned whether it is the root cause of violence.  “There are serious doubts,” he said.  The connection between climate and conflict can be examined only in certain countries and regions.  Discussing it in the global context is not relevant.  “Not all conflicts are threats to international peace and security,” he explained.  In addition, considering climate as a root cause of security issues distracts from the true root causes, and thus, hinders solutions.  Political and socioeconomic factors, which have a greater influence on conflict risk, cannot be ignored, he said, pointing out that COVID-19 has exacerbated inequalities within and between countries and sparked an uptick in hunger — including in countries that were already in conflict.  He urged donors to address the problem of “green protectionism”, seen in their refusal to exchange technology that would allow others to adapt.   While discussing climate issues in the Council is seen as beneficial, the “real work” of improving coordination of international activities would be better accomplished in the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and UNFCC.  Conflicts — in and of themselves — reduce the ability of States to adapt to climate change, he said, explaining that the increased security risks in the Sahel are, in fact, caused by countries pursuing regime change in Libya.
Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera, President of Malawi, speaking for the least developed countries, said building resilience to mitigate the security risks associated with climate change must begin with reflections on COVID-19, as Governments have relegated many other priorities in the quest to fight the virus.  Describing the impact of the nexus between climate change and security is “indiscriminate and consequential”, he said water scarcity, desertification and cyclones all foster competition for resources, and in the process, turn people into climate refugees.  Least developed countries bear the brunt of these phenomena, despite that their emissions are 30 times lower than those of high‑income countries.  Stressing that recovery from the coronavirus must be aligned with efforts to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, he pressed developed countries to approach the 2021 UNFCC meeting with more ambition than in years past, as their current commitments to cut emissions remain “woefully inadequate”.  They must fulfil their pledges to provide $100 billion in climate financing annually, answer the call to earmark 50 per cent of financing in the Green Climate Fund for adaptation, especially in least developed countries, and to meaningfully transfer climate‑friendly technologies to help least developed countries accelerate their green development efforts.
Gaston Alphonso Browne, Prime Minister and Minister for Finance and Corporate Governance of Antigua and Barbuda, spoke on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States, declaring:  “Make no mistake […] climate change’s existential threat to our own survival is not a future consideration, but a current reality.”  For the past 30 years, the Alliance has been the single most consistent advocate on climate, he said, highlighting the often-overlooked threats faced by small island developing States.  He urged the international community to simultaneously plan and operationalize a system to address inevitable loss and damage which uproot peace and security of small island developing States.  Equitable solutions are needed to systematically address difficult issues, such as climate change displacement, including the treatment of climate refugees, and loss of territory. For the past three decades, small island and low-lying States have been sounding the alarm, sending the SOS distress signal.  They are losing their territories, populations, resources and very existence due to climate change.  The Secretary-General recently stated:  “Without nature’s help, we will not thrive or even survive[…] For too long, we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature.”  Sadly, small island developing States continue to be the front line for this war.  “Our appeal for the Council is to take this threat very seriously before it is too late,” he said.
Heiko Maas, Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs of Germany, speaking for the Group of Friends of Climate and Security, said those countries are united by the common belief that climate change is the fundamental challenge of our time.  The poorest and most vulnerable are suffering the most, with entire islands at risk of disappearing.  “We are putting their future, their safety and their well‑being at risk if we don’t act,” he stressed, calling for concerted efforts by the United Nations in making climate change its top priority.  Agreeing with other speakers that the issue has major implications for peace and security, he said it therefore belongs firmly on the Council’s agenda.  In July 2020, the Nauru delegation presented the organ with a plan of action, including calling for the appointment of a Special Envoy on Climate and Security; regular reporting to the Council; climate‑sensitive peacebuilding; and more cooperation with civil society, regional and national actors on climate-related security risks.  Now, it is time for the Council to adopt a strong resolution reflecting each of those points, he said.
Climate Change ‘Biggest Threat Modern Humans Have Ever Faced’, World-Renowned Naturalist Tells Security Council, Calls for Greater Global Cooperation
https://press.un.org/en/2021/sc14445.doc.htm
https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/5/1/203/8135/Science-Fiction-and-the-Risks-of-the-Anthropocene
Science Fiction and the Risks of the Anthropocene: Anticipated Transformations in Dale Pendell's The Great Bay | Environmental Humanities
2014-05-01
Mossner; Alexa Weik
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<p>Alexa Weik von Mossner</p><div>
<p><strong>Alexa Weik von Mossner</strong> is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria and currently a Visiting Scholar in the English Department at UCLA. Her writings on various ecocritical issues and the affective dimensions of our engagement with cultural texts have been published in journals including <em>Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment</em> and <em>Environmental Communication.</em> She is the author of <em>Cosmopolitan Minds: Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination</em> (U of Texas P, 2014), the editor of <em>Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology and Film</em> (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014), and co-editor of <em>The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture</em> (with Sylvia Mayer, Winter, 2014).</p>
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<p>Environmental Humanities (2014) 5 (1): 203–216.</p>
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<h2>Abstract</h2>
<section><p>Covering the time span from 2021 to 16000 N.C., Dale Pendell's speculative novel <em>The Great Bay</em> chronicles the profound climatic, geological and ecological transformations that California undergoes during these fourteen millennia. Human life becomes unimaginably small on such a time scale, and Pendell responds to that representational challenge by compiling a wide variety of texts that zero in on individual humans at different points in the future rather than offering a continuous story or central character. In a way, that place is taken by the geographical region that is the focus of the narrative and gives the book its title. Timothy Morton has argued that because we live in the Anthropocene we can no longer understand history as exclusively human. Pendell's “Chronicle of the Collapse” suggests that the same is true for storytelling, offering readers the story of a nonhuman protagonist that changes slowly over time. The result is a highly fragmented narrative that is interesting for what it tries to achieve but at the same time remarkably unengaging. In its distant and distanced rendering of future ecological change and human anguish, <em>The Great Bay</em> is a grave reminder not only of the incalculable risks of the Anthropocene, but also of the basic tenets of realist storytelling.</p></section>
<p>Dale Pendell's <em>The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse</em> (2010) opens with a table of contents that is accompanied by three illustrations showing the physical features of California.<sup><sup>1</sup></sup> The first illustration is dominated by the long flat plain of the San Joaquin Valley. San Francisco Bay to the west of it is also clearly visible, and although the city of San Francisco isn't shown or mentioned (though East Palo Alto is), it is an easily recognizable representation of California. The second map looks much less familiar. This is because the waters of San Francisco Bay now extend far into the San Joaquin Valley, a process that seems to have continued in the third illustration, which shows the Valley nearly filled by seawater and a significantly shrunken shoreline along the Pacific Coast. All the big coastal cities are now gone—in fact there are no longer any cities noted at all. Looking at the table of contents, we realize that this illustration accompanies the overview of the final five chapters of the book, covering the future history of California from 2521 to a final document about the “Caribou Hunters on Pit River” fourteen thousand years “after the Collapse.”<sup><sup>2</sup></sup> That Collapse, we learn in the first chapter, happened in the year 2021, and while it marked the end of the “Oil Culture,”<sup><sup>3</sup></sup> it did not terminate the long-term climatic and geological effects of human activity on planet Earth. The comprehensive transformations of the epoch that some have come to call the Anthropocene will continue for millennia, and Pendell's ambitious science fiction novel attempts nothing less than to imagine not only the geological but also the human dimensions of this future development.</p><p>As an informal scientific term, the Anthropocene denotes a geological epoch that follows the Holocene, an epoch that is marked by a new scale of human activity and agency. Those who are interested in the social and cultural dimensions of the Anthropocene tend to look not only at its present challenges but also at its potential future dimensions and the consequences for ecosystems and humans alike. They frequently frame their concerns in terms of uncertainty, pointing out that “our collective actions have brought us into uncharted territory” and that “there's a risk of an irreversible cascade of changes leading us into a future that's profoundly different from anything we've faced before.”<sup><sup>4</sup></sup> Like the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, they assume that living in an epoch that is shaped by human activities means being confronted with environmental risks and hazards that are the unintended consequences of those activities. Beck has theorized the societal dimensions of this dilemma in his work on the <em>world risk society,</em> a concept that “draws attention to the limited controllability of the dangers we have created for ourselves.”<sup><sup>5</sup></sup> Beck has argued that it is not only up to philosophy and science to explore the risk societies of the Anthropocene, but that novelists, too, do important work in exploring the “two faces of risk—chance and danger”<sup><sup>6</sup></sup> in their imaginative accounts,<sup><sup>7</sup></sup> and no genre would be better suited for such fictional explorations than science fiction.</p><p>As a speculative mode of narration, science fiction imagines possible alternative and future worlds that can be either utopian or dystopian in nature. It is “a fictive practice” that, in the words of Tom Moylan, “has the formal potential to re-envision the world in ways that generate pleasurable, probing, and potentially subversive responses in its readers.”<sup><sup>8</sup></sup> Not least because of their investment in the building of alternative worlds, a good number of science fiction writers have concerned themselves with environmental issues. As Ursula Heise has pointed out, “science fiction is one of the genres that have most persistently and most daringly engaged environmental questions and their challenge to our vision of the future.”<sup><sup>9</sup></sup> Pendell's <em>The Great Bay</em> is an interesting example in this regard because of its ambitious temporal scope. Covering the time span from 2021 to 16000 N.C. allows Pendell to chronicle the profound climatic, geological and ecological transformations that California undergoes during these fourteen millennia. Human life becomes almost unimaginably small on such a time scale, and <em>The Great Bay</em>—despite its explicit indexation as a <em>novel</em> on the cover of the book—addresses this problem by presenting readers with a wide variety of texts that offer panoptic views of the future state of the world and briefly zero in on individual human lives rather than a continuous narrative or central character. In a way, that place is taken by the geographical region that is the focus of the narrative, and so it is probably not by coincidence that it is this nonhuman protagonist—the “Great Bay,” as the future extension of the San Francisco Bay into the San Joaquin Valley is called—that gives the book its title.</p><p>“[W]e are no longer able to think history as exclusively human,” writes Timothy Morton in <em>Hyperobjects</em> (2013), “for the very reason that we live in the Anthropocene.”<sup><sup>10</sup></sup> Pendell's novel suggests that the same is true for storytelling: The protagonists of narratives can no longer be exclusively human in an age of rapid climatic and geological transformations that are the result of human activity and at the same time determine the activity of future humans. In a way the book is therefore a response to Heise's complaint, in <em>Sense of Place and Sense of Planet</em> (2008), that most climate change novels are too “conventional in their narrative strategies,”<sup><sup>11</sup></sup> frequently falling back “on apocalyptic narrative” and simplistic story lines that concentrate on the lives of generic science fiction protagonists.<sup><sup>12</sup></sup> Heise calls for stylistic and formal innovation while also suggesting that the Modernist tradition of narrative collage offers possibilities for capturing the vast dimensions of global ecological transformations.<sup><sup>13</sup></sup> Pendell's <em>The Great Bay</em> certainly attempts such an innovative mode of narration as it tells its story about the year of the Collapse and the fourteen millennia that follow it, and it also relies heavily on methods of collage and fragmentation. The result, however, is a narrative that is interesting for what it tries to achieve but at the same time remarkably unengaging. Favoring geological and climatic timescales over human ones runs the risk of losing readers' empathetic engagement with characters they understand well enough to care about their hopes and goals. In its distant rendering of future ecological change and human anguish, <em>The Great Bay</em> is therefore a grave reminder not only of the incalculable risks of the Anthropocene but also of the basic tenets of realist storytelling.</p> <h2>Envisioning the Risks of the Anthropocene</h2>
<p>“Risk,” explains Ulrich Beck in his <em>World at Risk</em> (2007), “is <em>not</em> synonymous with catastrophe. Risk means the <em>anticipation</em> of the catastrophe. Risks concern the possibility of future occurrences and developments; they make present a state of the world that does not (yet) exist.”<sup><sup>14</sup></sup> This differentiation between risk and catastrophe is important because it underlines the uncertainty and future-oriented temporality of risk. “Risks are always future events that <em>may</em> occur, that <em>threaten</em> us,” writes Beck, but despite this inherent futurity, they have considerable effects on our present, “because this constant danger shapes our expectations, lodges in our heads and guides our actions, it becomes a political force that transforms the world.”<sup><sup>15</sup></sup> The risks of the Anthropocene are therefore potential <em>future</em> hazards and catastrophes that have not yet materialized and some of which in fact may never materialize. Nevertheless, the awareness of these risks shapes our expectations and, potentially, our actions. As is usually the case with risks, this awareness takes its starting point in the observation of past and present occurrences, combined with a projection of their potential future developments. The <em>Welcome to the Anthropocene</em> website offers one of many descriptions of the status quo:</p><div><blockquote><p>Probably the best-known aspect of our newfound influence is what we're doing to the climate. Atmospheric carbon dioxide may be at its highest level in 15 million years. But this is just one part of the story; we're changing the planet in countless ways. Nutrients from fertilizer wash off fields and down rivers, creating stretches of sea where nothing grows except vast algal blooms; deforestation means vast quantities of soil are being eroded and swept away. Rich grasslands are turning to desert; ancient ice formations are melting away; species everywhere are vanishing.<sup><sup>16</sup></sup></p></blockquote></div><p>Climate change here emerges as only one of many ways in which humans interfere with the Earth's biosphere, but it will likely be the interference that has the most lasting effects. Over the past decade countless popular science books have tried to warn their readers about the risks involved in this interference, basing their projections on the findings of peer-reviewed scientific articles and their own research.</p><p>NASA-climatologist James Hansen, for example, writes in <em>Storms of My Grandchildren</em> (2009) that “continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself—and the timetable is shorter than we thought.”<sup><sup>17</sup></sup> The subtitle of Hansen's book, <em>The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity,</em> also clearly invokes a sense of risk in the way Beck has described it, speaking about the <em>coming</em> climate catastrophe as well as about a <em>last chance</em> to save ourselves. There is a sense of urgency and potential doom in these words, and while it may have been the publisher's decision to feature them so prominently on the cover, they adequately represent the apocalyptic tone<sup><sup>18</sup></sup> of Hansen's deliberations. “Planet Earth,” he writes, “is in imminent peril”<sup><sup>19</sup></sup> because of human activity, which is why “it is crucial for all of us ... to get involved.”<sup><sup>20</sup></sup> Bill McKibben's <em>Eaarth</em> (2009) strikes a similar tone, but doesn't tell its readers, as does Hansen's book, that humanity still has a “last chance” to avoid the worst. In McKibben's view, planet Earth is already “a different place” than it was for the past ten thousand years, which is why it “needs a new name: Eaarth.”<sup><sup>21</sup></sup> Rather than offering an apocalyptic perspective, in which, as Heise points out, “utter destruction lies ahead but can be averted,”<sup><sup>22</sup></sup> McKibben presents a risk scenario in which “crises are already underway all around and while their consequences can be mitigated, a future without their impact has become impossible to envision.”<sup><sup>23</sup></sup> The environment on his planet Eaarth is what Frederic Buell has described as “a horror people hopelessly dwell within, a horror that goes on and on all around them.”<sup><sup>24</sup></sup> But even as he insists that “global warming is ... no longer a future threat, <em>no longer a threat at all.</em> It is our reality,”<sup><sup>25</sup></sup> McKibben still tries to alert his readers to the even greater dangers in the future, so that they can adapt to the changing climate and build “communities and economies that can withstand what's coming.”<sup><sup>26</sup></sup> James Lovelock sounds even more alarmed in <em>The Revenge of Gaia</em> (2007), where he speaks about his concern about “the Earth's declining health,” urging his readers to do something about anthropogenic climate change because “the living Earth's response to what we do will depend not merely on the extent of our land use and pollutions but also on its current state of health.”<sup><sup>27</sup></sup></p><p>These are just three examples of how the risks of the Anthropocene—particularly climate risk—have been used in popular science texts to engage readers emotionally in a narrative of environmental decline and scare them into taking action to prevent these risks from turning into actual hazards and catastrophes. It is perhaps unsurprising that in order to convey the severity of the risks, many of these texts describe potential future catastrophes <em>as if</em> they were no longer risks but already a reality. Peter Ward's <em>The Flooded Earth</em> (2010), for example, opens with a description of Miami in the year 2120 CE when carbon dioxide is at 800 ppm and the city an island “because the level of the world's ocean's had risen 10 feet.”<sup><sup>28</sup></sup> Mark Lynas's <em>Six Degrees</em> (2007) takes considerable liberty in its detailed description of a world that is one to six degrees hotter than in the present.<sup><sup>29</sup></sup> The most daring attempt to make the potential future catastrophes imaginable for readers, however, can be found in Hansen's book, which includes a science fiction story set in the year 2525 in which a humanoid alien species unsuccessfully tries to resettle its people to a planet Earth that now has surface temperatures of one hundred degrees Celsius and is devoid of life. While this scenario “may read like far-fetched science fiction,” writes Hansen, “its central hypothesis is a tragic certainty—continued unfettered burning of all fossil fuels will cause the climate system to pass tipping points, such that we hand our children and grandchildren a dynamic situation that is out of control.”<sup><sup>30</sup></sup> In order to illustrate the book's scientific hypothesis, then, Hansen turns to apocalyptic fiction in the hope that the shared imagination of future devastation will make his discourse of anthropogenic risk more convincing.</p><p>It remains to be seen whether the use of apocalyptical fictional elements in popular scientific discourse on the risks of the Anthropocene indeed makes such discourse more accessible and effective. In the case of Hansen's book the science fiction story is so far-fetched and the protagonists so bloodless that it seems unlikely that they will engage readers' imaginations and emotions in the intended way. Hansen is ready to admit that “science fiction isn't [his] area of expertise,”<sup><sup>31</sup></sup> and so we might forgive him that, as a climatologist, he cannot create fictional characters or storylines that excite our minds. The question remains, however, what modes of narration <em>can</em> adequately imagine future worlds that continue to be shaped by the actions of humans who died decades, centuries, millennia ago. Pendell's <em>The Great Bay</em> constitutes one attempt to deal with the vast spatial and temporal dimensions of the issue within the realm of speculative fiction. Climate change figures prominently in the book, and it is what determines the often miserable lives of its future humans. But it is not the only anthropogenic transformation that Pendell chronicles, nor is it the sole reason for the initial collapse of human civilization. The book mentions multiple causes for the future catastrophes it envisions, and all of them have been counted among the potential risks of the Anthropocene.</p> <h2>Anticipating the Catastrophes of the Anthropocene: <em>The Great Bay</em></h2>
<p><em>The Great Bay</em> offers two reasons for the Collapse it envisions for 2021 and the subsequent demise of mankind. The initial blow is a global pandemic, “a new kind of chicken pox, or smallpox”<sup><sup>32</sup></sup> with absolutely devastating effects. However, we quickly learn that the seemingly natural disaster is actually anthropogenic in nature: “There was a rumor that the disease was an army bug, a genetically engineered biological weapon that had back-fired. ... The disease certainly spread with an engineered efficiency—two hundred million died in the United States in the first month.”<sup><sup>33</sup></sup> The reason why the pandemic can spread so quickly and eradicate the larger part of the American population within only a few weeks is serious infrastructural problems that are related to the changing climate. We learn that “2021 had been the hottest summer on record, even topping 2020,” with the result that “[t]he power grid had been stretched to the breaking point for weeks. The ‘strategic oil reserves' had been depleted the year before.”<sup><sup>34</sup></sup> It is therefore anthropogenic climate change and resource depletion that, in <em>The Great Bay,</em> induce the disastrous failure of US infrastructure, and that in turn leaves the country unable to cope with the human-made virus that kills off its population. By October of the same year, the population of the United States is reduced to fifty million; one year later to fifteen million, and “by the spring of 2024 [it] was eight million and still declining.”<sup><sup>35</sup></sup></p><p>The Panoptic overviews that stand at the beginning of each of the twelve chapters offer “objective” information about the changing climate and its impact on California, the United States, and the rest of the world. They relate climatic, geological, and human processes alike, and they draw connections between previous human activities, resulting climatic and ecological transformations, and the latter's effects on the humans of the future. The authorial narrator who speaks to us in these Panoptic introductions employ a decidedly detached and laconic tone in narrating the often horrific human suffering resulting from the unintended consequences of earlier human activities. “For a while,” we are informed, “they buried the bodies in mass graves with bulldozers.”<sup><sup>36</sup></sup> Later on, when electricity fails and corpses are simply placed outside in the streets, the sight becomes even more horrific: “Dogs ate at the corpses and some people shot at the dogs; others, in frustration, shot at the helicopters.”<sup><sup>37</sup></sup> And things only get worse as times goes by: “2022 and 2023 were the Hunger Years. People can endure near starvation for long periods of time while awaiting rescue or deliverance. But there were no deliverers, no rescuers—there were no relief expeditions. People starved, quietly, and died quietly. And, like any animal who starves to death, with the dignity of acceptance.”<sup><sup>38</sup></sup> Without the comforts and affordances of modern civilization, and in the absence of divine interference, humans die like the animals that they are. The narrator relates all this as simple facts, with the same equanimity that also characterizes his recounting of the infrastructural and societal breakdown and of the many failed attempts to save and rebuild, to scavenge and survive in a world that has been stretched beyond its breaking point.</p><p>One could easily argue that <em>The Great Bay</em> is a post-apocalyptic narrative. After all, it takes the near-complete collapse of human civilization as its starting point and then shows individual humans who try to survive in its aftermath, trying to make do with the limited resources and machinery available. However, the novel's unusual time frame and the nature of the disaster complicate this classification. “[I]t is unlikely that an apocalypse will save us,” writes Pendell in the Afterword to his novel, “Much more likely is a gradual degradation of the quality of life, and, for many species, of their habitat and their chances for survival.”<sup><sup>39</sup></sup> These species, which clearly include the human species, are therefore forced to continually “dwell” in crisis, to use Frederick Buell's term again. Accordingly, the global catastrophe in Pendell's narrative is not so much an apocalypse as it is a fateful combination of several unintended consequences of scientific, technological, and societal risk taking and decision making. Pendell's Collapse is the moment in which risks turn into hazards and, ultimately, into catastrophe. It was inevitable, we are told, “even without the Pandemic,”<sup><sup>40</sup></sup> because of the short-sightedness of human behavior and because humans took risks they shouldn't have.</p><p>Similarly important is the fact that the global disaster doesn't really provide a clean slate for a fresh start, as is often the case in post-apocalyptic narratives. The nature of climate change prevents this, since the human CO2 emissions that are already in the atmosphere keep forcing the climate even though there are very few additional emissions after the Collapse. These changes happen very slowly, over the course of almost sixteen thousand years, and they affect the lives of individual humans in very different ways during this long time span. By 2031,</p><div><blockquote><p>Carbon dioxide levels approached those of the early Eocene. Industrial outputs of CO2 had stopped, but a long chain-reaction was in progress, and CO2 in the atmosphere is long-lived. Permafrost thawing was releasing large amounts of methane. The manmade aerosols and other particulate matter that had been masking the heating from greenhouse gases were gone.... In the West, summer temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit were more and more common, the heat spells lasting for a month a time ... New records would have been set everywhere, if anyone had been keeping records.<sup><sup>41</sup></sup></p></blockquote></div><p>Rather than a post-apocalyptic text, <em>The Great Bay</em> is therefore a risk narrative in which crises continue to be underway all around and their impacts cannot ever be fully or at all mitigated. In order to show the human dimensions of these impacts, the representation of large-scale anthropogenic changes to the physical properties of the planet is combined with stories of individual humans who try to survive in an increasingly strange environment.</p><p>These stories differ considerably in both form and tone, supposedly because they are taken from very different sources and excavated from different archives, among them the “Archives of the Scholar's Guild, Berkeley,”<sup><sup>42</sup></sup> the “Library of the Order of Antiquities” which collects materials “750 years after the Collapse,”<sup><sup>43</sup></sup> and the “Institute of Medieval History,”<sup><sup>44</sup></sup> which operates 1,250 years later. They include short stories, newspaper articles, interviews, historical records, encyclopedic entries, legends, and an 80-page travel journal by Solomon the Monk about “The Great Trek from the Great Bay of California to the Bicentennial Rendezvous in Boulder”<sup><sup>45</sup></sup> in the year 2222, complete with detailed maps of future landscapes. These texts narrate a wide range of human responses to their changing environment, many of which are futile or tragic. Right after the collapse, a girl named Amanda is sent away from her home in Los Angeles by her infected mother so that she can find her father and be safe. No vehicle is moving in the city and “[t]here were bodies on the sidewalk on every block and swarms of buzzing flies.”<sup><sup>46</sup></sup> Amanda is afraid and hungry, but she keeps going in an environment that is dangerous and disgusting with corpses rotting everywhere. She meets Inez, who is also looking for her father, and together the two girls try to make their way north, meeting dozens of strangers along the way, some of whom help them while others try to rape or kill them. In the end, they seek the protection of a gang of bikers and live among them.</p><p>The need for protection and community looms large in many of the stories, as does the need for spiritual and religious consolation.<sup><sup>47</sup></sup> Jason Kilpatrick, a former hedge fund manager in Silicon Valley who is ninety years old in 2081 when he is being interviewed, states that “[a] lot of people are bitter about the Collapse,” but insists that it was actually “a good thing” because “we were wrecking the earth. Now the ocean is coming up because the ice is melting. We all knew, but none of us wanted to change. So the change came to us.”<sup><sup>48</sup></sup> The reason why Kilpatrick thinks it is a good thing that the old system collapsed is that it led to a new sense of community: “I like the way people help each other. That's what people are supposed to do ... I don't think anybody survived who wasn't in some kind of group.”<sup><sup>49</sup></sup> Pendell describes many of such groups and their internal and external dynamics, but stays away from naively celebrating the beauty of these newly-formed communities. Kilpatrick himself acknowledges the enormously high death rate within the collective he used to be part of,<sup><sup>50</sup></sup> and his interview is followed by the second part of Amanda's story, in which the Roadkill Rangers, as the bikers with whom she now lives are called, are decimated first by the pox and then by cholera, while others are shot in a fight with “a gang of police.”<sup><sup>51</sup></sup> In the end she and Inez both are pregnant, in Amanda's case without any certainty about the identity of the father. It no longer seems to matter. What counts in this group and in others like it is nothing but sheer survival. Although <em>The Great Bay</em> again and again affirms the human <em>need</em> for sustaining and sustainable communities, it puts a large question mark behind the ability of such communities to withstand what's coming.<sup><sup>52</sup></sup></p><p>Nothing built by humans, the novel suggests, can really withstand what's coming, simply because human lives and their products are no match for the forceful processes that have been set in motion during the early centuries of the Anthropocene. If, as Frederick Buell has observed, “environmental crisis has become part of people's normality today,”<sup><sup>53</sup></sup> then this is all the more true for the future humans in Pendell's novel, who live and die in a world in which “everything was too bad, too near to starvation for anyone to be able to organize any large-scale actions.”<sup><sup>54</sup></sup> While the immediate generations following the Collapse retain an acute awareness of the folly and greed of the civilization whose ruins they find all around them, this changes over time. Two hundred years later, we learn, “[t]he word ‘America’ was rarely heard. The ruins and everything about it were called ‘Precle,’ and fantastic stories were told about the people who had vanished.”<sup><sup>55</sup></sup> There is a steep decline in literacy that some find alarming, “[b]ut then, what was there to read, except ‘Precle.’”<sup><sup>56</sup></sup> And so the new generations retain only a vague sense of the elaborate culture of the Oil People and the global disaster it brought about. Over time, their sustenance practices are becoming simpler and simpler and the scope and scale of human agency “resemble those of the Bronze Age” by 2521, remaining at that level for the next few thousand years.<sup><sup>57</sup></sup> The risks now faced by the population of what used to be California include the pointed arrows of their envious neighbors as well as the many natural hazards of the Great Bay area. What people have completely forgotten at this point is that these “natural” hazards are in fact as anthropogenic in nature as the arrows of their neighbors.</p><p>In the course of a few millennia, the ecological effects of the Anthropocene thus have become naturalized, but for the contemporary reader, the dramatic devolution of humanity as a result of dramatic environmental changes will in all likelihood seem strange and unsettling. Darko Suvin has famously argued that the process of “cognitive estrangement” is what enables the readers of science fiction to see their actual world in a new light.<sup><sup>58</sup></sup> What is made strange in <em>The Great Bay</em> is the natural and built environments of California and the rest of the world. The narrative's many protagonists must live within these strange new geographies, dwelling in the midst of prolonged environmental crisis because they have no other choice.</p> <h2>Genre, Storytelling and the Protagonists of the Anthropocene</h2>
<p>“Literature,” writes Richard Kerridge, “can provide an all-out apocalyptic vision of catastrophe, to shock and scare us deeply,”<sup><sup>59</sup></sup> and science fiction is one of the genres that have often attempted to do this, not least through the mechanism of cognitive estrangement. <em>The Great Bay</em> combines its “all-out apocalyptic vision” of the initial Collapse with the representation of human dwelling in crises in its aftermath. However, despite the many risks faced by individual humans and their often tragic fates, the text makes it difficult to care very much for any of them. Pendell's laconic tone and cursory treatment of his protagonists creates a distance between readers and the human suffering that is presented to them, not only in the Panoptic sections, but also in the short vignettes that introduce us to individual future humans. Kerridge argues that “A crucial factor for ecocritics is the extent to which the apocalyptic plot is combined with elements of literary realism, giving us characters and events that seem consistent with real possibility (‘yes, this is how that person would react’).”<sup><sup>60</sup></sup> Such realism is mostly absent from Pendell's portrayals of future humans, not least because the text provides us with few details and very limited insight into these characters' thoughts, goals and feelings. The reader never gets to know any of them well enough to have much of an idea of how they would react in a given situation.</p><p>In a way, this narrative strategy mirrors the continuously waning influence of humans over their own destinies and that of the environments around them. They are of very little consequence not only to their immediate and distant surroundings but also to the reader. However, since, as Eric Otto has pointed out, effective cognitive estrangement requires elements of both strangeness and familiarity,<sup><sup>61</sup></sup> a certain intimacy with the characters is needed to fully understand and <em>care about</em> their fates in an increasingly strange environment. Narrative empathy, explains Suzanne Keen, is “a core component of emotional response to fiction,”<sup><sup>62</sup></sup> and the creation of this complex affective transaction between writer, text and reader one of the central tenets of realist fiction. Without such empathetic ties there is little interest on the part of readers in the goals a character seeks to achieve and only very limited affective engagement in that character's story. Reducing human protagonists to brief and mostly unremarkable and inconsequential presences on a dramatically changing planet might mirror the actual future we are facing, but it also runs the danger of disappointing the expectations and needs of many readers, who savor fictional texts not least because of the emotional experience they offer them.</p><p>Since the lives of individual humans are reduced to unrelated snapshots scattered throughout the text, it is ultimately the story of the Great Bay itself – and by extension the planet as a whole – that provides some kind of continuity and potentially sustains the interest of the reader. Pendell's Earth is no avenging Gaia but rather a planet that reacts with great sensitivity to physical and chemical forcing. The changes it undergoes as a result of human activity are quite dramatic:</p><div><blockquote><p>By 2250, sea level had risen eighty feet. If Antarctica continued to melt, sea levels could rise another two hundred feet. Typhoons moved to high latitudes in the Atlantic, mixing the waters. The Gulf Stream gradually found a stable course, and heat began moving again to the British Isles and Northern Europe, ending their short little ice age, but not the global flooding of the ocean.<sup><sup>63</sup></sup></p></blockquote></div><div><blockquote><p>The earth had entered a Pliocene climate in half a millennium. Rainfall was heavy in the far northern and southern latitudes, but the sub-tropics were deserts. Vegetation zones shifted too quickly for many plants and trees or the creatures who depended on them to follow. About two thirds of the world's plant and animal species died out.<sup><sup>64</sup></sup></p></blockquote></div><p>It is an ever stranger world that Pendell presents to us, as his nonhuman protagonist changes and develops as a result of anthropogenic forcing of the climate system. Eventually, the glimpses into human life get shorter and shorter, dwindling to flashes as the planet heads inescapably into the next Ice Age. However, not even this “long winter” will erase the lasting effects of the Anthropocene: “When spring at last reawakened and the ice again retreated, the earth would still be a poorer place. There would be no surface deposits of ores or minerals, no underground reserves of energy, and far less resilience in the biosphere.”<sup><sup>65</sup></sup> Fourteen thousand years, Pendell reminds us, is nothing on a geological timescale and the dubious accomplishment of twenty- and twenty-first century humans is that they change their planet in such a lasting way that the transformations outlast ice ages.</p> <h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p><em>The Great Bay</em> represents an ambitious attempt to tell the story of anthropogenic climate change on a time scale that is large enough to accommodate its relatively slow nature. Unlike Roland Emmerich's <em>The Day After Tomorrow</em> (2004) or even Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital Trilogy, the novel does not compress time in order to make climatic processes more easily accessible and dramatic for readers.<sup><sup>66</sup></sup> Instead of offering extremely unrealistic time frames that allow for narratives that center on individual human protagonists, Pendell adapts the temporality of his novel to the comparably slow pace of climate change and is willing to live with the consequences this decision has for his narration of human characters and stories.<sup><sup>67</sup></sup> As Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra point out in their 2011 survey of climate change literature, “climate change asks for authorial innovation, demanding plotlines and characterizations that participate in the global, networked, and controversial nature of climate change.”<sup><sup>68</sup></sup> This resonates with Heise's earlier call for stylistic innovation and the “search for the stories and images of a new kind of eco-cosmopolitan environmentalism that might be able effectively to engage with steadily increasing patterns of global connectivity, including those created by broadening risk scenarios.”<sup><sup>69</sup></sup> Pendell's novel attempts to show the big picture and the patterns of global connectivity, both on a temporal and on a spatial level, but the downside of his mode of narration is that the human readers it is intended for lack protagonists they can identify with. Whether a better writer would have been able to provide them with more engaging snapshots of future human lives remains open to debate.</p><p>However, the story Pendell tells about the future of planet Earth is nevertheless fascinating and disturbing. Rather than fostering empathetic ties to individual human protagonists the text succeeds in instilling in its readers a sense of awe and wonder in the face of these great transformations. As Otto has pointed out, “many environmental writers share the conviction that experiencing the awe-inspiring beyond, whether real or imagined in fiction, results in a more ethical perception of and behavior toward nonhuman nature,”<sup><sup>70</sup></sup> and Pendell's Afterword demonstrates his dissatisfaction with current attitudes and practices. Equally remarkable are his imaginings when it comes to human adaptation to the strange new world he has created. There is little left of nineteenth and twentieth century beliefs in the human domination of nature by the means of science and technology. Human communities are shown to be fragile and extremely vulnerable to changes in their environment, and the knowledge of all scientific advances of the past few hundred years is lost forever. The great Collapse is not the end of everything, and there are still moments when a new/old form of human life prospers, but it definitely is the end of a certain kind of human civilization, a civilization that was unable to comprehend that its behavior was reckless and self-destructive. Despite its limitations, Pendell's narrative about the future life of the Great Bay thus is a grim reminder of the risks produced by what we have come to call the Anthropocene. As Kate Rigby has noted, the term “implicates us all in a call to responsibility: the future of Earth, understood as a diverse collectivity of more-than-human life and the conditions in which such life either thrives or fails, we are told, now lies in our human, all-too-human hands.”<sup><sup>71</sup></sup><em>The Great Bay</em> looks back in time from a fictional future and attests the utter failure of human care and responsibility.</p> <h2>Bibliography</h2>
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Directed by . 20th Century Fox, </p><p>2004</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century</p><p>. </p><p>New York and London</p><p>: </p><p>Routledge</p><p>, </p><p>2004</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity</p><p>. </p><p>London</p><p>: </p><p>Bloomsbury</p><p>, </p><p>2009</p><p>.</p></div><div><p> “</p><p>Letter</p><p>.” </p><p>PMLA</p> <p>114</p><p>, no. </p><p>5</p><p> (</p><p>1999</p><p>): </p><p>1096</p><p>-</p><p>97</p><p>.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Oxford University Press</p><p>, </p><p>2008</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Empathy and the Novel</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Oxford University Press</p><p>, </p><p>2007</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. “</p><p>Ecocritical Approaches to Literary From and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality</p><p>.” In </p><p>The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism</p><p>, edited by , </p><p>361</p><p>-</p><p>375</p><p>. </p><p>Oxford and New York</p><p>: </p><p>Oxford University Press</p><p>, </p><p>2014</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Basic Books</p><p>, </p><p>2007</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet</p><p>. </p><p>London</p><p>: </p><p>HarperCollins</p><p>, </p><p>2007</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>St Martin's Griffin</p><p>, </p><p>2010</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World</p><p>. </p><p>Minneapolis</p><p>: </p><p>University of Minnesota Press</p><p>, </p><p>2013</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia</p><p>. </p><p>Boulder, CO</p><p>: </p><p>Westview Press</p><p>, </p><p>2000</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism</p><p>. </p><p>Columbus</p><p>: </p><p>Ohio State University Press</p><p>, </p><p>2012</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse</p><p>. </p><p>Berkeley, CA</p><p>: </p><p>North Atlantic Books</p><p>, </p><p>2010</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. “</p><p>Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness?</p><p>” </p><p>Australian Humanities Review</p> <p>47</p><p> (</p><p>2009</p><p>): </p><p>173</p><p>-</p><p>187</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Forty Signs of Rain</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Spectra</p><p>, </p><p>2004</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Fifty Degrees Below</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Spectra</p><p>, </p><p>2005</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Sixty Days and Counting</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Spectra</p><p>, </p><p>2007</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre</p><p>. </p><p>New Haven</p><p>: </p><p>Yale University Press</p><p>, </p><p>1979</p><p>.</p></div><div><p> and . “</p><p>Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism</p><p>.” </p><p>Wiley's Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change</p> <p>2</p><p>, no. </p><p>2</p> <p>March/April</p><p> (</p><p>2011</p><p>): </p><p>185</p><p>-</p><p>200</p><p>.</p></div><div><p></p><p>The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Basic Books</p><p>, </p><p>2010</p><p>.</p></div></div><div><p></p><p>Dale Pendell, <em>The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse</em> (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010).</p></div><div><p></p><p>Pendell, <em>The Great Bay,</em> 269.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Ulrich Beck, <em>World Risk Society</em> (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999), 6.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Beck's examples include Cervantes's <em>Don Quixote,</em> in which “in God's absence, risk unfolds its fateful and terrible, inscrutable ambiguity.” Ulrich Beck, <em>World at Risk</em> (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), 5.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Tom Moylan, <em>Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia</em> (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 4.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Ursula K. Heise, “Letter,” <em>PMLA</em> 114, no. 5 (1999): 1097.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Timothy Morton, <em>Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World</em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 2.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Ursula K. Heise, <em>Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global</em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 207.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Beck, <em>World at Risk,</em> 9.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Beck, <em>World at Risk,</em> 9-10.</p></div><div><p></p><p><em>Welcome to the Anthropocene,</em> “Anthropocene.”</p></div><div><p></p><p>James Hansen, <em>Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity</em> (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), ix.</p></div><div><p></p><p>For a detailed analysis of the use of apocalyptic modes of narration in the environmentalist discourse and fiction, see Chapter 5 of Greg Garrard's <em>Ecocriticism</em> (London and New York Routledge, 2012). See also the Introduction of Eric Otto's <em>Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism</em> (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012).</p></div><div><p></p><p>Bill McKibben, <em>Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet</em> (New York: St Martin's Griffin, 2010).</p></div><div><p></p><p>Heise, <em>Sense of Planet,</em> 142.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Frederick Buell, <em>From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century</em> (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 251.</p></div><div><p></p><p>McKibben, <em>Eaarth,</em> xiii.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Lovelock famously has conceptualized the Earth as Gaia and therefore as a living super organism that “controls its temperature composition so as to always feel comfortable.” This is also why, in his understanding, Gaia can take a callous form of “revenge.” James Lovelock, <em>The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity</em> (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 1-2.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Peter Ward, <em>The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps</em> (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 1.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Based on the scientific literature on climate change, <em>Six Degrees</em> is organized into six chapters with each chapter describing the possible ecological (as well as social and political) impacts at a specific average temperature, starting with a rise of one degree and ending at a rise of six degrees Celsius. Lynas acknowledges that he “would be foolish to expect these predictions to come true in any literal sense” but he nevertheless asserts that “climate change is the canvas on which the history of the twenty-first century will be painted.” Mark Lynas, <em>Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet</em> (London: HarperCollins, 2007), xxii.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Pendell, <em>The Great Bay,</em> 2.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Pendell, <em>The Great Bay,</em> 5-6.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Pendell, <em>The Great Bay,</em> 33.</p></div><div><p></p><p>We learn that in California “the sheer variety and diversity of the cults discouraged lethal rivalries. There were fundamentalist cults, Pentecostal cults—even the Methodists returned to the tents. There were antinomian Ranters, free-love Diggers, and all manner of communes: Eastern, New Age, prophetic, and libertine. There were pagan earth cults, death cults, Gnostic cults, tantric cults.” Pendell, <em>The Great Bay,</em> 6.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Pendell, <em>The Great Bay,</em> 25-26.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Frederick Buell, <em>From Apocalypse,</em> xvii.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Pendell, <em>The Great Bay,</em> 35.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Pendell, <em>The Great Bay,</em> 128.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Darko Suvin, <em>Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre</em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 4.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Richard Kerridge, “Ecological Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality,” in <em>The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism,</em> ed. Greg Garrard (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 372.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Kerridge, “Ecological Approaches,” 372.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Eric Otto, <em>Green Speculations,</em> 8.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Suzanne Keen, <em>Empathy and the Novel</em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ix.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Pendell, <em>The Great Bay,</em> 123-24.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Pendell, <em>The Great Bay,</em> 268.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Emmerich's film compresses its rapid climate change scenario into the course of just a few days. Robinson's trilogy isn't quite as daring in matters of time but the stalling of the Atlantic conveyer belt also in this case brings about an ice age much more quickly than predicted by scientific scenarios. Robinson has referred to this process as “terraforming Earth.” Kim Stanley Robinson, <em>Imagining Abrupt Climate Change: Terraforming Earth</em> (Seattle, WA: Amazon Shorts, 2005).</p></div><div><p></p><p>Pendell notes in the Afterword to his novel, however, that “for the purposes of the story [he has] used accelerated rising of sea levels beyond that of current projections. And yet, such rises are not impossible.” (Pendell, <em>The Great Bay,</em> 217).</p></div><div><p></p><p>Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns Putra, “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism,” <em>Wiley's Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change</em> 2, no. 2 March/April (2011): 185-200.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Heise, <em>Sense of Place,</em> 210.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Eric Otto, <em>Green Speculations,</em> 13.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Kate Rigby. “Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness?” <em>Australian Humanities Review</em> 47 (2009): 173-187.</p></div>
<p>Copyright: © von Mossner 2014</p><p>2014</p><div><p>This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This license permits use and distribution of the article for non-commercial purposes, provided the original work is cited and is not altered or transformed.</p></div>
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<div><div><p> and . “</p><p>Introduction: Dystopia and Histories</p><p>.” In </p><p>Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination</p><p>, edited by and , </p><p>1</p><p>-</p><p>12</p><p>. </p><p>New York and London</p><p>: </p><p>Routledge</p><p>, </p><p>2003</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>World at Risk</p><p>. </p><p>Cambridge, UK</p><p>: </p><p>Polity Press</p><p>, </p><p>2007</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>World Risk Society</p><p>. </p><p>Cambridge, UK</p><p>: </p><p>Polity Press</p><p>, </p><p>1999</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>The Day After Tomorrow</p><p>. DVD. Directed by . 20th Century Fox, </p><p>2004</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century</p><p>. </p><p>New York and London</p><p>: </p><p>Routledge</p><p>, </p><p>2004</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity</p><p>. </p><p>London</p><p>: </p><p>Bloomsbury</p><p>, </p><p>2009</p><p>.</p></div><div><p> “</p><p>Letter</p><p>.” </p><p>PMLA</p> <p>114</p><p>, no. </p><p>5</p><p> (</p><p>1999</p><p>): </p><p>1096</p><p>-</p><p>97</p><p>.</p></div><div><p></p><p>Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Oxford University Press</p><p>, </p><p>2008</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Empathy and the Novel</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Oxford University Press</p><p>, </p><p>2007</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. “</p><p>Ecocritical Approaches to Literary From and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality</p><p>.” In </p><p>The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism</p><p>, edited by , </p><p>361</p><p>-</p><p>375</p><p>. </p><p>Oxford and New York</p><p>: </p><p>Oxford University Press</p><p>, </p><p>2014</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Basic Books</p><p>, </p><p>2007</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet</p><p>. </p><p>London</p><p>: </p><p>HarperCollins</p><p>, </p><p>2007</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>St Martin's Griffin</p><p>, </p><p>2010</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World</p><p>. </p><p>Minneapolis</p><p>: </p><p>University of Minnesota Press</p><p>, </p><p>2013</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia</p><p>. </p><p>Boulder, CO</p><p>: </p><p>Westview Press</p><p>, </p><p>2000</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism</p><p>. </p><p>Columbus</p><p>: </p><p>Ohio State University Press</p><p>, </p><p>2012</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse</p><p>. </p><p>Berkeley, CA</p><p>: </p><p>North Atlantic Books</p><p>, </p><p>2010</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. “</p><p>Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness?</p><p>” </p><p>Australian Humanities Review</p> <p>47</p><p> (</p><p>2009</p><p>): </p><p>173</p><p>-</p><p>187</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Forty Signs of Rain</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Spectra</p><p>, </p><p>2004</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Fifty Degrees Below</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Spectra</p><p>, </p><p>2005</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Sixty Days and Counting</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Spectra</p><p>, </p><p>2007</p><p>.</p></div><div><p>. </p><p>Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre</p><p>. </p><p>New Haven</p><p>: </p><p>Yale University Press</p><p>, </p><p>1979</p><p>.</p></div><div><p> and . “</p><p>Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism</p><p>.” </p><p>Wiley's Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change</p> <p>2</p><p>, no. </p><p>2</p> <p>March/April</p><p> (</p><p>2011</p><p>): </p><p>185</p><p>-</p><p>200</p><p>.</p></div><div><p></p><p>The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps</p><p>. </p><p>New York</p><p>: </p><p>Basic Books</p><p>, </p><p>2010</p><p>.</p></div></div>
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 Research Article | May 01 2014

 Science Fiction and the Risks of the Anthropocene: Anticipated Transformations in Dale Pendell's The Great Bay

 Alexa Weik von Mossner
 Alexa Weik von Mossner

 Alexa Weik von Mossner is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria and currently a Visiting Scholar in the English Department at UCLA. Her writings on various ecocritical issues and the affective dimensions of our engagement with cultural texts have been published in journals including Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and Environmental Communication. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Minds: Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination (U of Texas P, 2014), the editor of Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology and Film (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014), and co-editor of The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (with Sylvia Mayer, Winter, 2014).

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 Environmental Humanities (2014) 5 (1): 203–216.
 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615478
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 Alexa Weik von Mossner; Science Fiction and the Risks of the Anthropocene: Anticipated Transformations in Dale Pendell's The Great Bay. Environmental Humanities 1 May 2014; 5 (1): 203–216. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615478

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 Abstract

 Covering the time span from 2021 to 16000 N.C., Dale Pendell's speculative novel The Great Bay chronicles the profound climatic, geological and ecological transformations that California undergoes during these fourteen millennia. Human life becomes unimaginably small on such a time scale, and Pendell responds to that representational challenge by compiling a wide variety of texts that zero in on individual humans at different points in the future rather than offering a continuous story or central character. In a way, that place is taken by the geographical region that is the focus of the narrative and gives the book its title. Timothy Morton has argued that because we live in the Anthropocene we can no longer understand history as exclusively human. Pendell's “Chronicle of the Collapse” suggests that the same is true for storytelling, offering readers the story of a nonhuman protagonist that changes slowly over time. The result is a highly fragmented narrative that is interesting for what it tries to achieve but at the same time remarkably unengaging. In its distant and distanced rendering of future ecological change and human anguish, The Great Bay is a grave reminder not only of the incalculable risks of the Anthropocene, but also of the basic tenets of realist storytelling.

 Dale Pendell's The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse (2010) opens with a table of contents that is accompanied by three illustrations showing the physical features of California.1 The first illustration is dominated by the long flat plain of the San Joaquin Valley. San Francisco Bay to the west of it is also clearly visible, and although the city of San Francisco isn't shown or mentioned (though East Palo Alto is), it is an easily recognizable representation of California. The second map looks much less familiar. This is because the waters of San Francisco Bay now extend far into the San Joaquin Valley, a process that seems to have continued in the third illustration, which shows the Valley nearly filled by seawater and a significantly shrunken shoreline along the Pacific Coast. All the big coastal cities are now gone—in fact there are no longer any cities noted at all. Looking at the table of contents, we realize that this illustration accompanies the overview of the final five chapters of the book, covering the future history of California from 2521 to a final document about the “Caribou Hunters on Pit River” fourteen thousand years “after the Collapse.”2 That Collapse, we learn in the first chapter, happened in the year 2021, and while it marked the end of the “Oil Culture,”3 it did not terminate the long-term climatic and geological effects of human activity on planet Earth. The comprehensive transformations of the epoch that some have come to call the Anthropocene will continue for millennia, and Pendell's ambitious science fiction novel attempts nothing less than to imagine not only the geological but also the human dimensions of this future development.

 As an informal scientific term, the Anthropocene denotes a geological epoch that follows the Holocene, an epoch that is marked by a new scale of human activity and agency. Those who are interested in the social and cultural dimensions of the Anthropocene tend to look not only at its present challenges but also at its potential future dimensions and the consequences for ecosystems and humans alike. They frequently frame their concerns in terms of uncertainty, pointing out that “our collective actions have brought us into uncharted territory” and that “there's a risk of an irreversible cascade of changes leading us into a future that's profoundly different from anything we've faced before.”4 Like the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, they assume that living in an epoch that is shaped by human activities means being confronted with environmental risks and hazards that are the unintended consequences of those activities. Beck has theorized the societal dimensions of this dilemma in his work on the world risk society, a concept that “draws attention to the limited controllability of the dangers we have created for ourselves.”5 Beck has argued that it is not only up to philosophy and science to explore the risk societies of the Anthropocene, but that novelists, too, do important work in exploring the “two faces of risk—chance and danger”6 in their imaginative accounts,7 and no genre would be better suited for such fictional explorations than science fiction.

 As a speculative mode of narration, science fiction imagines possible alternative and future worlds that can be either utopian or dystopian in nature. It is “a fictive practice” that, in the words of Tom Moylan, “has the formal potential to re-envision the world in ways that generate pleasurable, probing, and potentially subversive responses in its readers.”8 Not least because of their investment in the building of alternative worlds, a good number of science fiction writers have concerned themselves with environmental issues. As Ursula Heise has pointed out, “science fiction is one of the genres that have most persistently and most daringly engaged environmental questions and their challenge to our vision of the future.”9 Pendell's The Great Bay is an interesting example in this regard because of its ambitious temporal scope. Covering the time span from 2021 to 16000 N.C. allows Pendell to chronicle the profound climatic, geological and ecological transformations that California undergoes during these fourteen millennia. Human life becomes almost unimaginably small on such a time scale, and The Great Bay—despite its explicit indexation as a novel on the cover of the book—addresses this problem by presenting readers with a wide variety of texts that offer panoptic views of the future state of the world and briefly zero in on individual human lives rather than a continuous narrative or central character. In a way, that place is taken by the geographical region that is the focus of the narrative, and so it is probably not by coincidence that it is this nonhuman protagonist—the “Great Bay,” as the future extension of the San Francisco Bay into the San Joaquin Valley is called—that gives the book its title.

 “[W]e are no longer able to think history as exclusively human,” writes Timothy Morton in Hyperobjects (2013), “for the very reason that we live in the Anthropocene.”10 Pendell's novel suggests that the same is true for storytelling: The protagonists of narratives can no longer be exclusively human in an age of rapid climatic and geological transformations that are the result of human activity and at the same time determine the activity of future humans. In a way the book is therefore a response to Heise's complaint, in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008), that most climate change novels are too “conventional in their narrative strategies,”11 frequently falling back “on apocalyptic narrative” and simplistic story lines that concentrate on the lives of generic science fiction protagonists.12 Heise calls for stylistic and formal innovation while also suggesting that the Modernist tradition of narrative collage offers possibilities for capturing the vast dimensions of global ecological transformations.13 Pendell's The Great Bay certainly attempts such an innovative mode of narration as it tells its story about the year of the Collapse and the fourteen millennia that follow it, and it also relies heavily on methods of collage and fragmentation. The result, however, is a narrative that is interesting for what it tries to achieve but at the same time remarkably unengaging. Favoring geological and climatic timescales over human ones runs the risk of losing readers' empathetic engagement with characters they understand well enough to care about their hopes and goals. In its distant rendering of future ecological change and human anguish, The Great Bay is therefore a grave reminder not only of the incalculable risks of the Anthropocene but also of the basic tenets of realist storytelling.

 Envisioning the Risks of the Anthropocene

 “Risk,” explains Ulrich Beck in his World at Risk (2007), “is not synonymous with catastrophe. Risk means the anticipation of the catastrophe. Risks concern the possibility of future occurrences and developments; they make present a state of the world that does not (yet) exist.”14 This differentiation between risk and catastrophe is important because it underlines the uncertainty and future-oriented temporality of risk. “Risks are always future events that may occur, that threaten us,” writes Beck, but despite this inherent futurity, they have considerable effects on our present, “because this constant danger shapes our expectations, lodges in our heads and guides our actions, it becomes a political force that transforms the world.”15 The risks of the Anthropocene are therefore potential future hazards and catastrophes that have not yet materialized and some of which in fact may never materialize. Nevertheless, the awareness of these risks shapes our expectations and, potentially, our actions. As is usually the case with risks, this awareness takes its starting point in the observation of past and present occurrences, combined with a projection of their potential future developments. The Welcome to the Anthropocene website offers one of many descriptions of the status quo:

 Probably the best-known aspect of our newfound influence is what we're doing to the climate. Atmospheric carbon dioxide may be at its highest level in 15 million years. But this is just one part of the story; we're changing the planet in countless ways. Nutrients from fertilizer wash off fields and down rivers, creating stretches of sea where nothing grows except vast algal blooms; deforestation means vast quantities of soil are being eroded and swept away. Rich grasslands are turning to desert; ancient ice formations are melting away; species everywhere are vanishing.16

 Climate change here emerges as only one of many ways in which humans interfere with the Earth's biosphere, but it will likely be the interference that has the most lasting effects. Over the past decade countless popular science books have tried to warn their readers about the risks involved in this interference, basing their projections on the findings of peer-reviewed scientific articles and their own research.

 NASA-climatologist James Hansen, for example, writes in Storms of My Grandchildren (2009) that “continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself—and the timetable is shorter than we thought.”17 The subtitle of Hansen's book, The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, also clearly invokes a sense of risk in the way Beck has described it, speaking about the coming climate catastrophe as well as about a last chance to save ourselves. There is a sense of urgency and potential doom in these words, and while it may have been the publisher's decision to feature them so prominently on the cover, they adequately represent the apocalyptic tone18 of Hansen's deliberations. “Planet Earth,” he writes, “is in imminent peril”19 because of human activity, which is why “it is crucial for all of us ... to get involved.”20 Bill McKibben's Eaarth (2009) strikes a similar tone, but doesn't tell its readers, as does Hansen's book, that humanity still has a “last chance” to avoid the worst. In McKibben's view, planet Earth is already “a different place” than it was for the past ten thousand years, which is why it “needs a new name: Eaarth.”21 Rather than offering an apocalyptic perspective, in which, as Heise points out, “utter destruction lies ahead but can be averted,”22 McKibben presents a risk scenario in which “crises are already underway all around and while their consequences can be mitigated, a future without their impact has become impossible to envision.”23 The environment on his planet Eaarth is what Frederic Buell has described as “a horror people hopelessly dwell within, a horror that goes on and on all around them.”24 But even as he insists that “global warming is ... no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It is our reality,”25 McKibben still tries to alert his readers to the even greater dangers in the future, so that they can adapt to the changing climate and build “communities and economies that can withstand what's coming.”26 James Lovelock sounds even more alarmed in The Revenge of Gaia (2007), where he speaks about his concern about “the Earth's declining health,” urging his readers to do something about anthropogenic climate change because “the living Earth's response to what we do will depend not merely on the extent of our land use and pollutions but also on its current state of health.”27

 These are just three examples of how the risks of the Anthropocene—particularly climate risk—have been used in popular science texts to engage readers emotionally in a narrative of environmental decline and scare them into taking action to prevent these risks from turning into actual hazards and catastrophes. It is perhaps unsurprising that in order to convey the severity of the risks, many of these texts describe potential future catastrophes as if they were no longer risks but already a reality. Peter Ward's The Flooded Earth (2010), for example, opens with a description of Miami in the year 2120 CE when carbon dioxide is at 800 ppm and the city an island “because the level of the world's ocean's had risen 10 feet.”28 Mark Lynas's Six Degrees (2007) takes considerable liberty in its detailed description of a world that is one to six degrees hotter than in the present.29 The most daring attempt to make the potential future catastrophes imaginable for readers, however, can be found in Hansen's book, which includes a science fiction story set in the year 2525 in which a humanoid alien species unsuccessfully tries to resettle its people to a planet Earth that now has surface temperatures of one hundred degrees Celsius and is devoid of life. While this scenario “may read like far-fetched science fiction,” writes Hansen, “its central hypothesis is a tragic certainty—continued unfettered burning of all fossil fuels will cause the climate system to pass tipping points, such that we hand our children and grandchildren a dynamic situation that is out of control.”30 In order to illustrate the book's scientific hypothesis, then, Hansen turns to apocalyptic fiction in the hope that the shared imagination of future devastation will make his discourse of anthropogenic risk more convincing.

 It remains to be seen whether the use of apocalyptical fictional elements in popular scientific discourse on the risks of the Anthropocene indeed makes such discourse more accessible and effective. In the case of Hansen's book the science fiction story is so far-fetched and the protagonists so bloodless that it seems unlikely that they will engage readers' imaginations and emotions in the intended way. Hansen is ready to admit that “science fiction isn't [his] area of expertise,”31 and so we might forgive him that, as a climatologist, he cannot create fictional characters or storylines that excite our minds. The question remains, however, what modes of narration can adequately imagine future worlds that continue to be shaped by the actions of humans who died decades, centuries, millennia ago. Pendell's The Great Bay constitutes one attempt to deal with the vast spatial and temporal dimensions of the issue within the realm of speculative fiction. Climate change figures prominently in the book, and it is what determines the often miserable lives of its future humans. But it is not the only anthropogenic transformation that Pendell chronicles, nor is it the sole reason for the initial collapse of human civilization. The book mentions multiple causes for the future catastrophes it envisions, and all of them have been counted among the potential risks of the Anthropocene.

 Anticipating the Catastrophes of the Anthropocene: The Great Bay

 The Great Bay offers two reasons for the Collapse it envisions for 2021 and the subsequent demise of mankind. The initial blow is a global pandemic, “a new kind of chicken pox, or smallpox”32 with absolutely devastating effects. However, we quickly learn that the seemingly natural disaster is actually anthropogenic in nature: “There was a rumor that the disease was an army bug, a genetically engineered biological weapon that had back-fired. ... The disease certainly spread with an engineered efficiency—two hundred million died in the United States in the first month.”33 The reason why the pandemic can spread so quickly and eradicate the larger part of the American population within only a few weeks is serious infrastructural problems that are related to the changing climate. We learn that “2021 had been the hottest summer on record, even topping 2020,” with the result that “[t]he power grid had been stretched to the breaking point for weeks. The ‘strategic oil reserves' had been depleted the year before.”34 It is therefore anthropogenic climate change and resource depletion that, in The Great Bay, induce the disastrous failure of US infrastructure, and that in turn leaves the country unable to cope with the human-made virus that kills off its population. By October of the same year, the population of the United States is reduced to fifty million; one year later to fifteen million, and “by the spring of 2024 [it] was eight million and still declining.”35

 The Panoptic overviews that stand at the beginning of each of the twelve chapters offer “objective” information about the changing climate and its impact on California, the United States, and the rest of the world. They relate climatic, geological, and human processes alike, and they draw connections between previous human activities, resulting climatic and ecological transformations, and the latter's effects on the humans of the future. The authorial narrator who speaks to us in these Panoptic introductions employ a decidedly detached and laconic tone in narrating the often horrific human suffering resulting from the unintended consequences of earlier human activities. “For a while,” we are informed, “they buried the bodies in mass graves with bulldozers.”36 Later on, when electricity fails and corpses are simply placed outside in the streets, the sight becomes even more horrific: “Dogs ate at the corpses and some people shot at the dogs; others, in frustration, shot at the helicopters.”37 And things only get worse as times goes by: “2022 and 2023 were the Hunger Years. People can endure near starvation for long periods of time while awaiting rescue or deliverance. But there were no deliverers, no rescuers—there were no relief expeditions. People starved, quietly, and died quietly. And, like any animal who starves to death, with the dignity of acceptance.”38 Without the comforts and affordances of modern civilization, and in the absence of divine interference, humans die like the animals that they are. The narrator relates all this as simple facts, with the same equanimity that also characterizes his recounting of the infrastructural and societal breakdown and of the many failed attempts to save and rebuild, to scavenge and survive in a world that has been stretched beyond its breaking point.

 One could easily argue that The Great Bay is a post-apocalyptic narrative. After all, it takes the near-complete collapse of human civilization as its starting point and then shows individual humans who try to survive in its aftermath, trying to make do with the limited resources and machinery available. However, the novel's unusual time frame and the nature of the disaster complicate this classification. “[I]t is unlikely that an apocalypse will save us,” writes Pendell in the Afterword to his novel, “Much more likely is a gradual degradation of the quality of life, and, for many species, of their habitat and their chances for survival.”39 These species, which clearly include the human species, are therefore forced to continually “dwell” in crisis, to use Frederick Buell's term again. Accordingly, the global catastrophe in Pendell's narrative is not so much an apocalypse as it is a fateful combination of several unintended consequences of scientific, technological, and societal risk taking and decision making. Pendell's Collapse is the moment in which risks turn into hazards and, ultimately, into catastrophe. It was inevitable, we are told, “even without the Pandemic,”40 because of the short-sightedness of human behavior and because humans took risks they shouldn't have.

 Similarly important is the fact that the global disaster doesn't really provide a clean slate for a fresh start, as is often the case in post-apocalyptic narratives. The nature of climate change prevents this, since the human CO2 emissions that are already in the atmosphere keep forcing the climate even though there are very few additional emissions after the Collapse. These changes happen very slowly, over the course of almost sixteen thousand years, and they affect the lives of individual humans in very different ways during this long time span. By 2031,

 Carbon dioxide levels approached those of the early Eocene. Industrial outputs of CO2 had stopped, but a long chain-reaction was in progress, and CO2 in the atmosphere is long-lived. Permafrost thawing was releasing large amounts of methane. The manmade aerosols and other particulate matter that had been masking the heating from greenhouse gases were gone.... In the West, summer temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit were more and more common, the heat spells lasting for a month a time ... New records would have been set everywhere, if anyone had been keeping records.41

 Rather than a post-apocalyptic text, The Great Bay is therefore a risk narrative in which crises continue to be underway all around and their impacts cannot ever be fully or at all mitigated. In order to show the human dimensions of these impacts, the representation of large-scale anthropogenic changes to the physical properties of the planet is combined with stories of individual humans who try to survive in an increasingly strange environment.

 These stories differ considerably in both form and tone, supposedly because they are taken from very different sources and excavated from different archives, among them the “Archives of the Scholar's Guild, Berkeley,”42 the “Library of the Order of Antiquities” which collects materials “750 years after the Collapse,”43 and the “Institute of Medieval History,”44 which operates 1,250 years later. They include short stories, newspaper articles, interviews, historical records, encyclopedic entries, legends, and an 80-page travel journal by Solomon the Monk about “The Great Trek from the Great Bay of California to the Bicentennial Rendezvous in Boulder”45 in the year 2222, complete with detailed maps of future landscapes. These texts narrate a wide range of human responses to their changing environment, many of which are futile or tragic. Right after the collapse, a girl named Amanda is sent away from her home in Los Angeles by her infected mother so that she can find her father and be safe. No vehicle is moving in the city and “[t]here were bodies on the sidewalk on every block and swarms of buzzing flies.”46 Amanda is afraid and hungry, but she keeps going in an environment that is dangerous and disgusting with corpses rotting everywhere. She meets Inez, who is also looking for her father, and together the two girls try to make their way north, meeting dozens of strangers along the way, some of whom help them while others try to rape or kill them. In the end, they seek the protection of a gang of bikers and live among them.

 The need for protection and community looms large in many of the stories, as does the need for spiritual and religious consolation.47 Jason Kilpatrick, a former hedge fund manager in Silicon Valley who is ninety years old in 2081 when he is being interviewed, states that “[a] lot of people are bitter about the Collapse,” but insists that it was actually “a good thing” because “we were wrecking the earth. Now the ocean is coming up because the ice is melting. We all knew, but none of us wanted to change. So the change came to us.”48 The reason why Kilpatrick thinks it is a good thing that the old system collapsed is that it led to a new sense of community: “I like the way people help each other. That's what people are supposed to do ... I don't think anybody survived who wasn't in some kind of group.”49 Pendell describes many of such groups and their internal and external dynamics, but stays away from naively celebrating the beauty of these newly-formed communities. Kilpatrick himself acknowledges the enormously high death rate within the collective he used to be part of,50 and his interview is followed by the second part of Amanda's story, in which the Roadkill Rangers, as the bikers with whom she now lives are called, are decimated first by the pox and then by cholera, while others are shot in a fight with “a gang of police.”51 In the end she and Inez both are pregnant, in Amanda's case without any certainty about the identity of the father. It no longer seems to matter. What counts in this group and in others like it is nothing but sheer survival. Although The Great Bay again and again affirms the human need for sustaining and sustainable communities, it puts a large question mark behind the ability of such communities to withstand what's coming.52

 Nothing built by humans, the novel suggests, can really withstand what's coming, simply because human lives and their products are no match for the forceful processes that have been set in motion during the early centuries of the Anthropocene. If, as Frederick Buell has observed, “environmental crisis has become part of people's normality today,”53 then this is all the more true for the future humans in Pendell's novel, who live and die in a world in which “everything was too bad, too near to starvation for anyone to be able to organize any large-scale actions.”54 While the immediate generations following the Collapse retain an acute awareness of the folly and greed of the civilization whose ruins they find all around them, this changes over time. Two hundred years later, we learn, “[t]he word ‘America’ was rarely heard. The ruins and everything about it were called ‘Precle,’ and fantastic stories were told about the people who had vanished.”55 There is a steep decline in literacy that some find alarming, “[b]ut then, what was there to read, except ‘Precle.’”56 And so the new generations retain only a vague sense of the elaborate culture of the Oil People and the global disaster it brought about. Over time, their sustenance practices are becoming simpler and simpler and the scope and scale of human agency “resemble those of the Bronze Age” by 2521, remaining at that level for the next few thousand years.57 The risks now faced by the population of what used to be California include the pointed arrows of their envious neighbors as well as the many natural hazards of the Great Bay area. What people have completely forgotten at this point is that these “natural” hazards are in fact as anthropogenic in nature as the arrows of their neighbors.

 In the course of a few millennia, the ecological effects of the Anthropocene thus have become naturalized, but for the contemporary reader, the dramatic devolution of humanity as a result of dramatic environmental changes will in all likelihood seem strange and unsettling. Darko Suvin has famously argued that the process of “cognitive estrangement” is what enables the readers of science fiction to see their actual world in a new light.58 What is made strange in The Great Bay is the natural and built environments of California and the rest of the world. The narrative's many protagonists must live within these strange new geographies, dwelling in the midst of prolonged environmental crisis because they have no other choice.

 Genre, Storytelling and the Protagonists of the Anthropocene

 “Literature,” writes Richard Kerridge, “can provide an all-out apocalyptic vision of catastrophe, to shock and scare us deeply,”59 and science fiction is one of the genres that have often attempted to do this, not least through the mechanism of cognitive estrangement. The Great Bay combines its “all-out apocalyptic vision” of the initial Collapse with the representation of human dwelling in crises in its aftermath. However, despite the many risks faced by individual humans and their often tragic fates, the text makes it difficult to care very much for any of them. Pendell's laconic tone and cursory treatment of his protagonists creates a distance between readers and the human suffering that is presented to them, not only in the Panoptic sections, but also in the short vignettes that introduce us to individual future humans. Kerridge argues that “A crucial factor for ecocritics is the extent to which the apocalyptic plot is combined with elements of literary realism, giving us characters and events that seem consistent with real possibility (‘yes, this is how that person would react’).”60 Such realism is mostly absent from Pendell's portrayals of future humans, not least because the text provides us with few details and very limited insight into these characters' thoughts, goals and feelings. The reader never gets to know any of them well enough to have much of an idea of how they would react in a given situation.

 In a way, this narrative strategy mirrors the continuously waning influence of humans over their own destinies and that of the environments around them. They are of very little consequence not only to their immediate and distant surroundings but also to the reader. However, since, as Eric Otto has pointed out, effective cognitive estrangement requires elements of both strangeness and familiarity,61 a certain intimacy with the characters is needed to fully understand and care about their fates in an increasingly strange environment. Narrative empathy, explains Suzanne Keen, is “a core component of emotional response to fiction,”62 and the creation of this complex affective transaction between writer, text and reader one of the central tenets of realist fiction. Without such empathetic ties there is little interest on the part of readers in the goals a character seeks to achieve and only very limited affective engagement in that character's story. Reducing human protagonists to brief and mostly unremarkable and inconsequential presences on a dramatically changing planet might mirror the actual future we are facing, but it also runs the danger of disappointing the expectations and needs of many readers, who savor fictional texts not least because of the emotional experience they offer them.

 Since the lives of individual humans are reduced to unrelated snapshots scattered throughout the text, it is ultimately the story of the Great Bay itself – and by extension the planet as a whole – that provides some kind of continuity and potentially sustains the interest of the reader. Pendell's Earth is no avenging Gaia but rather a planet that reacts with great sensitivity to physical and chemical forcing. The changes it undergoes as a result of human activity are quite dramatic:

 By 2250, sea level had risen eighty feet. If Antarctica continued to melt, sea levels could rise another two hundred feet. Typhoons moved to high latitudes in the Atlantic, mixing the waters. The Gulf Stream gradually found a stable course, and heat began moving again to the British Isles and Northern Europe, ending their short little ice age, but not the global flooding of the ocean.63

 The earth had entered a Pliocene climate in half a millennium. Rainfall was heavy in the far northern and southern latitudes, but the sub-tropics were deserts. Vegetation zones shifted too quickly for many plants and trees or the creatures who depended on them to follow. About two thirds of the world's plant and animal species died out.64

 It is an ever stranger world that Pendell presents to us, as his nonhuman protagonist changes and develops as a result of anthropogenic forcing of the climate system. Eventually, the glimpses into human life get shorter and shorter, dwindling to flashes as the planet heads inescapably into the next Ice Age. However, not even this “long winter” will erase the lasting effects of the Anthropocene: “When spring at last reawakened and the ice again retreated, the earth would still be a poorer place. There would be no surface deposits of ores or minerals, no underground reserves of energy, and far less resilience in the biosphere.”65 Fourteen thousand years, Pendell reminds us, is nothing on a geological timescale and the dubious accomplishment of twenty- and twenty-first century humans is that they change their planet in such a lasting way that the transformations outlast ice ages.

 Conclusion

 The Great Bay represents an ambitious attempt to tell the story of anthropogenic climate change on a time scale that is large enough to accommodate its relatively slow nature. Unlike Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow (2004) or even Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital Trilogy, the novel does not compress time in order to make climatic processes more easily accessible and dramatic for readers.66 Instead of offering extremely unrealistic time frames that allow for narratives that center on individual human protagonists, Pendell adapts the temporality of his novel to the comparably slow pace of climate change and is willing to live with the consequences this decision has for his narration of human characters and stories.67 As Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra point out in their 2011 survey of climate change literature, “climate change asks for authorial innovation, demanding plotlines and characterizations that participate in the global, networked, and controversial nature of climate change.”68 This resonates with Heise's earlier call for stylistic innovation and the “search for the stories and images of a new kind of eco-cosmopolitan environmentalism that might be able effectively to engage with steadily increasing patterns of global connectivity, including those created by broadening risk scenarios.”69 Pendell's novel attempts to show the big picture and the patterns of global connectivity, both on a temporal and on a spatial level, but the downside of his mode of narration is that the human readers it is intended for lack protagonists they can identify with. Whether a better writer would have been able to provide them with more engaging snapshots of future human lives remains open to debate.

 However, the story Pendell tells about the future of planet Earth is nevertheless fascinating and disturbing. Rather than fostering empathetic ties to individual human protagonists the text succeeds in instilling in its readers a sense of awe and wonder in the face of these great transformations. As Otto has pointed out, “many environmental writers share the conviction that experiencing the awe-inspiring beyond, whether real or imagined in fiction, results in a more ethical perception of and behavior toward nonhuman nature,”70 and Pendell's Afterword demonstrates his dissatisfaction with current attitudes and practices. Equally remarkable are his imaginings when it comes to human adaptation to the strange new world he has created. There is little left of nineteenth and twentieth century beliefs in the human domination of nature by the means of science and technology. Human communities are shown to be fragile and extremely vulnerable to changes in their environment, and the knowledge of all scientific advances of the past few hundred years is lost forever. The great Collapse is not the end of everything, and there are still moments when a new/old form of human life prospers, but it definitely is the end of a certain kind of human civilization, a civilization that was unable to comprehend that its behavior was reckless and self-destructive. Despite its limitations, Pendell's narrative about the future life of the Great Bay thus is a grim reminder of the risks produced by what we have come to call the Anthropocene. As Kate Rigby has noted, the term “implicates us all in a call to responsibility: the future of Earth, understood as a diverse collectivity of more-than-human life and the conditions in which such life either thrives or fails, we are told, now lies in our human, all-too-human hands.”71The Great Bay looks back in time from a fictional future and attests the utter failure of human care and responsibility.

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 Welcome to the Anthropocene
 . “
 Anthropocene
 .” Accessed
 3
 January
 2014
 , http://www.anthropocene.info/en/anthropocene.
 1

 Dale Pendell, The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010).

 2

 Pendell, The Great Bay, 269.

 3

 Ibid., 39.

 4

 Welcome to the Anthropocene, “Anthropocene,” accessed 3 January 2014, http://www.anthropocene.info/en/anthropocene.

 5

 Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999), 6.

 6

 Ibid., 5.

 7

 Beck's examples include Cervantes's Don Quixote, in which “in God's absence, risk unfolds its fateful and terrible, inscrutable ambiguity.” Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), 5.

 8

 Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 4.

 9

 Ursula K. Heise, “Letter,” PMLA 114, no. 5 (1999): 1097.

 10

 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 2.

 11

 Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 207.

 12

 Ibid., 206.

 13

 See Ibid., 76-77.

 14

 Beck, World at Risk, 9.

 15

 Beck, World at Risk, 9-10.

 16

 Welcome to the Anthropocene, “Anthropocene.”

 17

 James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), ix.

 18

 For a detailed analysis of the use of apocalyptic modes of narration in the environmentalist discourse and fiction, see Chapter 5 of Greg Garrard's Ecocriticism (London and New York Routledge, 2012). See also the Introduction of Eric Otto's Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012).

 19

 Hansen, Storms, xi.

 20

 Ibid., 277.

 21

 Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: St Martin's Griffin, 2010).

 22

 Heise, Sense of Planet, 142.

 23

 Ibid., 142.

 24

 Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 251.

 25

 McKibben, Eaarth, xiii.

 26

 Ibid., xv.

 27

 Lovelock famously has conceptualized the Earth as Gaia and therefore as a living super organism that “controls its temperature composition so as to always feel comfortable.” This is also why, in his understanding, Gaia can take a callous form of “revenge.” James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 1-2.

 28

 Peter Ward, The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 1.

 29

 Based on the scientific literature on climate change, Six Degrees is organized into six chapters with each chapter describing the possible ecological (as well as social and political) impacts at a specific average temperature, starting with a rise of one degree and ending at a rise of six degrees Celsius. Lynas acknowledges that he “would be foolish to expect these predictions to come true in any literal sense” but he nevertheless asserts that “climate change is the canvas on which the history of the twenty-first century will be painted.” Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (London: HarperCollins, 2007), xxii.

 30

 Hansen, Storms, 269.

 31

 Ibid., 260.

 32

 Pendell, The Great Bay, 2.

 33

 Ibid., 2.

 34

 Ibid., 1.

 35

 Pendell, The Great Bay, 5-6.

 36

 Ibid., 1.

 37

 Ibid.

 38

 Ibid., 5.

 39

 Ibid., 271.

 40

 Ibid., 41.

 41

 Pendell, The Great Bay, 33.

 42

 Ibid., 9.

 43

 Ibid., 223.

 44

 Ibid., 247.

 45

 Ibid., 129.

 46

 Ibid., 10.

 47

 We learn that in California “the sheer variety and diversity of the cults discouraged lethal rivalries. There were fundamentalist cults, Pentecostal cults—even the Methodists returned to the tents. There were antinomian Ranters, free-love Diggers, and all manner of communes: Eastern, New Age, prophetic, and libertine. There were pagan earth cults, death cults, Gnostic cults, tantric cults.” Pendell, The Great Bay, 6.

 48

 Pendell, The Great Bay, 25-26.

 49

 Ibid., 26, 29.

 50

 Ibid., 28.

 51

 Ibid., 30.

 52

 McKibben, Eaarth, xv.

 53

 Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse, xvii.

 54

 Pendell, The Great Bay, 35.

 55

 Ibid., 127.

 56

 Pendell, The Great Bay, 128.

 57

 Ibid., 215.

 58

 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 4.

 59

 Richard Kerridge, “Ecological Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 372.

 60

 Kerridge, “Ecological Approaches,” 372.

 61

 Eric Otto, Green Speculations, 8.

 62

 Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ix.

 63

 Pendell, The Great Bay, 123-24.

 64

 Ibid., 187.

 65

 Pendell, The Great Bay, 268.

 66

 Emmerich's film compresses its rapid climate change scenario into the course of just a few days. Robinson's trilogy isn't quite as daring in matters of time but the stalling of the Atlantic conveyer belt also in this case brings about an ice age much more quickly than predicted by scientific scenarios. Robinson has referred to this process as “terraforming Earth.” Kim Stanley Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change: Terraforming Earth (Seattle, WA: Amazon Shorts, 2005).

 67

 Pendell notes in the Afterword to his novel, however, that “for the purposes of the story [he has] used accelerated rising of sea levels beyond that of current projections. And yet, such rises are not impossible.” (Pendell, The Great Bay, 217).

 68

 Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns Putra, “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism,” Wiley's Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2, no. 2 March/April (2011): 185-200.

 69

 Heise, Sense of Place, 210.

 70

 Eric Otto, Green Speculations, 13.

 71

 Kate Rigby. “Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness?” Australian Humanities Review 47 (2009): 173-187.

 Copyright: © von Mossner 2014
 2014
 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This license permits use and distribution of the article for non-commercial purposes, provided the original work is cited and is not altered or transformed.
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 Volume 5, Issue 1
 May 1, 2014
 * Previous Issue
 * Next Issue
 * Abstract
 * Envisioning the Risks of the Anthropocene
 * Anticipating the Catastrophes of the Anthropocene: The Great Bay
 * Genre, Storytelling and the Protagonists of the Anthropocene
 * Conclusion
 * Bibliography
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 References

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Alexa Weik von Mossner 
 Alexa Weik von Mossner is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria and currently a Visiting Scholar in the English Department at UCLA. Her writings on various ecocritical issues and the affective dimensions of our engagement with cultural texts have been published in journals including Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and Environmental Communication. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Minds: Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination (U of Texas P, 2014), the editor of Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology and Film (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014), and co-editor of The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (with Sylvia Mayer, Winter, 2014).
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Environmental Humanities (2014) 5 (1): 203–216.
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Abstract
 Covering the time span from 2021 to 16000 N.C., Dale Pendell's speculative novel The Great Bay chronicles the profound climatic, geological and ecological transformations that California undergoes during these fourteen millennia. Human life becomes unimaginably small on such a time scale, and Pendell responds to that representational challenge by compiling a wide variety of texts that zero in on individual humans at different points in the future rather than offering a continuous story or central character. In a way, that place is taken by the geographical region that is the focus of the narrative and gives the book its title. Timothy Morton has argued that because we live in the Anthropocene we can no longer understand history as exclusively human. Pendell's “Chronicle of the Collapse” suggests that the same is true for storytelling, offering readers the story of a nonhuman protagonist that changes slowly over time. The result is a highly fragmented narrative that is interesting for what it tries to achieve but at the same time remarkably unengaging. In its distant and distanced rendering of future ecological change and human anguish, The Great Bay is a grave reminder not only of the incalculable risks of the Anthropocene, but also of the basic tenets of realist storytelling. 
Dale Pendell's The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse (2010) opens with a table of contents that is accompanied by three illustrations showing the physical features of California. 1  The first illustration is dominated by the long flat plain of the San Joaquin Valley. San Francisco Bay to the west of it is also clearly visible, and although the city of San Francisco isn't shown or mentioned (though East Palo Alto is), it is an easily recognizable representation of California. The second map looks much less familiar. This is because the waters of San Francisco Bay now extend far into the San Joaquin Valley, a process that seems to have continued in the third illustration, which shows the Valley nearly filled by seawater and a significantly shrunken shoreline along the Pacific Coast. All the big coastal cities are now gone—in fact there are no longer any cities noted at all. Looking at the table of contents, we realize that this illustration accompanies the overview of the final five chapters of the book, covering the future history of California from 2521 to a final document about the “Caribou Hunters on Pit River” fourteen thousand years “after the Collapse.” 2  That Collapse, we learn in the first chapter, happened in the year 2021, and while it marked the end of the “Oil Culture,” 3  it did not terminate the long-term climatic and geological effects of human activity on planet Earth. The comprehensive transformations of the epoch that some have come to call the Anthropocene will continue for millennia, and Pendell's ambitious science fiction novel attempts nothing less than to imagine not only the geological but also the human dimensions of this future development. As an informal scientific term, the Anthropocene denotes a geological epoch that follows the Holocene, an epoch that is marked by a new scale of human activity and agency. Those who are interested in the social and cultural dimensions of the Anthropocene tend to look not only at its present challenges but also at its potential future dimensions and the consequences for ecosystems and humans alike. They frequently frame their concerns in terms of uncertainty, pointing out that “our collective actions have brought us into uncharted territory” and that “there's a risk of an irreversible cascade of changes leading us into a future that's profoundly different from anything we've faced before.” 4  Like the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, they assume that living in an epoch that is shaped by human activities means being confronted with environmental risks and hazards that are the unintended consequences of those activities. Beck has theorized the societal dimensions of this dilemma in his work on the world risk society, a concept that “draws attention to the limited controllability of the dangers we have created for ourselves.” 5  Beck has argued that it is not only up to philosophy and science to explore the risk societies of the Anthropocene, but that novelists, too, do important work in exploring the “two faces of risk—chance and danger” 6  in their imaginative accounts, 7  and no genre would be better suited for such fictional explorations than science fiction. As a speculative mode of narration, science fiction imagines possible alternative and future worlds that can be either utopian or dystopian in nature. It is “a fictive practice” that, in the words of Tom Moylan, “has the formal potential to re-envision the world in ways that generate pleasurable, probing, and potentially subversive responses in its readers.” 8  Not least because of their investment in the building of alternative worlds, a good number of science fiction writers have concerned themselves with environmental issues. As Ursula Heise has pointed out, “science fiction is one of the genres that have most persistently and most daringly engaged environmental questions and their challenge to our vision of the future.” 9  Pendell's The Great Bay is an interesting example in this regard because of its ambitious temporal scope. Covering the time span from 2021 to 16000 N.C. allows Pendell to chronicle the profound climatic, geological and ecological transformations that California undergoes during these fourteen millennia. Human life becomes almost unimaginably small on such a time scale, and The Great Bay—despite its explicit indexation as a novel on the cover of the book—addresses this problem by presenting readers with a wide variety of texts that offer panoptic views of the future state of the world and briefly zero in on individual human lives rather than a continuous narrative or central character. In a way, that place is taken by the geographical region that is the focus of the narrative, and so it is probably not by coincidence that it is this nonhuman protagonist—the “Great Bay,” as the future extension of the San Francisco Bay into the San Joaquin Valley is called—that gives the book its title. “[W]e are no longer able to think history as exclusively human,” writes Timothy Morton in Hyperobjects (2013), “for the very reason that we live in the Anthropocene.” 10  Pendell's novel suggests that the same is true for storytelling: The protagonists of narratives can no longer be exclusively human in an age of rapid climatic and geological transformations that are the result of human activity and at the same time determine the activity of future humans. In a way the book is therefore a response to Heise's complaint, in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008), that most climate change novels are too “conventional in their narrative strategies,” 11  frequently falling back “on apocalyptic narrative” and simplistic story lines that concentrate on the lives of generic science fiction protagonists. 12  Heise calls for stylistic and formal innovation while also suggesting that the Modernist tradition of narrative collage offers possibilities for capturing the vast dimensions of global ecological transformations. 13  Pendell's The Great Bay certainly attempts such an innovative mode of narration as it tells its story about the year of the Collapse and the fourteen millennia that follow it, and it also relies heavily on methods of collage and fragmentation. The result, however, is a narrative that is interesting for what it tries to achieve but at the same time remarkably unengaging. Favoring geological and climatic timescales over human ones runs the risk of losing readers' empathetic engagement with characters they understand well enough to care about their hopes and goals. In its distant rendering of future ecological change and human anguish, The Great Bay is therefore a grave reminder not only of the incalculable risks of the Anthropocene but also of the basic tenets of realist storytelling. Envisioning the Risks of the Anthropocene
“Risk,” explains Ulrich Beck in his World at Risk (2007), “is not synonymous with catastrophe. Risk means the anticipation of the catastrophe. Risks concern the possibility of future occurrences and developments; they make present a state of the world that does not (yet) exist.” 14  This differentiation between risk and catastrophe is important because it underlines the uncertainty and future-oriented temporality of risk. “Risks are always future events that may occur, that threaten us,” writes Beck, but despite this inherent futurity, they have considerable effects on our present, “because this constant danger shapes our expectations, lodges in our heads and guides our actions, it becomes a political force that transforms the world.” 15  The risks of the Anthropocene are therefore potential future hazards and catastrophes that have not yet materialized and some of which in fact may never materialize. Nevertheless, the awareness of these risks shapes our expectations and, potentially, our actions. As is usually the case with risks, this awareness takes its starting point in the observation of past and present occurrences, combined with a projection of their potential future developments. The Welcome to the Anthropocene website offers one of many descriptions of the status quo:   Probably the best-known aspect of our newfound influence is what we're doing to the climate. Atmospheric carbon dioxide may be at its highest level in 15 million years. But this is just one part of the story; we're changing the planet in countless ways. Nutrients from fertilizer wash off fields and down rivers, creating stretches of sea where nothing grows except vast algal blooms; deforestation means vast quantities of soil are being eroded and swept away. Rich grasslands are turning to desert; ancient ice formations are melting away; species everywhere are vanishing. 16     Climate change here emerges as only one of many ways in which humans interfere with the Earth's biosphere, but it will likely be the interference that has the most lasting effects. Over the past decade countless popular science books have tried to warn their readers about the risks involved in this interference, basing their projections on the findings of peer-reviewed scientific articles and their own research. NASA-climatologist James Hansen, for example, writes in Storms of My Grandchildren (2009) that “continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself—and the timetable is shorter than we thought.” 17  The subtitle of Hansen's book, The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, also clearly invokes a sense of risk in the way Beck has described it, speaking about the coming climate catastrophe as well as about a last chance to save ourselves. There is a sense of urgency and potential doom in these words, and while it may have been the publisher's decision to feature them so prominently on the cover, they adequately represent the apocalyptic tone 18  of Hansen's deliberations. “Planet Earth,” he writes, “is in imminent peril” 19  because of human activity, which is why “it is crucial for all of us ... to get involved.” 20  Bill McKibben's Eaarth (2009) strikes a similar tone, but doesn't tell its readers, as does Hansen's book, that humanity still has a “last chance” to avoid the worst. In McKibben's view, planet Earth is already “a different place” than it was for the past ten thousand years, which is why it “needs a new name: Eaarth.” 21  Rather than offering an apocalyptic perspective, in which, as Heise points out, “utter destruction lies ahead but can be averted,” 22  McKibben presents a risk scenario in which “crises are already underway all around and while their consequences can be mitigated, a future without their impact has become impossible to envision.” 23  The environment on his planet Eaarth is what Frederic Buell has described as “a horror people hopelessly dwell within, a horror that goes on and on all around them.” 24  But even as he insists that “global warming is ... no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It is our reality,” 25  McKibben still tries to alert his readers to the even greater dangers in the future, so that they can adapt to the changing climate and build “communities and economies that can withstand what's coming.” 26  James Lovelock sounds even more alarmed in The Revenge of Gaia (2007), where he speaks about his concern about “the Earth's declining health,” urging his readers to do something about anthropogenic climate change because “the living Earth's response to what we do will depend not merely on the extent of our land use and pollutions but also on its current state of health.” 27   These are just three examples of how the risks of the Anthropocene—particularly climate risk—have been used in popular science texts to engage readers emotionally in a narrative of environmental decline and scare them into taking action to prevent these risks from turning into actual hazards and catastrophes. It is perhaps unsurprising that in order to convey the severity of the risks, many of these texts describe potential future catastrophes as if they were no longer risks but already a reality. Peter Ward's The Flooded Earth (2010), for example, opens with a description of Miami in the year 2120 CE when carbon dioxide is at 800 ppm and the city an island “because the level of the world's ocean's had risen 10 feet.” 28  Mark Lynas's Six Degrees (2007) takes considerable liberty in its detailed description of a world that is one to six degrees hotter than in the present. 29  The most daring attempt to make the potential future catastrophes imaginable for readers, however, can be found in Hansen's book, which includes a science fiction story set in the year 2525 in which a humanoid alien species unsuccessfully tries to resettle its people to a planet Earth that now has surface temperatures of one hundred degrees Celsius and is devoid of life. While this scenario “may read like far-fetched science fiction,” writes Hansen, “its central hypothesis is a tragic certainty—continued unfettered burning of all fossil fuels will cause the climate system to pass tipping points, such that we hand our children and grandchildren a dynamic situation that is out of control.” 30  In order to illustrate the book's scientific hypothesis, then, Hansen turns to apocalyptic fiction in the hope that the shared imagination of future devastation will make his discourse of anthropogenic risk more convincing. It remains to be seen whether the use of apocalyptical fictional elements in popular scientific discourse on the risks of the Anthropocene indeed makes such discourse more accessible and effective. In the case of Hansen's book the science fiction story is so far-fetched and the protagonists so bloodless that it seems unlikely that they will engage readers' imaginations and emotions in the intended way. Hansen is ready to admit that “science fiction isn't [his] area of expertise,” 31  and so we might forgive him that, as a climatologist, he cannot create fictional characters or storylines that excite our minds. The question remains, however, what modes of narration can adequately imagine future worlds that continue to be shaped by the actions of humans who died decades, centuries, millennia ago. Pendell's The Great Bay constitutes one attempt to deal with the vast spatial and temporal dimensions of the issue within the realm of speculative fiction. Climate change figures prominently in the book, and it is what determines the often miserable lives of its future humans. But it is not the only anthropogenic transformation that Pendell chronicles, nor is it the sole reason for the initial collapse of human civilization. The book mentions multiple causes for the future catastrophes it envisions, and all of them have been counted among the potential risks of the Anthropocene. Anticipating the Catastrophes of the Anthropocene: The Great Bay 
 The Great Bay offers two reasons for the Collapse it envisions for 2021 and the subsequent demise of mankind. The initial blow is a global pandemic, “a new kind of chicken pox, or smallpox” 32  with absolutely devastating effects. However, we quickly learn that the seemingly natural disaster is actually anthropogenic in nature: “There was a rumor that the disease was an army bug, a genetically engineered biological weapon that had back-fired. ... The disease certainly spread with an engineered efficiency—two hundred million died in the United States in the first month.” 33  The reason why the pandemic can spread so quickly and eradicate the larger part of the American population within only a few weeks is serious infrastructural problems that are related to the changing climate. We learn that “2021 had been the hottest summer on record, even topping 2020,” with the result that “[t]he power grid had been stretched to the breaking point for weeks. The ‘strategic oil reserves' had been depleted the year before.” 34  It is therefore anthropogenic climate change and resource depletion that, in The Great Bay, induce the disastrous failure of US infrastructure, and that in turn leaves the country unable to cope with the human-made virus that kills off its population. By October of the same year, the population of the United States is reduced to fifty million; one year later to fifteen million, and “by the spring of 2024 [it] was eight million and still declining.” 35   The Panoptic overviews that stand at the beginning of each of the twelve chapters offer “objective” information about the changing climate and its impact on California, the United States, and the rest of the world. They relate climatic, geological, and human processes alike, and they draw connections between previous human activities, resulting climatic and ecological transformations, and the latter's effects on the humans of the future. The authorial narrator who speaks to us in these Panoptic introductions employ a decidedly detached and laconic tone in narrating the often horrific human suffering resulting from the unintended consequences of earlier human activities. “For a while,” we are informed, “they buried the bodies in mass graves with bulldozers.” 36  Later on, when electricity fails and corpses are simply placed outside in the streets, the sight becomes even more horrific: “Dogs ate at the corpses and some people shot at the dogs; others, in frustration, shot at the helicopters.” 37  And things only get worse as times goes by: “2022 and 2023 were the Hunger Years. People can endure near starvation for long periods of time while awaiting rescue or deliverance. But there were no deliverers, no rescuers—there were no relief expeditions. People starved, quietly, and died quietly. And, like any animal who starves to death, with the dignity of acceptance.” 38  Without the comforts and affordances of modern civilization, and in the absence of divine interference, humans die like the animals that they are. The narrator relates all this as simple facts, with the same equanimity that also characterizes his recounting of the infrastructural and societal breakdown and of the many failed attempts to save and rebuild, to scavenge and survive in a world that has been stretched beyond its breaking point. One could easily argue that The Great Bay is a post-apocalyptic narrative. After all, it takes the near-complete collapse of human civilization as its starting point and then shows individual humans who try to survive in its aftermath, trying to make do with the limited resources and machinery available. However, the novel's unusual time frame and the nature of the disaster complicate this classification. “[I]t is unlikely that an apocalypse will save us,” writes Pendell in the Afterword to his novel, “Much more likely is a gradual degradation of the quality of life, and, for many species, of their habitat and their chances for survival.” 39  These species, which clearly include the human species, are therefore forced to continually “dwell” in crisis, to use Frederick Buell's term again. Accordingly, the global catastrophe in Pendell's narrative is not so much an apocalypse as it is a fateful combination of several unintended consequences of scientific, technological, and societal risk taking and decision making. Pendell's Collapse is the moment in which risks turn into hazards and, ultimately, into catastrophe. It was inevitable, we are told, “even without the Pandemic,” 40  because of the short-sightedness of human behavior and because humans took risks they shouldn't have. Similarly important is the fact that the global disaster doesn't really provide a clean slate for a fresh start, as is often the case in post-apocalyptic narratives. The nature of climate change prevents this, since the human CO2 emissions that are already in the atmosphere keep forcing the climate even though there are very few additional emissions after the Collapse. These changes happen very slowly, over the course of almost sixteen thousand years, and they affect the lives of individual humans in very different ways during this long time span. By 2031,   Carbon dioxide levels approached those of the early Eocene. Industrial outputs of CO2 had stopped, but a long chain-reaction was in progress, and CO2 in the atmosphere is long-lived. Permafrost thawing was releasing large amounts of methane. The manmade aerosols and other particulate matter that had been masking the heating from greenhouse gases were gone.... In the West, summer temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit were more and more common, the heat spells lasting for a month a time ... New records would have been set everywhere, if anyone had been keeping records. 41     Rather than a post-apocalyptic text, The Great Bay is therefore a risk narrative in which crises continue to be underway all around and their impacts cannot ever be fully or at all mitigated. In order to show the human dimensions of these impacts, the representation of large-scale anthropogenic changes to the physical properties of the planet is combined with stories of individual humans who try to survive in an increasingly strange environment. These stories differ considerably in both form and tone, supposedly because they are taken from very different sources and excavated from different archives, among them the “Archives of the Scholar's Guild, Berkeley,” 42  the “Library of the Order of Antiquities” which collects materials “750 years after the Collapse,” 43  and the “Institute of Medieval History,” 44  which operates 1,250 years later. They include short stories, newspaper articles, interviews, historical records, encyclopedic entries, legends, and an 80-page travel journal by Solomon the Monk about “The Great Trek from the Great Bay of California to the Bicentennial Rendezvous in Boulder” 45  in the year 2222, complete with detailed maps of future landscapes. These texts narrate a wide range of human responses to their changing environment, many of which are futile or tragic. Right after the collapse, a girl named Amanda is sent away from her home in Los Angeles by her infected mother so that she can find her father and be safe. No vehicle is moving in the city and “[t]here were bodies on the sidewalk on every block and swarms of buzzing flies.” 46  Amanda is afraid and hungry, but she keeps going in an environment that is dangerous and disgusting with corpses rotting everywhere. She meets Inez, who is also looking for her father, and together the two girls try to make their way north, meeting dozens of strangers along the way, some of whom help them while others try to rape or kill them. In the end, they seek the protection of a gang of bikers and live among them. The need for protection and community looms large in many of the stories, as does the need for spiritual and religious consolation. 47  Jason Kilpatrick, a former hedge fund manager in Silicon Valley who is ninety years old in 2081 when he is being interviewed, states that “[a] lot of people are bitter about the Collapse,” but insists that it was actually “a good thing” because “we were wrecking the earth. Now the ocean is coming up because the ice is melting. We all knew, but none of us wanted to change. So the change came to us.” 48  The reason why Kilpatrick thinks it is a good thing that the old system collapsed is that it led to a new sense of community: “I like the way people help each other. That's what people are supposed to do ... I don't think anybody survived who wasn't in some kind of group.” 49  Pendell describes many of such groups and their internal and external dynamics, but stays away from naively celebrating the beauty of these newly-formed communities. Kilpatrick himself acknowledges the enormously high death rate within the collective he used to be part of, 50  and his interview is followed by the second part of Amanda's story, in which the Roadkill Rangers, as the bikers with whom she now lives are called, are decimated first by the pox and then by cholera, while others are shot in a fight with “a gang of police.” 51  In the end she and Inez both are pregnant, in Amanda's case without any certainty about the identity of the father. It no longer seems to matter. What counts in this group and in others like it is nothing but sheer survival. Although The Great Bay again and again affirms the human need for sustaining and sustainable communities, it puts a large question mark behind the ability of such communities to withstand what's coming. 52   Nothing built by humans, the novel suggests, can really withstand what's coming, simply because human lives and their products are no match for the forceful processes that have been set in motion during the early centuries of the Anthropocene. If, as Frederick Buell has observed, “environmental crisis has become part of people's normality today,” 53  then this is all the more true for the future humans in Pendell's novel, who live and die in a world in which “everything was too bad, too near to starvation for anyone to be able to organize any large-scale actions.” 54  While the immediate generations following the Collapse retain an acute awareness of the folly and greed of the civilization whose ruins they find all around them, this changes over time. Two hundred years later, we learn, “[t]he word ‘America’ was rarely heard. The ruins and everything about it were called ‘Precle,’ and fantastic stories were told about the people who had vanished.” 55  There is a steep decline in literacy that some find alarming, “[b]ut then, what was there to read, except ‘Precle.’” 56  And so the new generations retain only a vague sense of the elaborate culture of the Oil People and the global disaster it brought about. Over time, their sustenance practices are becoming simpler and simpler and the scope and scale of human agency “resemble those of the Bronze Age” by 2521, remaining at that level for the next few thousand years. 57  The risks now faced by the population of what used to be California include the pointed arrows of their envious neighbors as well as the many natural hazards of the Great Bay area. What people have completely forgotten at this point is that these “natural” hazards are in fact as anthropogenic in nature as the arrows of their neighbors. In the course of a few millennia, the ecological effects of the Anthropocene thus have become naturalized, but for the contemporary reader, the dramatic devolution of humanity as a result of dramatic environmental changes will in all likelihood seem strange and unsettling. Darko Suvin has famously argued that the process of “cognitive estrangement” is what enables the readers of science fiction to see their actual world in a new light. 58  What is made strange in The Great Bay is the natural and built environments of California and the rest of the world. The narrative's many protagonists must live within these strange new geographies, dwelling in the midst of prolonged environmental crisis because they have no other choice. Genre, Storytelling and the Protagonists of the Anthropocene
“Literature,” writes Richard Kerridge, “can provide an all-out apocalyptic vision of catastrophe, to shock and scare us deeply,” 59  and science fiction is one of the genres that have often attempted to do this, not least through the mechanism of cognitive estrangement. The Great Bay combines its “all-out apocalyptic vision” of the initial Collapse with the representation of human dwelling in crises in its aftermath. However, despite the many risks faced by individual humans and their often tragic fates, the text makes it difficult to care very much for any of them. Pendell's laconic tone and cursory treatment of his protagonists creates a distance between readers and the human suffering that is presented to them, not only in the Panoptic sections, but also in the short vignettes that introduce us to individual future humans. Kerridge argues that “A crucial factor for ecocritics is the extent to which the apocalyptic plot is combined with elements of literary realism, giving us characters and events that seem consistent with real possibility (‘yes, this is how that person would react’).” 60  Such realism is mostly absent from Pendell's portrayals of future humans, not least because the text provides us with few details and very limited insight into these characters' thoughts, goals and feelings. The reader never gets to know any of them well enough to have much of an idea of how they would react in a given situation. In a way, this narrative strategy mirrors the continuously waning influence of humans over their own destinies and that of the environments around them. They are of very little consequence not only to their immediate and distant surroundings but also to the reader. However, since, as Eric Otto has pointed out, effective cognitive estrangement requires elements of both strangeness and familiarity, 61  a certain intimacy with the characters is needed to fully understand and care about their fates in an increasingly strange environment. Narrative empathy, explains Suzanne Keen, is “a core component of emotional response to fiction,” 62  and the creation of this complex affective transaction between writer, text and reader one of the central tenets of realist fiction. Without such empathetic ties there is little interest on the part of readers in the goals a character seeks to achieve and only very limited affective engagement in that character's story. Reducing human protagonists to brief and mostly unremarkable and inconsequential presences on a dramatically changing planet might mirror the actual future we are facing, but it also runs the danger of disappointing the expectations and needs of many readers, who savor fictional texts not least because of the emotional experience they offer them. Since the lives of individual humans are reduced to unrelated snapshots scattered throughout the text, it is ultimately the story of the Great Bay itself – and by extension the planet as a whole – that provides some kind of continuity and potentially sustains the interest of the reader. Pendell's Earth is no avenging Gaia but rather a planet that reacts with great sensitivity to physical and chemical forcing. The changes it undergoes as a result of human activity are quite dramatic:   By 2250, sea level had risen eighty feet. If Antarctica continued to melt, sea levels could rise another two hundred feet. Typhoons moved to high latitudes in the Atlantic, mixing the waters. The Gulf Stream gradually found a stable course, and heat began moving again to the British Isles and Northern Europe, ending their short little ice age, but not the global flooding of the ocean. 63       The earth had entered a Pliocene climate in half a millennium. Rainfall was heavy in the far northern and southern latitudes, but the sub-tropics were deserts. Vegetation zones shifted too quickly for many plants and trees or the creatures who depended on them to follow. About two thirds of the world's plant and animal species died out. 64     It is an ever stranger world that Pendell presents to us, as his nonhuman protagonist changes and develops as a result of anthropogenic forcing of the climate system. Eventually, the glimpses into human life get shorter and shorter, dwindling to flashes as the planet heads inescapably into the next Ice Age. However, not even this “long winter” will erase the lasting effects of the Anthropocene: “When spring at last reawakened and the ice again retreated, the earth would still be a poorer place. There would be no surface deposits of ores or minerals, no underground reserves of energy, and far less resilience in the biosphere.” 65  Fourteen thousand years, Pendell reminds us, is nothing on a geological timescale and the dubious accomplishment of twenty- and twenty-first century humans is that they change their planet in such a lasting way that the transformations outlast ice ages. Conclusion
 The Great Bay represents an ambitious attempt to tell the story of anthropogenic climate change on a time scale that is large enough to accommodate its relatively slow nature. Unlike Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow (2004) or even Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital Trilogy, the novel does not compress time in order to make climatic processes more easily accessible and dramatic for readers. 66  Instead of offering extremely unrealistic time frames that allow for narratives that center on individual human protagonists, Pendell adapts the temporality of his novel to the comparably slow pace of climate change and is willing to live with the consequences this decision has for his narration of human characters and stories. 67  As Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra point out in their 2011 survey of climate change literature, “climate change asks for authorial innovation, demanding plotlines and characterizations that participate in the global, networked, and controversial nature of climate change.” 68  This resonates with Heise's earlier call for stylistic innovation and the “search for the stories and images of a new kind of eco-cosmopolitan environmentalism that might be able effectively to engage with steadily increasing patterns of global connectivity, including those created by broadening risk scenarios.” 69  Pendell's novel attempts to show the big picture and the patterns of global connectivity, both on a temporal and on a spatial level, but the downside of his mode of narration is that the human readers it is intended for lack protagonists they can identify with. Whether a better writer would have been able to provide them with more engaging snapshots of future human lives remains open to debate. However, the story Pendell tells about the future of planet Earth is nevertheless fascinating and disturbing. Rather than fostering empathetic ties to individual human protagonists the text succeeds in instilling in its readers a sense of awe and wonder in the face of these great transformations. As Otto has pointed out, “many environmental writers share the conviction that experiencing the awe-inspiring beyond, whether real or imagined in fiction, results in a more ethical perception of and behavior toward nonhuman nature,” 70  and Pendell's Afterword demonstrates his dissatisfaction with current attitudes and practices. Equally remarkable are his imaginings when it comes to human adaptation to the strange new world he has created. There is little left of nineteenth and twentieth century beliefs in the human domination of nature by the means of science and technology. Human communities are shown to be fragile and extremely vulnerable to changes in their environment, and the knowledge of all scientific advances of the past few hundred years is lost forever. The great Collapse is not the end of everything, and there are still moments when a new/old form of human life prospers, but it definitely is the end of a certain kind of human civilization, a civilization that was unable to comprehend that its behavior was reckless and self-destructive. Despite its limitations, Pendell's narrative about the future life of the Great Bay thus is a grim reminder of the risks produced by what we have come to call the Anthropocene. As Kate Rigby has noted, the term “implicates us all in a call to responsibility: the future of Earth, understood as a diverse collectivity of more-than-human life and the conditions in which such life either thrives or fails, we are told, now lies in our human, all-too-human hands.” 71  The Great Bay looks back in time from a fictional future and attests the utter failure of human care and responsibility. Bibliography
   and . “ Introduction: Dystopia and Histories .” In  Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination , edited by and ,  1 - 12 .  New York and London :  Routledge ,  2003 .   .  World at Risk .  Cambridge, UK :  Polity Press ,  2007 .   .  World Risk Society .  Cambridge, UK :  Polity Press ,  1999 .   The Day After Tomorrow . DVD. Directed by . 20th Century Fox,  2004 .   .  From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century .  New York and London :  Routledge ,  2004 .   .  Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity .  London :  Bloomsbury ,  2009 .    “ Letter .”  PMLA 114 , no.  5  ( 1999 ):  1096 - 97 .     Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global .  New York :  Oxford University Press ,  2008 .   .  Empathy and the Novel .  New York :  Oxford University Press ,  2007 .   . “ Ecocritical Approaches to Literary From and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality .” In  The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism , edited by ,  361 - 375 .  Oxford and New York :  Oxford University Press ,  2014 .   .  The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity .  New York :  Basic Books ,  2007 .   .  Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet .  London :  HarperCollins ,  2007 .   .  Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet .  New York :  St Martin's Griffin ,  2010 .   .  Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World .  Minneapolis :  University of Minnesota Press ,  2013 .   .  Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia .  Boulder, CO :  Westview Press ,  2000 .   .  Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism .  Columbus :  Ohio State University Press ,  2012 .   .  The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse .  Berkeley, CA :  North Atlantic Books ,  2010 .   . “ Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness? ”  Australian Humanities Review 47  ( 2009 ):  173 - 187 .   .  Forty Signs of Rain .  New York :  Spectra ,  2004 .   .  Fifty Degrees Below .  New York :  Spectra ,  2005 .   .  Sixty Days and Counting .  New York :  Spectra ,  2007 .   .  Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre .  New Haven :  Yale University Press ,  1979 .    and . “ Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism .”  Wiley's Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2 , no.  2 March/April  ( 2011 ):  185 - 200 .     The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps .  New York :  Basic Books ,  2010 .      Dale Pendell, The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010).     Pendell, The Great Bay, 269.     Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999), 6.     Beck's examples include Cervantes's Don Quixote, in which “in God's absence, risk unfolds its fateful and terrible, inscrutable ambiguity.” Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), 5.     Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 4.     Ursula K. Heise, “Letter,” PMLA 114, no. 5 (1999): 1097.     Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 2.     Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 207.     Beck, World at Risk, 9.     Beck, World at Risk, 9-10.      Welcome to the Anthropocene, “Anthropocene.”     James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), ix.     For a detailed analysis of the use of apocalyptic modes of narration in the environmentalist discourse and fiction, see Chapter 5 of Greg Garrard's Ecocriticism (London and New York Routledge, 2012). See also the Introduction of Eric Otto's Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012).     Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: St Martin's Griffin, 2010).     Heise, Sense of Planet, 142.     Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 251.     McKibben, Eaarth, xiii.     Lovelock famously has conceptualized the Earth as Gaia and therefore as a living super organism that “controls its temperature composition so as to always feel comfortable.” This is also why, in his understanding, Gaia can take a callous form of “revenge.” James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 1-2.     Peter Ward, The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 1.     Based on the scientific literature on climate change, Six Degrees is organized into six chapters with each chapter describing the possible ecological (as well as social and political) impacts at a specific average temperature, starting with a rise of one degree and ending at a rise of six degrees Celsius. Lynas acknowledges that he “would be foolish to expect these predictions to come true in any literal sense” but he nevertheless asserts that “climate change is the canvas on which the history of the twenty-first century will be painted.” Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (London: HarperCollins, 2007), xxii.     Pendell, The Great Bay, 2.     Pendell, The Great Bay, 5-6.     Pendell, The Great Bay, 33.     We learn that in California “the sheer variety and diversity of the cults discouraged lethal rivalries. There were fundamentalist cults, Pentecostal cults—even the Methodists returned to the tents. There were antinomian Ranters, free-love Diggers, and all manner of communes: Eastern, New Age, prophetic, and libertine. There were pagan earth cults, death cults, Gnostic cults, tantric cults.” Pendell, The Great Bay, 6.     Pendell, The Great Bay, 25-26.     Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse, xvii.     Pendell, The Great Bay, 35.     Pendell, The Great Bay, 128.     Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 4.     Richard Kerridge, “Ecological Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 372.     Kerridge, “Ecological Approaches,” 372.     Eric Otto, Green Speculations, 8.     Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ix.     Pendell, The Great Bay, 123-24.     Pendell, The Great Bay, 268.     Emmerich's film compresses its rapid climate change scenario into the course of just a few days. Robinson's trilogy isn't quite as daring in matters of time but the stalling of the Atlantic conveyer belt also in this case brings about an ice age much more quickly than predicted by scientific scenarios. Robinson has referred to this process as “terraforming Earth.” Kim Stanley Robinson, Imagining Abrupt Climate Change: Terraforming Earth (Seattle, WA: Amazon Shorts, 2005).     Pendell notes in the Afterword to his novel, however, that “for the purposes of the story [he has] used accelerated rising of sea levels beyond that of current projections. And yet, such rises are not impossible.” (Pendell, The Great Bay, 217).     Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns Putra, “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism,” Wiley's Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2, no. 2 March/April (2011): 185-200.     Heise, Sense of Place, 210.     Eric Otto, Green Speculations, 13.     Kate Rigby. “Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness?” Australian Humanities Review 47 (2009): 173-187. 
Copyright: © von Mossner 2014 2014  This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This license permits use and distribution of the article for non-commercial purposes, provided the original work is cited and is not altered or transformed. 
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   and . “ Introduction: Dystopia and Histories .” In  Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination , edited by and ,  1 - 12 .  New York and London :  Routledge ,  2003 .   .  World at Risk .  Cambridge, UK :  Polity Press ,  2007 .   .  World Risk Society .  Cambridge, UK :  Polity Press ,  1999 .   The Day After Tomorrow . DVD. Directed by . 20th Century Fox,  2004 .   .  From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century .  New York and London :  Routledge ,  2004 .   .  Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity .  London :  Bloomsbury ,  2009 .    “ Letter .”  PMLA 114 , no.  5  ( 1999 ):  1096 - 97 .     Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global .  New York :  Oxford University Press ,  2008 .   .  Empathy and the Novel .  New York :  Oxford University Press ,  2007 .   . “ Ecocritical Approaches to Literary From and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality .” In  The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism , edited by ,  361 - 375 .  Oxford and New York :  Oxford University Press ,  2014 .   .  The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity .  New York :  Basic Books ,  2007 .   .  Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet .  London :  HarperCollins ,  2007 .   .  Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet .  New York :  St Martin's Griffin ,  2010 .   .  Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World .  Minneapolis :  University of Minnesota Press ,  2013 .   .  Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia .  Boulder, CO :  Westview Press ,  2000 .   .  Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism .  Columbus :  Ohio State University Press ,  2012 .   .  The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse .  Berkeley, CA :  North Atlantic Books ,  2010 .   . “ Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness? ”  Australian Humanities Review 47  ( 2009 ):  173 - 187 .   .  Forty Signs of Rain .  New York :  Spectra ,  2004 .   .  Fifty Degrees Below .  New York :  Spectra ,  2005 .   .  Sixty Days and Counting .  New York :  Spectra ,  2007 .   .  Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre .  New Haven :  Yale University Press ,  1979 .    and . “ Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism .”  Wiley's Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2 , no.  2 March/April  ( 2011 ):  185 - 200 .     The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps .  New York :  Basic Books ,  2010 .  
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2015-01-01
Author
<div><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/17438949-melissa-dog-wolf-lover-martin"></a></section><section><p>3,456 reviews9,600 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1427296621">January 4, 2021</a></section><div><p><b>UPDATE: $2.99 Kindle US 1/4/21</b><p>Holy guacamole! This book rocked! </p><p>I had a feeling I would like this book but hells bells, I had no idea how much I would love it. </p><p>You have Earth that is pretty much going to pot, then goes to pot because of some stuff. Then people wake up a million years later on their ships. Well, okay not a million but still. </p><p>So there is space! </p><p></p><p>There is a new planet that continued to make itself from the start of terra forming many years ago &lt; -- I don't think I spelled that right but we all know what it means. They were working on making the planet livable. </p><p>AND . . . </p><p>we have freaking . . . </p><p>SPIDERS! </p><p></p><p>and I liked Portia, she was the main spider and they are like no other spiders. Dudes and dudettes, this book is like no other I have read. YOU might have, but I have not. </p><p>Loved it, looks nice on my shelf with one of his other books. I'm a happy camper. </p><p>Mel ♥</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/17438949?shelf=own">own</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/58160628-emily-books-with-emily-fox"></a></section><section><p>530 reviews58.4k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2356097177">January 4, 2020</a></section><div><p>I adore the first contact with aliens trope so when I heard this was essentially the remanent of humanity vs intelligent spiders I jumped on it. Very unique and the ending took me pleasantly by surprise.<p>I never thought I would end up rooting for spiders... but I did! </p><p>A must read!</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4213258-bradley"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>6 books3,960 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1411536881">October 27, 2015</a></section><div><p>There's something wildly giddy welling up within me, and I blame it entirely on this book.<p>There have been a couple of brilliant SF titles to come out this year and I would swear belong on the Hugo list, and this is yet one more. Kim Stanley Robinson's <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/23197269.Aurora">Aurora</a> was one, as was Scott Hawkins's <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/23363928.The_Library_at_Mount_Char">The Library at Mount Char</a>, but if I had to break down the individual merits of each, I might wind up saying that this one deserves it the most. For pure SF, it hits the heights of ideas, memorable characters, exploration, and message, although the message is definitely not one that is apparent until the end.</p><p>It has all the hallmarks of a good classic SF tale, and I was reminded every step of the way of John Brunner's <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/872586.The_Crucible_of_Time">The Crucible of Time</a>, with the bringing up of an alien society from its primitive roots to space exploration, the wild quest of humanity trying to survive it's own stupidity in over ten thousand years of desperate Ark travel, and throw into the mix a great mad cyborg/AI god/scientist who's belief system gets sorely challenged. </p><p>If all that isn't enough to perk you up, then how about a society of biopunk spiders learning to tame themselves and their world with the propelling help of a nanovirus designed to uplift an entirely different species, but lacking those poor monkeys, had to make due with some jumping spiders from old Earth?</p><p>Oh yeah. Now we're talking. From page one we get a precious nod to David Brin for his wonderful Uplift series, but right as we begin to suspect that it's a rip-off, everything goes to hell. I call that an auspicious beginning.</p><p>And then we get slices of alien life complete with great self-contained stories, with nothing worthless to the grand over-tale being spun, including the war and eventual domestication of deadly intelligent army ants, the fight for the poor male spider's rights (who don't appreciate being eaten after mating), and the eventual discovery that the original scientist that had seeded the world with the nanovirus, who still lived as a cyborg, was not, in fact, a god.</p><p>And if that isn't enough, let's get to know the human side of the equation. They've had a rough time climbing back out of a dark age only to discover that the Earth is a complete shit hole and there's nothing left to be saved. They rose on the backs of the dead society that had brought humanity to this pass and went out to search for a new home. Unfortunately, everything has gone to shit except this one little paradise that's defended by a mad cyborg god who thinks that humans are shit. (And she's right.) She'll protect her precious project from anything that dares disturb it.</p><p>Great conflict ensues. </p><p>My god this was a great book. I had a bit of a learning curve in the first few dozen pages getting over the somewhat sparse writing, but there's a purpose to it. A hell of a lot has to happen to build such an enormous tale without stretching it out into a dozen equivalent and impoverished books. In this one novel, we get everything. It's brilliant.</p><p>I'll revisit this review at a later time and see if it still captures my imagination as much as the other Hugo Possibles, but my mind wants to put all my bets on this one. The flaws in Aurora, despite the brilliant setup, message, and end, are just enough to push it down a rung for me. Library at Mount Char was mostly dark fantasy with a damn huge nod at turning it into a real SF title, and I still think it's awesome and mythic, but if I had to choose between something that's obviously SF to the core and beyond and a great book that has more in common with American Gods and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, (both of which won Hugos in their years despite being fantasies), then I'd choose Children of Time.</p><p>Unfortunately, I'm going to have to sit on the fence. Having to choose between two novels that are very different in scope, writing, and characterizations is a hell of a thing. Both are fantastic at what they do. I cried during both. I'll just have to revisit my memories later to be certain.</p><p>Oh, there is one more thing I need to mention.</p><p>I hate the title. </p><p>It does absolutely NOTHING to enumerate how fucking awesome this epic SF is. Fans of any classic SF need to read this gem. It has a hell of a lot more flow to it, and just as much idea exploration as anything written by Alastair Reynolds. Go get it. Now.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4213258?shelf=biopunk">biopunk</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4213258?shelf=fanboy-goes-squee">fanboy-goes-squee</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4213258?shelf=sci-fi">sci-fi</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3978225-carol"></a></section><section><p>1,530 reviews7,851 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1462132950">February 7, 2017</a></section><div><p><br />Sympathetic spiders? Inconceivable!<p><i>–I do not think that word means what you think it means–</i></p><p>Nope, in this case, it pretty much does. It's not that I have a spider-phobia--I like to think we have a truce regarding squishing and biting--it's that something about their structure and movement speaks to a primeval instinct to <i>run away. </i> <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/25499718.Children_of_Time">Children of Time</a> popped up in friend reviews, but I'll be honest--it wasn't until I realized there were giant spiders and colony ships that I really became intrigued. I am usually interested in the moving island of space colonization, and the inclusion of what seemed to be genuine aliens piqued my curiosity. Could it be done? Could an author really give an alien feel and yet remain sympathetic to creatures that inspire such fear?</p><p>Yes and yes.</p><p>Aside from that general set-up, I went into <i>Children</i> blind. Tchaikovsky structures the premise and then alternates the narrative between the two species. Once settled into the story-telling rhythm, he adds another wrinkle. I appreciate the way he told the story, easing the reader in and then building on the concepts. The human narrative tends to be more dialogue oriented, the spider-narrative more internal. It makes for an interesting pace change that might have dragged had the entire book been one style or the other.<br /><b><br />"She feels fear, a building anxiety that makes her stamp her feet and twitch her palps. Her people are more suited to offence than defence, but they have been unable to retain the initiative in this conflict. She will have to improvise. There is no plan for what comes next. She may die, and her eyes look into that abyss and feed her with a terror of extinction, of un-being, that is perhaps the legacy of all life."<br /></b><br />Characterization proved rather intriguing, particularly at first. I thought the feel of primitive spider-thinking rather believable, and appreciated the structuring of a very different world-view. I ended up believing the premise enough to enjoy the story and not feel hampered by arguing the science in my head. Also interestingly--particularly in a genre known for its sexism--the tendency of some female spiders to eat the males after mating is turned toward matriarchic ends. I was also intrigued by the spiders' interaction with other beings on the world, as well as how they are characterized.<br /><b><br />"She knows that individual ants themselves cannot be treated with, communicated with or even threatened. Her comprehension is coarse, of a necessity, but approximates to the truth. Each ant does not think. It has a complex set of responses based on a wide range of stimuli, many of which are themselves chemical messages produced by other ants in response to still more eventualities."<br /></b><br />Writing is solid. It is complex enough to convey cognitive concepts of world-view as well as philosophical underpinnings of what intelligence and interconnectivity is. I didn't overtly realize it as I read, but I think there were parallel discussions of what humanity means and aims for, a particularly worthwhile topic for our time.<br /><b><br />"The more he learned of them, the more he saw them not as spacefaring godlike exemplars, as his culture had originally cast them, but as monsters: clumsy, bickering, short-sighted monsters... In trying to be the ancients, they had sealed their own fate--neither to reach those heights, nor any others, doomed instead to a history of mediocrity and envy."<br /></b><br />I do think Tchaikovsky loses his way somewhat near the last third of the book. Still, it ended up being a book full of unexpected twists and turns. Most worked. A few did not, and I remain ambivalent about the ending. However, there were also moments when I thought, "this reminds me of Ursula LeGuin and one of her world-building, sci-fi masterpieces." A good story, intriguing world-building and a layered exploration of humanity and civilization. Overall, I'd definitely recommend it to someone who is in the mood for classic-feeling science fiction with modern sensibilities.</p><p>Four and a half webs, rounding up because it deserves recognition for Big Ideas, not because it's screaming to be included in my personal library.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3978225?shelf=animals-and-people">animals-and-people</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3978225?shelf=classic">classic</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3978225?shelf=et-phone-home">et-phone-home</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/20498957-claudia"></a></section><section><p>954 reviews532 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1538157063">February 16, 2018</a></section><div><p>Hard science fiction = a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on <u>scientific accuracy or technical detail or both</u>. Just to be sure what are we talking about.<p>The detailed info about Portia, the jumping spider and Scytodes, the spitting spider are as accurate as they can be, no doubt here. In fact, there is an entire chapter at the beginning with characterizations of both species, which is, after all, fascinating, but non-fiction. So, nothing new. (BTW, all this info about the spiders is on Wikipedia).</p><p>The story line: on another planet, Dr. Kern initiated an experiment on a new terraformed planet. </p><p>On the other hand, the two main human factions on Earth, those in favor and against nanotechnology and the like, manage the performance to almost destroy the Earth. There are survivors but all the knowledge and technology of their ancestors is lost (how much time did pass between the experiment above and the war we don’t know, but appears not too long. However, they are called ancestors and from the old empire or something…).</p><p>But - there is a big BUT: they had built a few arks (space ships) in which they gathered the survivors and the long trip in finding another Earth begins. How did they build those arks if they had no tech, no knowledge and no resources left?! Ok, moving on. The key crew wakes after 1800 years when they arrive near the planet in question and discover the ship in which Dr. Kern is still guarding her planet, half mad. And the ones from the ark are amazed by the technology (they being in a space ship capable of interstellar travels, remember?).</p><p>Should I go on? No. <br />I forced myself to read up to 52% and then I went straight to the last chapter and guess what: exactly what I have imagined.<br />Where is the hard science fiction? All the info thrown into the story is disjointed. The various ideas contradict one another. And I can give a lot of other nonsense ideas but I already bored myself…</p><p>And the writing is so flat; just words thrown to fill the pages; endless explanations; absurd development; moron characters; etc.<br />I’ll stop here. I’m rarely so virulent about a story, given the fact that I have the utmost respect for writers. It’s not minor deal to be able to create a world of words. But I had such a big disappointment with this one, given all the five stars rating it has. Too much hype behind it with no real ground.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/20498957?shelf=sci-fi">sci-fi</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/20498957?shelf=utterly-disappointing">utterly-disappointing</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/59458347-petrik"></a></section><section><p>672 reviews42.6k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2164925869">October 31, 2017</a></section><div><p><b>Smart and imaginative, highly recommended for everyone who loves Sci-Fi and not recommended for anyone with arachnophobia.</b><p>Children of Time is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s first Sci-Fi and also my first experience with his work. This is a highly praised book, it won Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel in 2016 and most likely, will be 5 stars read for anyone who has never read anything like it. Plus, for even more praise, the film rights to the book has also been sold to Lionsgate. </p><p>It’s a great story. The plot revolved around the race for survival between races on attaining a single terraformed planet; The races being the last surviving humanity that fled their dying Earth, and the sentient spiders accidentally evolved by a mad scientist; these beings were born and live on the planet.</p><p><b>Picture: Children of Time (Polish cover)</b></p><p></p><p>This standalone encompassed a lot of relatable topics to our society such as gender discrimination, greed, and on the bright side, empathy. It’s unique and epic, with tale spanning between generations to generations. Unfortunately for me, I have read something very similar to this in a manga called Terra Formars and because of that, my experience on this was a bit ruined. The premise of this book with that particular manga is very similar, with the differences being the planet is Mars and the sentient creatures are cockroaches. It’s not fair for me to compare the topic unrelated form of speculative fiction but I want you to first look at this gif so I can explain my reasoning. (Warning: gory scene ahead)</p><p></p><p>That, ladies and gentleman is a sentient evolved cockroach killing humans. This somehow affected me into thinking that this standalone will be action-packed because of the similar premise; it’s not. Children of Time plot direction is almost the total opposite. I expected more interaction between the two species but they happened only twice throughout the entire book, one very briefly too. I also felt the entire middle section from the alien’s side felt a bit boring; it was a bit too long and felt like learning biology and history from a textbook because there’s almost no dialogue on it. Finally, I don’t think it was necessary to divide the prose for the two races POV’s, the human side was written in past tense while the alien side was written in present tense; this made their stories felt disconnected to me.</p><p>I may sound a bit too negative here. This is because up until the 80% section of the book, I totally felt like this is a 3 stars book at best. However, I was wrong. The author has saved everything for the last 20% of the book and it was brilliant. No loose ends, the conclusion of this book was truly incredible and made all my struggle through the middle section of the book worth it.</p><p>Knowing that this is the author’s first Sci-Fi, I foresee a very bright future ahead of him. I highly recommend this to every Sci-Fi fans but not to anyone with arachnophobia; because.. sentient spiders. </p><p>For anyone who loved this book and wants something more epic, I recommend reading <i>Remembrance of Earth’s Past</i> by Cixin Liu. Trust me, the last book of that trilogy made everything this book looks like an ant regarding its scope.</p><p><i>You can find <b><a href="http://booknest.eu/reviews/pat/905-adrian-tchaikovsky">this</a></b> and the rest of my Adult Epic/High Fantasy &amp; Sci-Fi reviews at <b><a href="http://booknest.eu/review/patrick">BookNest</a></b></i></p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/10282461-james-tivendale"></a></section><section><p>310 reviews1,325 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2757037197">May 8, 2019</a></section><div><p>I received a review copy of Children of Time in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Adrian Tchaikovsky and Pan Macmillan for the opportunity. <p>Children of Time is 600-pages of extraordinary, evolution-based science fiction that features quality storytelling and worldbuilding that is rarely seen in this generation. This narrative is set over 1000's of years. We first see Doctor Kern and her scientific team of 19 as they wish to experiment with monkeys and a nanovirus on what some individuals are considering could be the new Earth. After betrayal and confrontation on their spaceship, which may be reflecting hostilities back on Earth events don't progress in the way that they envisaged.</p><p>The action mainly follows two very different perspectives. The first is the views of a human classicist named Holsten who has travelled for two millennia to the above-mentioned planet after the end of Earth. He is onboard the spaceship Gilgamesh with the remnants of the human race and spends most of his years frozen and therefore not aging. The crew members are only awakened when their duties permit it necessary so our first contact with the human ensemble is when they are approaching the said planet. The crew features the needed components to create a new future including commanders, engineers, soldiers, intellects, etc... It transpires that the planet they are looking to land on is already occupied and it isn't by the highly evolved monkeys as was planned. This brings me to the second perspective which is written from the point of view of spiders - a species that are also receptive to the advancements in evolution that the nanovirus presents. This complication was not accounted for and may be problematic. We follow the spiders as they evolve over 100's of generations and the way it is written is truly unique. The main spiders we follow are Portia, Bianca, and Fabian. They don't live to be 1000's of years old, instead, we follow the original characters' relatives through different generations as the spiders evolve. They may share the same name but often have very different personalities. There is also a third perspective that is from a human/machine/satellite/messenger/God viewpoint and she is very protective of 'her planet' and does not wish for the humans to land. It's a superbly original tale in the way it is presented. </p><p>Often, science fiction stories that I read are overly complex with tech-lingo and it sometimes feels like the author is trying to prove how smart he is. In the first few pages of Children of Time, I thought it would be the same again. However, after the first chapter or two, it became crystal clear that this is a novel where the story, characters, and development are the top priority. It is beautifully written, and has been extremely well researched and is expertly paced. Children of Time is packed full of highs and lows. Who could have known I'd care about the death of a revolutionary hero giant-spider? The spiders' society throughout various stages of evolution is intensely detailed and complex, still the way the species progress feels organic and natural although before this narrative I'd have never considered how a spider community would behave. Turns out they're pretty damn sexist! </p><p>For quite a lengthy book I was reading this at a blistering pace. Chapters tend to be between 10-20 pages so it was always tempting to just read one more which soon became another 100 pages. Especially the last 100 pages with I devoured in one breathless sitting. It features an insane space battle and I could never have imagined reading something of the sort when I first picked this up. The ending is intense, unpredictable, but highly satisfying. When I finished reading this story the first thought I had upon reflection was that there is no way I could be an author because I could never write anything this good so what would be the point? It's one of the best science fiction books I've ever read and I've already started Children of Ruin. A+ Recommended.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/10282461?shelf=sci-fi">sci-fi</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/27962805-choko"></a></section><section><p>1,194 reviews2,583 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2304801466">January 28, 2023</a></section><div><p>Re-read and What can I say? I loved everything about it! I can't believe I had given it only 4.65 stars the first time around. It is a full <b> 5* and maybe some plusses:) </b> The intricacies of the world building, both in the human and spider communities, was brilliant! The attention to detail, the thought that went in the communication, the way the one group evolved and the other devolved, the differences and the commonalities, the little gestures and the big, overwhelming occasions, just so good!!! <b>*** 4.65 ***</b><p><b>
 <i>"... ““You can never know. That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.” ...</i>
</b></p><p>I wanted to read this book only because it was recommended to me by a friend. I never expected to love it so much, despite never having read anything by the author. Boy am I glad I read it! </p><p>I was raised on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Every week my family would receive in the mail the newest Sci-Fi publication and we would all fight over who is going to read it first, although we all knew my dad would be first, then my mom, if she was interested, and then would be my turn. My favorite of those were the ones with deep and logical connection to the Science side of the fiction, not so much the ones with the space battles and soap-operas in space kind of stories. I loved the real plausible what-ifs that came with books taking the known of Physics and Biology and building them up into strange and irregular ways, but still creating worlds and creatures whose existence and creation we could follow in a somewhat logical way, thinking that yeah, given just the right conditions, this could actually happen and what could we, us humans, do about it. </p><p>Well, <i>"Children of Time "</i> is just this kind of book! The author has done his research into the biology of Arachnids and insects, putting them in a newly terraformed world with virgin ecosystem created to support life deriving from our Earth, mix in a Nano-Virus as a variable which acts as an accelerator for neuro-development and intelligence, and a catalyst for critically important markers of useful growth and useless excess of abilities, thus crafting a positive growth of individuals in a communal culture with always expending intellect and talents. Final result - <b>Giant Intelligent Spiders!!!!</b></p><p><b>
 <i>"... “The act of courtship is consummated as a public ritual, where the hopeful males – in their moment of prominence – perform in front of a peer group, or even the whole city, before the female chooses her partner and accepts his package of sperm. She may then kill and eat him, which is thought to be a great honour for the victim, although even Portia suspects that the males do not quite see it that way.” ...</i>
</b></p><p>Yep, not a planet for those who have an uncomfortable relationship with our eight-legged web-weaving friends. Also, not exactly what the scientist who created the Nano-Virus intended to begin with. Our human, very intelligent, and very self-centered Dr. Avrana Kern, created the virus in order to push monkeys to their most extreme intellectual growth through generations. Instead, when the virus was unleashed on the planet, the monkeys and most of the rest of the humans were sabotaged by an opponent to the project and all blew up. Dr. Avrana Kern is the only one left, in a small capsule in space, going in and out of freeze-stasis, waiting for her "creations" to contact her from the planet. During this time, life on Earth self-destructs, thousands of years later humans reemerge, and then once again only a small part of them remain, looking for another planet to settle on, frozen on an Arc ship called Gilgamesh. The spider planet looks like their only chance and the books goes through their battles to get to it and try to take it over. </p><p><b>
 <i>"... “She has improved the lives of her species in a dozen separate ways, for she has a mind that can see answers to problems others did not even realize were holding them back.” ...</i>
</b></p><p>The book timeline measures in thousands of years and it is fascinating to follow the growth of some and the degradation and regression of others. This was done from the points of view of several pivotal characters, of which Portia and all her progeny through the centuries was my favorite. I loved everything about her/them. I loved how important the Classicist Human Holsten and the head engineer of the ship Lain were to the sustaining of the Human population on the Gilgamesh. A person who can sit back and think about communication and how it shapes our relationships with others, be it species, tribes or Peoples. And how vital the knowledge and ability to take care and advance our infrastructure is, when those skills are being overlooked at times of famine as well as at times when our martial or more lofty flights of fancy seem to rule our daily lives. We are reminded of how easy it would be for us to fall into the one or the other category, letting our roots and foundations rot, while our heads are in the clouds...</p><p><b>
 <i>"... “If they were of any quality or caliber, then they would ascend by their own virtues. Not if there was no structure that they could possibly climb. Not if all the structure that exists was designed to disenfranchise them. Portia,” ...</i>
</b></p><p>This book is not just about evolution. It is about understanding our nature and trying to learn from our mistakes, not just following the innate instinct for destruction, cannibalism, and disseminating everything which is different from us, to the point of mortally wounding ourselves. In our superior Humans First and Only ideology, we slowly but surely erode our environment and eventually the environment will strike back, one way or another. Let's hope we don't realize this too late...</p><p><b>
 <i>"... “Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them – not even its own reflection. ” ...</i>
</b></p><p>Now I wish you all Happy Reading and may you always find what you Need in the pages of a good Book!!!</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/27962805?shelf=sci-fi-fantasy">sci-fi-fantasy</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/21690081-dana-ilie"></a></section><section><p>404 reviews347 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2483967945">August 11, 2018</a></section><div><p>Children of Time’ is one of those books one devours obsessively and then mourns once it’s finished. Yes, ‘Children of Time’ is that good.<p>The author acknowledges our implicit arachnophobia and then very cleverly turns it on its head; indeed, after a while you kind of forget that these characters are spiders at all, even when they get stuck in to very spiderish behaviour. Their cities, for example, are great forests festooned with web complexes and, latterly, organic machinery and vehicles. The many versions of the spider society are also resolutely female and this novel is one of the few I can think of that presents a detailed, believable and sympathetic matriarchy. That it is in not in any way a utopia, without seeming unrecognisable or awful either, is another credit to the unapologetic intelligence of this book.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21690081?shelf=bookclub">bookclub</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/50424456-mayim-de-vries"></a></section><section><p>577 reviews822 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2161582657">March 28, 2020</a></section><div><p><b>“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”</b><br /><i>Professor Stephen Hawking</i><p><b>“What have you done with my monkeys?”</b><br /><i>Doctor Avrana Kern</i></p><p>I do not sci-fi that much but when I do, I do it only with books that make me cheer for spiders.</p><p>Adrian Tchaikovsky is famous for infusing his books with themes and motives related to his interests. He studied zoology and psychology. He is also interested in natural history, with particular emphasis on the world of insects. These are the roots of the “Children of Time”, a thrilling story about the fall of one civilisation and the birth of another. Together with human civilisation standing on the verge of destruction, we embark upon a fantastic interstellar travel. A tantalising cosmic odyssey, which takes place over the span of millennia, filled with extraordinary adventures, heroes, and dramatic twists.</p><p><b>1. THE IDEA</b></p><p><i>“We are the civilisation of transport, waiting to happen somewhere else.”</i></p><p>Human civilisation has found itself on the verge of annihilation. The Earth is no longer habitable and so humanity’s last quest is a search of a planet suitable for settlement. Hundreds of thousands of years pass. A spaceship with the last surviving people finds a place similar to Earth. It turns out that the living conditions on the planet are a result of its terraforming many thousands of years ago. It is but a remnant of a wider experiment aimed at creating an intelligent species able to develop at an accelerated pace. The intention was to create a new, better man. However, not everything went as planned, and the “exalted” ones are not monkeys (or other vertebrates, indeed), but an unassuming species known as <i>portia labiata</i>. Yup, <b>here come the sentient spiders</b>. (</p><u>Don’t make my mistake and check the photos. They are absolutely awful!</u>)<p><b>2. THE DESIGN</b></p><p><i>“Why should we be made thus, to improve and improve, unless it is to aspire.”</i></p><p>The narration gives us <b>two perspectives</b>. The first is the one presents the actions of the inhabitants of the last ship-ark with the human cargo, Gilgamesh , trying to find a new planet to settle on. The second one shows the evolution of the spiders, accelerated by a special nanovirus. Consequently, we have one chapter about the human journey through the universe, and another one about the life of spiders on the green planet. Reading the spider civilisation chapters is like watching a National Geographic or a BBC Earth documentary. And <b>I would never expect that the adventures of insects can be so enticing!</b></p><p>To the contrary, <b>human protagonists are a considerable weakness of the book</b>. Holsten, a scholar <i>“at the wrong end of his career”</i> and a historian “at the wrong end of history”, Guyen, a power-obsessed commander, control-hungry and with an utter god-complex, Lain, the engineer turned leader by necessity (come the hour, come the woman), Karst, your regular security tough-guy, or rigid, narrowly-minded scientists - they are all unremarkable, lacking perspicuity, and difficult to bond with. </p><p><b>Pitched against humans, the Portias, Biancas and Fabians, even the Violas of the spider-folk are clear winners.</b> Throughout the thousands of years, we trace the evolving story (and the civilisation) through the (many!) eyes of numerous spiders, for simplicity called by the same names. <b>Just as much as I was quite indifferent to the human figures (I treated them as tools meant to give the spiders time to evolve and at the same time, to push the action forward), I found myself positively cheering for the insects!</b></p><p><b>3. COSMIC WONDERS AWAIT</b></p><p><i>“Because she needed to reach out and know there was something she could reach out to.”</i></p><p>The novel was showered with prizes, and rightly so. The rich style of the Mr Tchaikovsky is impressive. “Children of Time” seduces us with an unusual ingenuity of worldbuilding, an intriguing plot, convincing descriptions and an extraordinary ambiance. </p><p>Tchaikovsky's tale is a story about the demise of one civilisation and the birth of another. On this very simple, not to say simplistic, premise, the Author creates a brilliant cosmic epos, which contains many key elements that are the driving force of more than one classic science-fiction novel. We have the destruction of humanity, genetic experiments, interstellar journey, fighting for survival with alien forms of life, artificial intelligence, playing the god. Especially gender war in this book is delightful. </p><p>It is a novel written with panache, and yet carefully attending to minor details, enriched by the colourful and multifaceted picture of struggles undertaken in the defence and preservation of life, and trials related to overcoming consecutive stages of biological and cultural evolution. It is also a critical vision of the distant inheritors of the Earth, irreversibly poisoning the environment, and thus approaching the point of eliminating their own species. Despite the threat of total extermination, people still cannot get rid of deadly social mechanisms and habits, nurturing the inspiration to remain masters of the whole universe against all odds.</p><p><b>4. THE ORPHANS OF TIME</b></p><p> <i>“You claim to be human. Go be human elsewhere.”</i></p><p>It is evident that for Mr Tchaikovsky, <b>humans have lost the game</b>. In the novel, we can also see <b>a civilisation devolving, understanding less than before, losing memory and wisdom, too busy with survival to pass on the knowledge</b>. In the book, all the coveted achievements of civilisational development like genetic engineering or transcending the boundaries of artificial intelligence, resonate only in echoes of former splendour and mimicked copies. The old ambitions of conquest, large-scale attempts at creating terraformed planets, leave only negligible traces behind. <b>Considering how the humans are depicted in this novel, I think that “The Orphans of Time” would be a more apt title.</b> Additionally, <b>humanity is crippled by its own irredeemable nature</b>. We are poisoned by the propensity to violence which we, as a species, seem unable to transcend. Mr Tchaikovsky presents us simply as <i>“monsters: clumsy, bickering, short-sighted monsters.”</i></p><p>This very pessimist Hobessian view, determinist to the extreme, whereby humans are not able to transcend certain obstacles is contrasted with the nascent spider civilisation free from such inhibitions. The green world with giant arthropods, with its nascent civilisation where biology and custom are at constant war, where tradition is set against the progress, the known past against the unknown future, and where the intellect bent to break the shackles of yesterday triumphs, reads like a veritable paradise. </p><p>This is something that the Author denies the humans. Where spiders are thriving on empathy and cooperation and altruistic sacrifice, humans cheat, abuse and destroy. But <b>the worst thing is that this catastrophic tone and constant trajectory of humankind towards destruction is not substantiated by anything</b>. Why would humanity be unable to retrace their developmental steps when the spiders basically zipped through evolution and progress? </p><p><b>The last 20% killed the book for me.</b> Particularly during the final stages of arachnid development, I was forced to resort to ‘suspension of disbelief’ which is a technique I usually apply only for fairytales. <b>It is not that I didn’t like the ending, it is more that I didn’t get the answers as to why things worked out the way they did.</b> Explanations for the evolutional check-mate that would anchor the ending in any kind of logic. The finale (and the epilogue) seemed terribly arbitrary and bent on proving a very controversial hypothesis. <b>This was the decisive factor regarding my rating.</b></p><p>Indubitably, <b>“Children of Time” offers a reading adventure, which I savoured with appreciation and applause</b>. It provided me with excellent multi-level entertainment, and at the same time raised many important issues as a poignant warning, foretelling what the humanity may face if we continue to push towards the mutual destruction of each other and the whole environment. <b>However, Mr Tchaikovsky's humanity is one inherently unable to produce Mother Teresas, Mahatmas Ghandi, and Irenas Sendler. And this is not us.</b></p><p>The story continues in: </p><p>2. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3226701424">Children of Ruin</a> ★★★☆☆</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8655084-phrynne"></a></section><section><p>3,214 reviews2,047 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1631403417">September 21, 2022</a></section><div><p>What a beautiful book. Six hundred totally absorbing pages. One of the best Science Fiction books I have ever read. Not being particularly coherent here but let me say again it is very, very good.<p>It shows mankind at its worst - I would not have cared if the last human being in the universe had died at the end. I hate spiders but was converted to the sentient kind, and I was cheering them on as they grew smarter and smarter. </p><p>I could not imagine how it was going to end but <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/1445909.Adrian_Tchaikovsky">Adrian Tchaikovsky</a> is some kind of genius, and the last few pages were just brilliant. Naming the ship Voyager was a touch of magic.</p><p>Recommend reading for anyone not just sci fi enthusiasts. There is something in this book for everyone.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/30863291-philip"></a></section><section><p>499 reviews672 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1738777454">October 24, 2017</a></section><div><p>5ish stars. <p>An unqualified masterpiece. This is some of the smartest, most exciting, and most imaginative fiction I've read in a long time. It's grand, expansive, and both character-driven and plot-driven.</p><p>Uplifted spiders. So cool and creative. The evolution of the Portias and their clusters is endlessly compelling. The journey that the humans take over the millennia, if not as thrilling, is dramatic in its buildup to the inevitable convergence of the two groups.</p><p>It chronicles the rise and fall of the human population and explores its recurring, natural gravitation towards malignant ambition and self-destruction. While that aspect is disheartening, there’s also hope, because the spiders, being non-human, might be able to circumvent those tragedies... It’s about nature, pride, communication, fear, change, and determination at all costs. Highly recommended.</p><p><a href="https://mrphilipslibrary.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/children-of-time-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/">Posted in Mr. Philip's Library</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/30863291?shelf=2015-releases">2015-releases</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/30863291?shelf=author-man">author-man</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/30863291?shelf=dying-earth">dying-earth</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3672777-nataliya"></a></section><section><p>741 reviews11.8k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1859128586">April 21, 2020</a></section><div><p><blockquote>
 <i>“If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net – what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?”</i>
</blockquote>This is an excellent SF story, a modern classic in my opinion. For those of you who are not fans of the idea of SF, this is also a wonderful literary story chock-full of philosophy and allegory.<blockquote>How good is it, you ask? Well, <b>good enough for this arachnophobe to read it twice now, and good enough to feel unexpected kinship to the giant sentient spiders</b> - to see them as persons and not just as alien creepy crawlies. Maybe I got hit with that nanovirus too, who knows?<p> </p></blockquote>In a distant future humans are terraforming planets. Avrana Kern, a scientist, is about to seed a newly terraformed planet with monkeys and add to the atmosphere a nanovirus engineered to accelerate their development and allow it to happen on the scale of millennia rather than millions of years, and allow the monkeys to develop into <i>“a race of uplifted sentient aides and servants [who] would welcome their makers.”</i><blockquote>
 <i> “This is the future. This is where mankind takes its next great step. This is where we become gods.”</i>
</blockquote>Except that, predictably, human squabbles on a galactic scale plunge the Earth and its colonies into Dark Ages from which they take millennia to recover, and eventually the survivors leave the dying poisoned planet in ark ships, headed for the hope of terraformed planets, zeroing on the green and beautiful Kern’s world. But things went wrong there, too. Kern’s monkeys have never made it to the planet. The nanovirus, lacking the species it was made for, manages nevertheless to find a species it could infect and change and accelerate the evolution of - the spiders. Whose civilization is robust and so different from ours. And the AI imprint of Avrana Kern still circles their world in her shuttle, the Messenger as the spiders perceive it, <b>unaware that the monkey experiment failure has become the spider triumph. </b><blockquote>
 <i>“In the end, he supposed, it didn't matter. Genocide was genocide. He thought of the Old Empire, which had been so civilized that it had in the end poisoned its own homeworld. And here we are, about to start ripping pieces of the ecosystem out of this new one.” </i>
</blockquote>The story is told in the alternating chapters set among humans on the spaceship, the last of the dying civilization, and the spiders that are building their civilization one generation of the time - each time a new generation of Portias (as in <i>Portia labiata</i> spiders), Biancas and Fabians spinning the webs of knowledge and society,<b> making their own literal world wide web</b>. Collision is imminent.<blockquote>
<i>“For a species that thinks naturally in terms of interconnected networks and systems, the idea of a war of conquest and extermination – rather than a campaign of conversion, subversion and co-option – does not come easily.”</i><p></p></blockquote>Spiders are creepy, no doubt. They might as well really be aliens, they are so fundamentally different from us in all the respects. <b>And we are hardwired to distrust and fear those that are different, that are *other*, that are not us - that are “them”. </b>We seem to be hell-bent on the destruction even of those who *are* kin, let alone those who are as different as can be. That’s just how our survival instincts work, I guess.<blockquote>
 <i> “Sometimes all it takes, to crack a problem, is a new perspective.”</i>
</blockquote>The alternating chapters of human and spider narratives are done very well. Human parts of the story are done in a more ‘usual’ tone of SF adventure, relying on dialogue for exposition. Spider parts have a completely different voice and feel - more of the omniscient narration, less dialogue (as the spiders’ speech is nonvocal), and more of a chronicle feel. There is never a doubt that these are alien beings,<b> not too anthropomorphic but just ‘person-ized’ enough to be relatable</b>. The world building is masterful, immersive and vivid. And writing itself is excellent.<p>The exploration of what it means to be human and what it means to be a person is also done very well. It’s easy and tempting in the books dealing with these questions to slide into philosophical navel-gazing and proselytizing, and skid the story to a halt to deal with the big ideas. Tchaikovsky avoids those pitfalls. Philosophical bits are subtly woven into the story and allow you to come to conclusions yourself without the author beating you with them anvil-like over the head. And I love it.</p><blockquote>
 <i>“Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”</i>
</blockquote>So good. <p><b>5 stars.</b></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3672777?shelf=2017-reads">2017-reads</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3672777?shelf=2020-reads">2020-reads</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4379514-mogsy-mmogc"></a></section><section><p>2,026 reviews2,606 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1424454365">June 12, 2017</a></section><div><p>5 of 5 stars at The BiblioSanctum <a href="https://bibliosanctum.com/2017/06/12/audiobook-review-children-of-time-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/">https://bibliosanctum.com/2017/06/12/...</a><p>Children of Time was my first novel by this author, and wow, what a way to start my initiation into the Adrian Tchaikovsky fan club! I have never read anything quite like this book before, and I have to say the praise it’s gotten has been well deserved. I just loved this.</p><p>First of all we have this incredible story, which has everything in place for a space opera of the grandest proportions. Long ago, when Earth was on its last legs and humanity feared it could go no further, scientists were sent out beyond the solar system to find and terraform new planets to ensure the future of our species. One of them, the brilliant but megalomaniacal Dr. Avrana Kern was successful in locating such a world, but just as she was about to implement a nanotech virus to accelerate the development process, sabotage occurred. Kern’s monkeys that were intended for biological uplift were not deployed on the planet because they were all killed in the attack on her ship. Kern herself was forced to be transformed, reduced to an AI mind and a body preserved in stasis. However, her nanovirus, the one intended to speed up evolution in the monkeys, did in fact make it onto the planet, imbedding itself into—wait for it—a species of spiders.</p><p>Years and years go by. Earth is no more. Desperate humans take to the stars in generation ships like the Gilgamesh to find these terraformed planets their ancestors supposedly prepared for them, but instead of a welcoming home, they find Kern’s World and the repercussions of her genetically engineered virus. For generations, the planet’s inhabitants have been evolving as well, the uplifted spiders developing their own cultures, civilizations and knowledge. It is their world now, and they don’t take kindly to the assumptions of these strange looking humans who think they can just take over and live on their planet.</p><p>As a huge life sciences geek, I loved the ideas behind books like Children of Time or what some other science fiction fans call “biopunk”. The chapters aboard the Gilgamesh were compelling with their human drama and fight for survival, but in my opinion, it was the sections about the spiders which were the most fascinating. They were also what made this novel stand out from all the sci-fi I’ve read so far this year. Tchaikovsky details generations of evolution in the spiders’ biology as well as their culture, following compelling characters like the many iterations of Portia as her species develops language, religion, warfare, and other facets of civilization which they pass down to their descendants via a form of genetic memory. As such, they eventually become something akin to spiders but not as we understand them, having been altered by the virus but also by factors specific to their unique physiology. The author deserves extra bonus points too because it takes a real talent to write genuine, relatable and sympathetic non-human characters, and even more when they are effectively overgrown, freaky arachnids. Don’t think you can ever bring yourself to root for a giant spider? There’s a really good chance this book will change your mind.</p><p>I was also impressed by the way Tchaikovsky managed to tell this monumental saga—which takes place over thousands of years—without once being sidetracked or losing the story’s main thread. When it dawned on me what the author was trying to do, I didn’t think it was going to work, but oh, it does. In alternating sections, he explores the changes happening on Kern’s World as well as the various side plots unfolding on the Gilgamesh. Most of humanity’s last remnants are frozen in time, traveling in the cargo bay of the ark ship, but we do get to meet and stay with several of the key players like Holsten Mason and Isa Lain who survive the centuries by going in and out of stasis. Culture is evolving in its own way too on the Gilgamesh, and every time Holsten wakes he is hit with another shock of how perspectives and attitudes on the ship have changed since the last time he emerged. It just goes to show, adaptation isn’t something that’s happening only on the surface of Kern’s World, with both the spider and human storylines mirroring and complementing each other in the coolest way possible.</p><p>Basically, you have got to read this book. It’s gotten such high ratings for a reason. Children of Time is one of the smartest, most remarkable and innovative science fiction novels I’ve read in years and now I can’t wait to read more by Adrian Tchaikovsky.</p><p>Audiobook Comments: I loved Mel Hudson’s narration. Having a female reader really highlighted the spider chapters, and Hudson’s voice and accent exuded the perfect amount of acuity and class to bring characters like Portia to life. I don’t think I would have enjoyed myself as much if I had read the novel in print, so needless to say, I highly recommend this audiobook.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4379514?shelf=aliens">aliens</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4379514?shelf=audiobook">audiobook</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4379514?shelf=review-copy">review-copy</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/13396599-niki-hawkes---the-obsessive-bookseller"></a></section><section><p>723 reviews1,196 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4226314372">September 27, 2022</a></section><div><p><b>Check out my Booktube channel at: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWpzzPo-rrt4_KJHHP8i6Qw">The Obsessive Bookseller</a></b><p>Add Children of Time to my very short list of all-time favorites!!</p><p>So many things about it worked for me. First of all, I’m especially drawn to Scifi stories with a strong biological component (Julie Czerneda has been a long-time favorite in that regard), and not only was this one bursting with alien flora and fauna awesomeness, but it also had a strong anthropological angle. I read so many Scifi where the most creative they get with world-building is what type of tech is used on this group of ships vs that one, so it’s wonderful to get the same level of expansive creation I usually have to defer to fantasy novels to experience.</p><p>This is my first Tchaikovsky, and it definitely won’t be my last. He made so many brilliant writing decisions in this book that I was left in awe. He had really creative solutions to some story logistics that would’ve left me stumped. Like how to tell the story over multiple generations while maintaining your reader’s connection to the characters. Sometimes it’s as simple as giving them the same name – something I never would’ve thought of. He handled the time jumps for the humans with similar grace, establishing a trust with me very early on in his ability to deliver a satisfying story.</p><p>What’s more, I found out mid-read that the author majored in both Zoology and Psychology – both of which spark my interest so much I can hardly stand it. And both backgrounds clearly enhanced the story. I love it when authors take a background of deep knowledge and apply that to their writing.</p><p>The book had the perfect balance of world-building, character connection, pacing, momentum, and then he topped it all off with a brilliant finish. I’m sure I’ll be talking about this one for years to come.</p><p>Recommendations: one of my all-time favorites! If you like Scifi with a good dose of anthropological components and creature creations, this is an excellent pick. It’s imaginative, exciting, and incredibly well-composed – I can’t recommend it highly enough!</p><p><i>Thank you to my <b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/user?u=70056710&amp;fan_landing=true">Patrons</a></b>: Filipe, Dave, Frank, Sonja, Staci, Kat, and Katrin! &lt;3</i></p><p>Via The Obsessive Bookseller at <a href="https://www.nikihawkes.com/">www.NikiHawkes.com</a></p><p>Other books you might like:<br /><a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/35657891.Planetside__Planetside___1_">
 
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</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13396599?shelf=favorites">favorites</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13396599?shelf=my-ya-library-catalogue">my-ya-library-catalogue</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8575414-emma"></a></section><section><p>2,430 reviews827 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2031792040">July 8, 2017</a></section><div><p>I have really struggled with this book. Really the only science fiction I tend to like is character driven so I was up against it from the start! <br />I've always thought that insect and deep sea creatures have much potential as horror/ monster elements in a story. The look of them close up is just as awful as anything fictitious- it's only that, in the case of insects, they're small and in the case of deep- sea creatures, far down and away, that saves us. So I was interested to read about Portia and the development of society, culture, technology, the ideas of god or 'the messenger'. Fascinating to read about colonialism and the subsumption of other cultures and species and its parallels with human evolution.<br />But I got bored. And the human side of the story, where I would have predicted my deeper interest, had little pace for me. I can see this is a great book and deserves its high ratings, just not from me! I'm very interested to read this author's fantasy series still as I believe this may be more to my liking!</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8575414?shelf=science-fiction">science-fiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/21413858-k-j-charles"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>58 books8,081 followers</p></section></div><section><section><p><b>Read</b></p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3342748021">August 23, 2021</a></section><div><p>I have been avoiding this because spiders. More fool me. This is an incredible (spider-filled) book, with brilliant imaginative sweep, terrible inexorable logic, spiders, incredibly high stakes, a fascinating look at alien minds, a depressing look at human ones, and a highly satisfying bit of play with gender roles and sexism. And spiders. So many spiders. Aargh, spider. <p>In fact possibly what's most impressive about this book is that by the end, despite SPIDERS, I was actually rooting for the eight-eyed horror machines. Absolutely fantastic read, exactly what SF should be. I went straight out and bought the sequel even though that has *also* got spiders in it. And I'm reading it now and after that we won't mention the S word again, okay. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21413858?shelf=sf">sf</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/110612670-zuza-zaksiazkowane"></a></section><section><p>344 reviews30.9k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3214390719">August 30, 2020</a></section><div><p>2.5? 2.75? Idk<br />To była książka totalnie odbiegająca od moich oczekiwań, spodziewałam się czegoś innego a dostałam... dużo religijności, dużo gadania o niczym i wartką akcję na ostatnich 40 stronach. Nie jest zła, jest bardzo pomysłowa i niestandardowa, ale czy dobrze się bawiłam? Przez środkowe 300 stron - nie. Ale nie odradzam, to było dość ciekawe doswiadczenie 🤷🏼‍♀️</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/110612670?shelf=in-my-home-library">in-my-home-library</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/110612670?shelf=science-fiction">science-fiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/25398561-andr-oliveira"></a></section><section><p>169 reviews56 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2687142381">January 11, 2020</a></section><div><p>I wasn't ready for this book. WOW<p>I mean, this was awesome! It took me one month into the year to finally rate my first 5* book of 2019.</p><p>I don't want to say a lot about this book, but:</p><p>Earth is dying. Humans leave Earth. Humans find a world terraformed prepared for life, WITH SPIDERS.<br />Don't go into this book thinking that this is an action book with a lot of "Humans killing Spiders". It is so much more than that.</p><p>The scope of this story is unbelievably huge and it addresses some unexpected themes.</p><p>The only downside of this story is that it took me some time to connect with the characters. But I think it makes sense in this story and I won't say anything else about it.</p><p>If you love science-fiction, please, give this book a try.</p><p>Some kind of sequel is coming out in May, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42603230-children-of-ruin">Children of Ruin</a>, and I couldn't be more excited!!</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/25398561?shelf=sci-fi">sci-fi</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/25037254-robyn"></a></section><section><p>827 reviews132 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1419481584">October 23, 2015</a></section><div><p>Five stars because this puppy had me rooting for arachnids. Five stars for carefully crafted characters, humans and otherwise alike. Five stars because of the incredible, millennia- spanning plot. Five stars because of that ENDING! Not what I expected and so satisfying. </p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/25037254?shelf=2015">2015</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/25894509-jilly"></a></section><section><p>1,838 reviews6,160 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3414506749">June 28, 2020</a></section><div><p>Once we get the whole space-travel thing going, what is the best idea that we should prioritize, as a species? Well, it turns out that future-us thinks that we need to set-up a new planet with super-intelligent monkeys ruling it. Because, apparently, future-us never saw a movie. Or are such dumbasses that we took the worst idea possible and decided to run with that.<p><br />See? Now, this is a good idea. There's a big difference.</p><p>But, luckily someone realized that maybe they didn't want to doom us all to be monkey-slaves someday and did the most reasonable thing to stop this from happening: they killed all the monkeys. Now, I'm not a big monkey-lover in general. They are a little too gross for my liking. Give me a baby seal, or a squirrel, or bunny over a stinking monkey any day, but couldn't there possibly have been a better way to stop this thing than burning all the monkeys up? It wasn't their idea. Why should they suffer for some idiot scientist's terrible idea? I mean, come on, Earthlings? You used to be cool. (Okay, not now, but I'm assuming somewhere along the line.)</p><p>So, the monkeys are dead but the super-intelligence virus was already released upon the planet, and.... well, I guess you all know what has to happen.... that's right, super-intelligent spiders. Oh, and they are giant too for some reason, cuz why the hell not? When it's FUBAR, might as well go balls to walls.</p><p><br />Oh yeah, this is great. Nothing can possibly go wrong here.</p><p>Shockingly, we eventually destroy our own planet and have to send out spaceships with the last of humanity to find one of those habitable planets we discovered way back when. But, you know, nobody actually knows about the spider-thing. yeah. That's not gonna bite us in the ass.</p><p><br />Or maybe it will. Literally.</p><p>This book is a long epic tale of the evolution of the spider-planet and the last hope for the survival of mankind. Thousands of years of history is written in alternating chapters of each species. It is surprisingly fascinating. Like, I can't believe I liked this thing, but it was amazing. The spiders start out as neanderachnids and end up a sophisticated race of reasoning beings. But, we watch them go through things like the beginnings of self-awareness, to building a religion, to building cities and civilizations. You forget that they are disgusting spiders for a while. Then, they do something spidery or talk about their spider bodies and..</p><p></p><p>*shudder*</p><p>So, I would say if you are really arachnophobic, you won't want to read it. Since there are no pictures, though, and if you aren't that freaked out by spiders, then you will probably really like this book. It was way better than I thought it would be.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/25894509?shelf=apocalyptic-post-apocalyptic">apocalyptic-post-apocalyptic</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/25894509?shelf=fucking-brilliant">fucking-brilliant</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/25894509?shelf=sci-fi">sci-fi</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/870755-dan-schwent"></a></section><section><p>2,916 reviews10.6k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1885403619">December 29, 2018</a></section><div><p>As humanity's fortunes fade, an engineered nanovirus, not finding the monkeys it expected, begins elevating the insects and spiders of an earth-like world. Will it be the humans aboard the space ark Gilgamesh or the spiders of the green planet inherit the universe as... The Children of Time?<p>One of the lunch talkers was gushing over this book a few days ago, the rare interruption of my reading I can tolerate. Fortunately, I already had this on my kindle despite no memory of buying it. Anyway, I dug in and was quickly ensnared in its web.</p><p>Childen of Time is told in two silky, sticky threads: the humans aboard the Gilgamesh, with Holsten Mason, a classicist, as the view point character, and generations of uplifted spiders on Kern's World. As such, we see the rise of the spiders, aided by a human-made nanovirus, across generations, as Holsten is awoken to find the Gilgamesh and its people in various states of decline.</p><p>The worldbuilding is exquisite. Adrian Tchaikovsky's spiders are alien yet somehow familiar, not just feeling like humans in different bodies. AT clearly put a lot of thought into his worldbuilding, extrapolating a lot from spider behavior, not just plopping giant spiders down on an earthlike world. The various Portias, Biancas, and Fabians over the generations showed a lot of development and nuances. The spider civilization unfolded in an organic way and I couldn't get enough of it, with its crazy gender politics and technology based around trained ants and genetically encoded information.</p><p>The humans coping aboard the Gilgamesh weren't quite as interesting to me, although some interesting avenues are explored. Life aboard an ark isn't easy, especially when you're repeatedly awakened to find things have gone pear-shaped. The Gilgamesh's crew and cargo undergo some interesting reversals of fortune, some expected, others not.</p><p>By the time the two narrative threads entangled, I knew which side I wanted to come out on top. Tchaikovsky kept me guessing, though, right up until the end.</p><p>Children of Time features lots of things I find compelling in science fiction: artificial intelligence, evolved bugs, and generation ships, albeit unintentional. For once, I'm glad someone interrupted my lunchtime reading. Five out of five stars.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/870755?shelf=2018">2018</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/870755?shelf=2018-books">2018-books</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2457095-apatt"></a></section><section><p>507 reviews779 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2285335815">March 30, 2018</a></section><div><p>“<i>Children of Time: Winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award</i>”. Most cumbersome book title ever (this is the full title of the edition I bought). Why did the publisher have to tag the award thing on the book’s original title? Fortunately, on the bright side, this is my only complaint about this book!<p>This book takes <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/14078.David_Brin"> David Brin</a>’s “uplift” concept and really runs with it. In Brin’s popular <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/series/41134-the-uplift-saga">Uplift series</a>, humanity have used technology to boost the intellect of selected species of animals to sentience level. I can’t quite remember the reason behind this, presumably to make them more useful and for other, more magnanimous, purposes. Indeed there is a direct tribute to Brin in <i>Children of Time</i>, in the form a little spaceship called Brin 2. However, the emphasis of the novel is not about the uplifting itself, but about the accidental sentient species that arise from the project and its subsequent interaction with humanity.</p><p>The original idea was to uplift monkeys to sentient levels through an infection of an engineered “nanovirus”, and put them on a habitable planet, but someone sabotaged that project and all the monkeys are killed. However, the nanovirus is sent to the intended planet and infects several species of insects instead. Spiders turn out to be the chief beneficiaries of this project as the virus is most effective on them. This starts off one of the two main narrative threads which chronicles the rise of the spider race as the ruler of the planet. The other narrative thread concerns a group of humans fleeing from Earth which is destroyed by a final world war, on an “ark ship” called “Gilgamesh”. This massive spaceship is carrying working crew and thousands of people in suspended animation, to be defrosted when a habitable planet is found. Unfortunately the only habitable they manage to find, after hundreds of years and generations of crew have come and gone, is the nice planet now ruled by the spiders.</p><p><br />Wonderful Polish edition cover</p><p>It has been a busy month so it took me almost three weeks to finish. Somehow it makes me appreciate the book even more as my constant companion to many places. The narrative is quite interesting from the first chapter and as characters, situations and world building are gradually laid down it becomes increasingly compelling, by the end of the book I was completely riveted. While the humans and spiders plotlines are given about equal time I was much more fascinated by the spiders, the culture, language and technology they develop after receiving their “increased cognitive capacity”. The spider protagonists are also very well developed, and quite admirable. I love sci-fi biotechnology, organic devices, homes and transportations. It is fascinating how the development spiders’ technology takes a different path from the humans, due to lack of metals and electricity. Their tech is based on hyper advanced biochemistry instead. I love how their society is ruled by the female, and the physically weaker and less intelligent males are generally disposable second class citizens. That is until a radical and messianic male spider comes along.</p><p>The human side of the story is less fascinating but it never drags down the narrative. Their state of affairs is quite pitiful compared to the spiders. They spend hundreds of years on board “the Gilgamesh”, key figures going in and out of suspended animation as needed. Generations are born on the spaceship and never set foot on a planet. The ark ship becomes a “generation ship” even though it was never designed to be used as one and the living conditions on board become rather cramped as the on board population expands. This being the case their need to settle on the spider’s planet is understandable. Unfortunately the humans believe in the cold logic of a concept called “the prisoner’s’ choice” which is based on mutual distrust because the cost of betrayal would mean complete annihilation. As the humans and the spiders head for collision that would result in genocide of one side or the other I found myself curiously rooting for the spiders; mainly because the spider characters are generally better developed and they do have the moral high ground of being the <i>invadees</i>, not the invaders. Thematically it is mainly a story of racial prejudice and a plea for tolerance, with both sides thinking that there is a necessity to completely wipe out the other side for the survival of the race.</p><p>Whatever the outcome <i>Children of Time</i> is one of the best space operas I have ever read, with a nice and clear writing style and a straightforward linear structure of the twin plotlines that make the book very accessible. The sci-fi tech is highly imaginative and the science behind it is clearly explained without resorting to infodumping; some very good characterization, thrilling plot developments and a very good ending makes this one of the greats for me. Highly recommended.<br /><br /><b>Notes:</b><br />• In spite of the title this book has nothing to do with time travelling.</p><p>• In some ways, parts of this book are like <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/76620.Watership_Down__Watership_Down___1_"> Watership Down</a> for spiders, and that is high praise! It may also be <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/24178.Charlotte_s_Web"> Charlotte's Web</a> for adults? I haven't read that one, but my spider-sense says yes. It also reminds me a little bit of a computer game called Sim Ant.</p><p>• Tchaikovsky's study of psychology and zoology stand him in good stead here (he is also a keen amateur entomologist). Interestingly his fantasy series <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/series/45895-shadows-of-the-apt">Shadows of the Apt</a> is also based on insects. TBR'd!</p><p><br /><b>Quotes:</b><br /><i>“There had been those back on Earth who claimed the universe cared, and that the survival of humanity was important, destined, meant. They had mostly stayed behind, holding to their corroding faith that some great power would weigh in on their behalf if only things became so very bad.”</i></p><p><i>“The enemy they face is the child of a technology she cannot conceive of, advanced beyond the dreams of her own kind’s greatest scientists, using a technology of metal and fire and lighting, all fit tools for vengeful deities. At her disposal is fragile silk, biochemistry and symbiosis, and the valour of all those who will put their lives at her disposal.”</i></p><p><i>“Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”</i></p><p><i>“That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”</i></p><p><i>“I consider CoT to be an outreach program for literate-minded arachnophobics :) There has been a pleasant number of readers who really don't like spiders but (a) have got through the book; and (b) have come out of it willing to give the little guys the benefit of the doubt. Of course now I need to stealth-write a book that has spiders as utterly horrible people-destroying bad guys just to utterly throw my readership...”</i></p><br />From Adrian Tchaikovsky's <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/51nj96/hi_im_sff_writer_adrian_tchaikovsky_ama/">Reddit AMA</a>.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2457095?shelf=favorites">favorites</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2457095?shelf=sci-fi">sci-fi</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/12656534-zoeytron"></a></section><section><p>1,036 reviews667 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3395862330">June 21, 2020</a></section><div><p>Well, it finally happened.  Earth can no longer sustain life, having frozen over, then morphing into an oozing toxic thaw.  The possibility of mankind becoming extinct is all too real, and plans have been in place for a relocation to a more welcoming sphere.  It should have been ready when the spaceship arrived with its precious cargo of humans.  But where have all the monkeys gone?  This planet is host to evolutionized spiders.  So many eyes, so many legs.  Striking parallels are spun, the differences between arachnids and humans, and in some ways, the sameness.  Intricate webs for communication, sticky strands and knotted ties to restrict.  Basic, yet effective.  The spider culture is fascinating, travelers and spitters, a mysterious crystal and its secrets, electronic life.  And fire ants!</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/12656534?shelf=public-library">public-library</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4728718-algernon-darth-anyan"></a></section><section><p>1,492 reviews958 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1500785464">January 15, 2016</a></section><div><p><br /><b> This is the future.<br />This is where mankind takes its next step.<br />This is where we become gods. </b><p>Science has given mankind the tools to travel to distant stars, to terraform their planets and to play with the building blocks of life : genetics.<br />It sounds like a dream come true, an utopian future in which everything is possible.<br />In practice, the deployment of miraculous scientific discoveries from the laboratory to the real world is fraught with the same issues that have plagues past generations : greed, selfishness, religious intolerance, thirst for power, irresponsible behaviour. Instead of agents of progress, scientists turn into agents of destruction. Utopias become Distopias.</p><p>Adrian Tchaikovsky explores this deep divide between idealistic dreams and grim reality in two directions:</p><p>	- artificially accelerated evolution of a population through a nanotechnology, synthetic 'smart' virus<br />	- social degradation in a multi-generational arcology : a slower than lightspeed ship transporting the frozen survivors of a planetary holocaust.</p><p>It's been done before, but Tchaikovsky manages to be here both traditional and original. The story reminds me of the golden age SF in its mostly positive atitude towards science, in looking at the big picture rather than at the lives of the individuals, in tracking social movements through the lens of technological progress, in its plain, clear-cut storytelling and often unidimensional characters.</p><p>The originality of the project comes from the same passion of the author that made his fantasy epic special : Tchaikovsky is really keen on his arthropods. "Shadows of the Apt" is populated by a wide range of different nations that share insect and human traits. "Children of Time" invites us to view the world through alien eyes that share a lot of common features with Earth's spiders. This almost obsession with the insect world is giving Thhaikovsky an edge over his fellow writers through the huge diversity of the regnum, a much richer source of inspiration that the usual human shaped aliens. I know that for me, as a photographer, it is always fascinating to turn a macro lens on even the most common specimens of these arthropods, and that a close up look at their multifaceted eyes or at the shapes of mandibles and antennas will make me think of aliens living unnoticed among us humans.</p><p><i> They are among the most diverse groups of animals on the planet, including more than a million described species and representing more than half of all known living organisms. </i></p><p>"Children of Time" managed to keep my interest and to make me turn the pages faster and faster especially in its alien half of the story, mostly by this originality in perspective. . I was already a fan of the author before his move from fantasy to SF, but this new story reinforced his position among my favorites. It's not easy to keep a good balance between action and exposition and emotionally charged characterization, especially if you have no familiar frame of reference for your social and economic structures and you have to start anew with the main actors after each generational change. The novel covers a multi-millenial timespan yet, despite all the inherent problems of such a large frame, it works like clockwork, even in the final blending together of the two main streams : human and alien.</p><p>I am about no namedrop one of the biggest names in SF : Isaac Asimov. In the "Foundation" series, Asimov also uses a multigenerational approach that allows him to study history through the engines of science and technology, explaining wars, gender roles, growth and decay in relation to the discoveries of positronic brains or mathematical formulas that explain Fate and Chance. Tchaikovsky has his nanotechnology virus that can change a whole society from hunters/gatherers to intelligent predators, through commerce and military conquest to a modern society of scientists and artists. This alien evolution is not without its own mishaps and wrong turns in the path to the future. It starts with the promise of a mad dreamer:</p><p><b> We will seed the universe with all the wonders of the Earth. </b></p><p>... a dreamer who conveniently forgets that these wonders, monitored from outer space, manifest like global warming, oceans of plastic garbage, deforestation and desertification, global wars, famine and crippling poverty, indigent species hunted to extinction. Both the aliens on their terraformed planet and the humans in their multi-generational ark demonstrate that this dismal list is very close to the true heritage of humanity. Yet Tchaikovsky is also prone to remember that at the bottom of Pandora's Box there is a feeble thing called Hope. The future is not already written down, despite the claims of psychohistory and prophets of doom, and thus my last quotations from what turned out to be one of the best (SF) novels of 2015:</p><p><b> Nothing. No promises. The universe promises us nothing.<br />Things are the way we make them. <b><br /></b></b></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4728718?shelf=2016">2016</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/36819318-scott"></a></section><section><p>290 reviews298 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2985884685">September 30, 2019</a></section><div><p><b>Hey you!</b> Yeah <b>you</b> - the person reading this review!<p>Stop reading. No really, if you’re a Science Fiction fan stop reading this review <i>right now</i>. You don’t need to. You’re going to <b>
 <i>LOVE</i>
</b> this book. It’s going to rock your world. It’s fricking amazing. That’s all you need to know. </p><p>Now, go, git, skeddadle, whatever, just <i>RUN</i> to a bookshop, as fast as you can. Get this book, then call in sick at work. Ignore your family. Turn your back on your adult responsibilities. Do what you have to do to get some serious quality time with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s bloody brilliant novel.</p><p>What? You’re still here? Really? You need to be convinced to read one of the best science fiction novels of the 21st Century? A book that is a likely in the top fifty of any serious list of the best SF books ever written?</p><p>Ok. Damn. You’re tough. You’re a hard-nosed reader, someone who isn’t just gonna drop some cash after reading some guy's opinion on the internet. I get it. I’m usually like you. I read reviews. I research books for my to-read list. I’m not easily impressed, I’m a bit jaded, perhaps even a touch cynical.</p><p>But <i>Children of Time</i>… <b>this</b> is why I read Science Fiction - to experience books like this one, books that fill me with euphoria at their sheer brilliance, their audacity, their vision.<br />I get it though- you need to more than ‘it’s really good’ before you’ll commit. I’ll try to control my rabid enthusiasm for long enough to give you an idea of what you’re in for.</p><p>In the far future, humanity has fallen. An era of almost god-like technological power has passed, and the remaining humans have pulled themselves back up from the wartime devastation of Earth, scrabbled together some comparatively primitive tech, and escaped Earth in a cryo ark. The era of godlike power is so long ago that it approaches myth, and a journey that once took twenty years will now take many centuries. </p><p>At the end of their journey is a world. A world that an entire epoch earlier was terraformed and seeded with life. They hope it will be their new home.</p><p>The crew of this ship include a classicist – Holsten Mason – an expert on the language and history of the old empire, the dictatorial captain, Guyen - a man so obsessed with human preservation that he has become mentally imbalanced, and Lain, the ships chief engineer. As the ship travels across the millennia, the people awake from their sleep to meet challenges, sleep again, wake, and so on - hopping across time, losing touch with the universe outside their vessel.</p><p> But the world they are travelling to is not as they think it is.</p><p>This planet – Kern’s World – was seeded with more than life. It was seeded with a virus designed to accelerate evolution, to raise apes to human-level sentience, and it is being watched.</p><p>The world’s namesake - Doctor Avrana Kern - is trapped above the planet in a tiny satellite, incrementally losing her mind while she waits for her apes below her to evolve far enough to respond to radio signals.</p><p>But there are no apes. They all died entering while their ship entered the atmosphere. Instead, the virus is slowly raising the intelligence of various species on the planet, the most successful of which is a type of Spider…</p><p>Yep, arachnophobes beware - Kern’s world is home to an evolving civilization of intelligent spiders. <br />And what a civilization. Tchaikovsky deftly paints with a palette of thousands of years, showing a society evolving and growing in fascinating and enthralling detail. Following the many descendants of one of the first spiders to become more aware he takes readers into a society that is unique among all the SF novels I have read. </p><p>It’s a total trip, filled with wonder and even humor, as Tchaikovsky uses the matriarchal nature of insect societies to make some deft allegories to patriarchal human structures (in one example, the murder of smaller male spiders by larger females for fun is palmed off by a protagonist as ‘girls will be girls’.) </p><p>All the while of course, the human refugee ship draws closer, making conflict between humanity and their strange, lost children inevitable. </p><p>This juxtaposition, of the last days of a desperate and dying intelligent species (us!) with the evolution of another life-form from tiny, almost mindless insects into intelligent, civilized beings is the core of the narrative, and it’s heady, wonderful stuff.</p><p>The story twists and turns, avoiding SF clichés and forging its own unique path, leaving me genuinely surprised (and just a little giddy) by the novel’s end.</p><p>Anyway, now back to effusive praise and un-restrained recommendation:</p><p>If you like SF, if you like great storytelling and if you like having your mind and imagination expanded then you really must read this book - this guy is a major talent.</p><p>Now get out there and find yourself a copy!</p><p>Five giant, scary (yet thoughtful) spiders out of five.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/36819318?shelf=science-fiction">science-fiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/86504940-william-gwynne"></a></section><section><p>353 reviews1,448 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2589931389">July 21, 2021</a></section><div><p><i>
 <b>I now have a YouTube channel that I run with my brother, called 'The Brothers Gwynne'. Check it out - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2psnHIUhLZB0ax7ITEdc3A/videos">The Brothers Gwynne</a></b>
</i><p>My expanded review of this great book is now on BookNest... <a href="http://booknest.eu/component/k2/william/1619-children-of-time-children-of-time-1-by-adrian-tchaikovsky-book-review">Children of Time Review</a></p><p><b>“That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”</b></p><p>Children of Time is my first delving into the genre of science fiction, and it served as a great introduction. When I began, I found it a bit mind-boggling because of the technical space language and sophisticated technology. But as the story progressed, I soon acclimatised to this aspect and it did not become as demanding or distracting as I first thought.</p><p>There are some wonderfully unique aspects to this book, which I have been told cannot be compared to any other sci-fi, because of how different it is. One such idea is exploring evolution, and following the journey of this progression with different animals, in this case being a number of insect species...<br />It was so interesting and fun and novel that it cemented itself as my favourite part of the book, as I found myself disappointed every time a chapter finished with this PoV.</p><p><b>“Humanity is overrated”</b></p><p>It took a while to get into the other PoV, who was a human on a spaceship that carries the rest of humanity. This was partly due to the technical part that I mentioned earlier, and also because there was not as much action. But when the plot started rolling, I was also looking forward to this part of the story, because of the cultural challenges presented, the fantastic prose that Tchaikovsky writes with, the unique ideas, and so many other reasons.</p><p>There is a very small cast of named characters, definitely not over 15 in total. This is extremely different to what I am used to, but it served well to strengthen those bonds with the characters that are present, and allowed another level of depth to be added to these as they earned more page time.</p><p>So once again, Children of Time was a great introduction to the genre, and I am sure that I will continue onto its sequel at some point, and also some other science fiction, starting with Dune.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/86504940?shelf=reviewed">reviewed</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/86504940?shelf=sci-fi">sci-fi</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8101737-peter-tillman"></a></section><section><p>3,611 reviews324 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1822361245">November 28, 2021</a></section><div><p>The good news: $1 ebook at Amazon (Nope: now 10 bucks!(2021))<br />The bad news: I started it at the end of last year (2017), read to 62% and stalled out. When I picked it up again, I found I had no wish whatever to continue. It's a pretty ramshackle affair, and I'm surprised it won a major award. Not for me!<p>Here's Claudia's 1-star review:<br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1538157063">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a><br />I didn't hate it quite as much as she did. But it's pretty bad. Read her review before you try the book, and a few of the other 1 and 2-star writeups. Then read something else, is my advice. <br />"It's a sin to waste the reader's time" -- Larry Niven</p><p>Here's Ann Leckie's writeup, which led me to read it:<br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/15060837-some-books-i-ve-read">https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8101737?shelf=did-not-finish">did-not-finish</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8101737?shelf=not-for-me">not-for-me</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8101737?shelf=own-copy">own-copy</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/18656418-justine"></a></section><section><p>1,130 reviews309 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1313281163">November 29, 2017</a></section><div><p>An absolutely brilliant and fantastically imaginative piece of science fiction. This is one of the best books I've read this year.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/18656418?shelf=2015-read">2015-read</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/18656418?shelf=favourites">favourites</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/46184829-lena-k"></a></section><section><p>62 reviews126 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2359099445">December 5, 2018</a></section><div><p><b>DNF 40%</b><p>I just… didn’t like it. I didn’t feel any sympathy for any of the characters, human or otherwise. I mean, the concept of a virus that’s speeding up and directing evolution sounds captivating enough. It’s just, that in my opinion, it was poorly executed. I simply didn’t care about those creatures and their problems. The writing about them was distant and ‘scientific’, while I expected it to be less disconnected, I guess.</p><p>Let’s start from the very beginning (no spoilers here – it’s in the first or second chapters); The Human race is super advanced technologically and has colonies in space and on other planets – it uses very advanced AI and some scientists want to create smart servants from monkeys, using the mentioned above virus. WHY would they want to do that instead of just creating some robots?! Beats me… Have some mercy on those creatures! </p><p>Then there are these terrorists that are against messing up with mother nature, which are called NUNs. Hah! Nice wordplay there! (it means - Non Ultra Natura). So, the NUNs have had enough! They start a war and basically annihilate all humanity’s space colonies. Using a computer virus. Yes, you heard right. All humanity is almost wiped out because of a computer virus, which shuts their systems and they suffocate and die in space. HOW IN THE HELL?? I mean really, haven’t you heard about antiviruses, firewalls, compartmentalization of critical systems? No? ok… then Hasta La Vista Humanity. That’s just lazy writing. It was an exposition, but even it must make sense. </p><p>As I mentioned, I didn’t like or even sympathize with any of the characters. Not with the modified creatures, not with the crazy scientist that did everything possible to have her experiment carry on. Not with the human survivors, who obviously shoot each other in a spaceship. Guys and gals, you’re it, you’re what the human race depends on to find a place for it to survive. And what do you do? YOU START TO SHOOT AT EACH OTHER. IN A SPACESHIP. IN SPACE. Have some common sense, or better yet, just go instinct if you behave like that. Facepalm. </p><p>I did kind of liked the Classicist who discovered that a dead language doesn’t sound like the scholars speculated it did in real life. And I liked the monkeys. Which were absent, which was a good thing, because they didn’t spoil the book for me :)</p><p>Monkey quote:<br /><b>
 <i>“She had sold it to the people back home by describing how colonists would reach the planet then, descending from the skies like deities to meet their new people. Instead of a harsh, untamed world, a race of uplifted sentient aides and servants would welcome their makers. That was what she had told the boardrooms and the committees back on Earth, but it had never been the point of the exercise for her. The monkeys were the point, and what they would become.”</i>
</b></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/46184829?shelf=dnf">dnf</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/46184829?shelf=science-fiction">science-fiction</a></ul></section></section></article></div></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 Children of Time #1

 Children of Time

 Adrian Tchaikovsky

 4.30
 100,078 ratings 10,117 reviews
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 A race for survival among the stars... Humanity's last survivors escaped earth's ruins to find a new home. But when they find it, can their desperation overcome its dangers?

 WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?

 The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age—a world terraformed and prepared for human life.

 But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.

 Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?
 Genres Science Fiction Fiction Space Opera Fantasy Audiobook Space Science Fiction Fantasy
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 600 pages, Hardcover

 First published January 1, 2015

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 About the author

 Adrian Tchaikovsky

 151 books 9,899 followers
 ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY was born in Lincolnshire and studied zoology and psychology at Reading, before practising law in Leeds. He is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor and is trained in stage-fighting. His literary influences include Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake, China Miéville, Mary Gently, Steven Erikson, Naomi Novak, Scott Lynch and Alan Campbell.

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 4.30
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 Melissa ♥ Dog/Wolf Lover ♥ Martin
 3,456 reviews 9,600 followers
 January 4, 2021
 UPDATE: $2.99 Kindle US 1/4/21

 Holy guacamole! This book rocked!

 I had a feeling I would like this book but hells bells, I had no idea how much I would love it.

 You have Earth that is pretty much going to pot, then goes to pot because of some stuff. Then people wake up a million years later on their ships. Well, okay not a million but still.

 So there is space!



 There is a new planet that continued to make itself from the start of terra forming many years ago < -- I don't think I spelled that right but we all know what it means. They were working on making the planet livable.

 AND . . .


 we have freaking . . .

 SPIDERS!



 and I liked Portia, she was the main spider and they are like no other spiders. Dudes and dudettes, this book is like no other I have read. YOU might have, but I have not.

 Loved it, looks nice on my shelf with one of his other books. I'm a happy camper.

 Mel ♥
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 Emily (Books with Emily Fox)
 530 reviews 58.4k followers
 January 4, 2020
 I adore the first contact with aliens trope so when I heard this was essentially the remanent of humanity vs intelligent spiders I jumped on it. Very unique and the ending took me pleasantly by surprise.

 I never thought I would end up rooting for spiders... but I did!

 A must read!
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 Bradley
 Author 6 books 3,960 followers
 October 27, 2015
 There's something wildly giddy welling up within me, and I blame it entirely on this book.

 There have been a couple of brilliant SF titles to come out this year and I would swear belong on the Hugo list, and this is yet one more. Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora was one, as was Scott Hawkins's The Library at Mount Char , but if I had to break down the individual merits of each, I might wind up saying that this one deserves it the most. For pure SF, it hits the heights of ideas, memorable characters, exploration, and message, although the message is definitely not one that is apparent until the end.

 It has all the hallmarks of a good classic SF tale, and I was reminded every step of the way of John Brunner's The Crucible of Time , with the bringing up of an alien society from its primitive roots to space exploration, the wild quest of humanity trying to survive it's own stupidity in over ten thousand years of desperate Ark travel, and throw into the mix a great mad cyborg/AI god/scientist who's belief system gets sorely challenged.

 If all that isn't enough to perk you up, then how about a society of biopunk spiders learning to tame themselves and their world with the propelling help of a nanovirus designed to uplift an entirely different species, but lacking those poor monkeys, had to make due with some jumping spiders from old Earth?

 Oh yeah. Now we're talking. From page one we get a precious nod to David Brin for his wonderful Uplift series, but right as we begin to suspect that it's a rip-off, everything goes to hell. I call that an auspicious beginning.

 And then we get slices of alien life complete with great self-contained stories, with nothing worthless to the grand over-tale being spun, including the war and eventual domestication of deadly intelligent army ants, the fight for the poor male spider's rights (who don't appreciate being eaten after mating), and the eventual discovery that the original scientist that had seeded the world with the nanovirus, who still lived as a cyborg, was not, in fact, a god.

 And if that isn't enough, let's get to know the human side of the equation. They've had a rough time climbing back out of a dark age only to discover that the Earth is a complete shit hole and there's nothing left to be saved. They rose on the backs of the dead society that had brought humanity to this pass and went out to search for a new home. Unfortunately, everything has gone to shit except this one little paradise that's defended by a mad cyborg god who thinks that humans are shit. (And she's right.) She'll protect her precious project from anything that dares disturb it.

 Great conflict ensues.

 My god this was a great book. I had a bit of a learning curve in the first few dozen pages getting over the somewhat sparse writing, but there's a purpose to it. A hell of a lot has to happen to build such an enormous tale without stretching it out into a dozen equivalent and impoverished books. In this one novel, we get everything. It's brilliant.

 I'll revisit this review at a later time and see if it still captures my imagination as much as the other Hugo Possibles, but my mind wants to put all my bets on this one. The flaws in Aurora, despite the brilliant setup, message, and end, are just enough to push it down a rung for me. Library at Mount Char was mostly dark fantasy with a damn huge nod at turning it into a real SF title, and I still think it's awesome and mythic, but if I had to choose between something that's obviously SF to the core and beyond and a great book that has more in common with American Gods and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, (both of which won Hugos in their years despite being fantasies), then I'd choose Children of Time.

 Unfortunately, I'm going to have to sit on the fence. Having to choose between two novels that are very different in scope, writing, and characterizations is a hell of a thing. Both are fantastic at what they do. I cried during both. I'll just have to revisit my memories later to be certain.


 Oh, there is one more thing I need to mention.

 I hate the title.

 It does absolutely NOTHING to enumerate how fucking awesome this epic SF is. Fans of any classic SF need to read this gem. It has a hell of a lot more flow to it, and just as much idea exploration as anything written by Alastair Reynolds. Go get it. Now.
 biopunk fanboy-goes-squee sci-fi
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 carol.
 1,530 reviews 7,851 followers
 February 7, 2017

 Sympathetic spiders? Inconceivable!

 –I do not think that word means what you think it means–

 Nope, in this case, it pretty much does. It's not that I have a spider-phobia--I like to think we have a truce regarding squishing and biting--it's that something about their structure and movement speaks to a primeval instinct to run away. Children of Time popped up in friend reviews, but I'll be honest--it wasn't until I realized there were giant spiders and colony ships that I really became intrigued. I am usually interested in the moving island of space colonization, and the inclusion of what seemed to be genuine aliens piqued my curiosity. Could it be done? Could an author really give an alien feel and yet remain sympathetic to creatures that inspire such fear?

 Yes and yes.

 Aside from that general set-up, I went into Children blind. Tchaikovsky structures the premise and then alternates the narrative between the two species. Once settled into the story-telling rhythm, he adds another wrinkle. I appreciate the way he told the story, easing the reader in and then building on the concepts. The human narrative tends to be more dialogue oriented, the spider-narrative more internal. It makes for an interesting pace change that might have dragged had the entire book been one style or the other.

 "She feels fear, a building anxiety that makes her stamp her feet and twitch her palps. Her people are more suited to offence than defence, but they have been unable to retain the initiative in this conflict. She will have to improvise. There is no plan for what comes next. She may die, and her eyes look into that abyss and feed her with a terror of extinction, of un-being, that is perhaps the legacy of all life."

 Characterization proved rather intriguing, particularly at first. I thought the feel of primitive spider-thinking rather believable, and appreciated the structuring of a very different world-view. I ended up believing the premise enough to enjoy the story and not feel hampered by arguing the science in my head. Also interestingly--particularly in a genre known for its sexism--the tendency of some female spiders to eat the males after mating is turned toward matriarchic ends. I was also intrigued by the spiders' interaction with other beings on the world, as well as how they are characterized.

 "She knows that individual ants themselves cannot be treated with, communicated with or even threatened. Her comprehension is coarse, of a necessity, but approximates to the truth. Each ant does not think. It has a complex set of responses based on a wide range of stimuli, many of which are themselves chemical messages produced by other ants in response to still more eventualities."

 Writing is solid. It is complex enough to convey cognitive concepts of world-view as well as philosophical underpinnings of what intelligence and interconnectivity is. I didn't overtly realize it as I read, but I think there were parallel discussions of what humanity means and aims for, a particularly worthwhile topic for our time.

 "The more he learned of them, the more he saw them not as spacefaring godlike exemplars, as his culture had originally cast them, but as monsters: clumsy, bickering, short-sighted monsters... In trying to be the ancients, they had sealed their own fate--neither to reach those heights, nor any others, doomed instead to a history of mediocrity and envy."

 I do think Tchaikovsky loses his way somewhat near the last third of the book. Still, it ended up being a book full of unexpected twists and turns. Most worked. A few did not, and I remain ambivalent about the ending. However, there were also moments when I thought, "this reminds me of Ursula LeGuin and one of her world-building, sci-fi masterpieces." A good story, intriguing world-building and a layered exploration of humanity and civilization. Overall, I'd definitely recommend it to someone who is in the mood for classic-feeling science fiction with modern sensibilities.

 Four and a half webs, rounding up because it deserves recognition for Big Ideas, not because it's screaming to be included in my personal library.
 animals-and-people classic et-phone-home
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 Claudia
 954 reviews 532 followers
 February 16, 2018
 Hard science fiction = a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific accuracy or technical detail or both . Just to be sure what are we talking about.

 The detailed info about Portia, the jumping spider and Scytodes, the spitting spider are as accurate as they can be, no doubt here. In fact, there is an entire chapter at the beginning with characterizations of both species, which is, after all, fascinating, but non-fiction. So, nothing new. (BTW, all this info about the spiders is on Wikipedia).

 The story line: on another planet, Dr. Kern initiated an experiment on a new terraformed planet. But something goes wrong and instead of monkeys, who were supposed to inhabit this planet and evolve due to a nanovirus, the ones which get infected are the spiders. Further, it gets tricky: these spiders, infected with that nanovirus, became intelligent - which is perfectly all right and intriguing. Up until the point when they suddenly become scientists… They even build up lenses (how the heck did they do that?!) for observing the stars and also for studying viruses in their attempt to find a cure for a disease. (This was the cherry on the cake).

 On the other hand, the two main human factions on Earth, those in favor and against nanotechnology and the like, manage the performance to almost destroy the Earth. There are survivors but all the knowledge and technology of their ancestors is lost (how much time did pass between the experiment above and the war we don’t know, but appears not too long. However, they are called ancestors and from the old empire or something…).

 But - there is a big BUT: they had built a few arks (space ships) in which they gathered the survivors and the long trip in finding another Earth begins. How did they build those arks if they had no tech, no knowledge and no resources left?! Ok, moving on. The key crew wakes after 1800 years when they arrive near the planet in question and discover the ship in which Dr. Kern is still guarding her planet, half mad. And the ones from the ark are amazed by the technology (they being in a space ship capable of interstellar travels, remember?).

 Should I go on? No.
 I forced myself to read up to 52% and then I went straight to the last chapter and guess what: exactly what I have imagined.
 Where is the hard science fiction? All the info thrown into the story is disjointed. The various ideas contradict one another. I’m no biologist but I don’t think that a nanovirus could transform a species, which at the beginning had just 60k neurons (in fact, 600k, but somebody ate a 0) directly into scientists, after increasing in body size, of course... (wouldn’t have been interesting if we wouldn’t had giant spiders, right?) And I can give a lot of other nonsense ideas but I already bored myself…

 And the writing is so flat; just words thrown to fill the pages; endless explanations; absurd development; moron characters; etc.
 I’ll stop here. I’m rarely so virulent about a story, given the fact that I have the utmost respect for writers. It’s not minor deal to be able to create a world of words. But I had such a big disappointment with this one, given all the five stars rating it has. Too much hype behind it with no real ground.
 sci-fi utterly-disappointing
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 Petrik
 672 reviews 42.6k followers
 October 31, 2017
 Smart and imaginative, highly recommended for everyone who loves Sci-Fi and not recommended for anyone with arachnophobia.

 Children of Time is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s first Sci-Fi and also my first experience with his work. This is a highly praised book, it won Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel in 2016 and most likely, will be 5 stars read for anyone who has never read anything like it. Plus, for even more praise, the film rights to the book has also been sold to Lionsgate.

 It’s a great story. The plot revolved around the race for survival between races on attaining a single terraformed planet; The races being the last surviving humanity that fled their dying Earth, and the sentient spiders accidentally evolved by a mad scientist; these beings were born and live on the planet.

 Picture: Children of Time (Polish cover)



 This standalone encompassed a lot of relatable topics to our society such as gender discrimination, greed, and on the bright side, empathy. It’s unique and epic, with tale spanning between generations to generations. Unfortunately for me, I have read something very similar to this in a manga called Terra Formars and because of that, my experience on this was a bit ruined. The premise of this book with that particular manga is very similar, with the differences being the planet is Mars and the sentient creatures are cockroaches. It’s not fair for me to compare the topic unrelated form of speculative fiction but I want you to first look at this gif so I can explain my reasoning. (Warning: gory scene ahead)



 That, ladies and gentleman is a sentient evolved cockroach killing humans. This somehow affected me into thinking that this standalone will be action-packed because of the similar premise; it’s not. Children of Time plot direction is almost the total opposite. I expected more interaction between the two species but they happened only twice throughout the entire book, one very briefly too. I also felt the entire middle section from the alien’s side felt a bit boring; it was a bit too long and felt like learning biology and history from a textbook because there’s almost no dialogue on it. Finally, I don’t think it was necessary to divide the prose for the two races POV’s, the human side was written in past tense while the alien side was written in present tense; this made their stories felt disconnected to me.

 I may sound a bit too negative here. This is because up until the 80% section of the book, I totally felt like this is a 3 stars book at best. However, I was wrong. The author has saved everything for the last 20% of the book and it was brilliant. No loose ends, the conclusion of this book was truly incredible and made all my struggle through the middle section of the book worth it.

 Knowing that this is the author’s first Sci-Fi, I foresee a very bright future ahead of him. I highly recommend this to every Sci-Fi fans but not to anyone with arachnophobia; because.. sentient spiders.

 For anyone who loved this book and wants something more epic, I recommend reading Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Cixin Liu. Trust me, the last book of that trilogy made everything this book looks like an ant regarding its scope.

 You can find this and the rest of my Adult Epic/High Fantasy & Sci-Fi reviews at BookNest
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 James Tivendale
 310 reviews 1,325 followers
 May 8, 2019
 I received a review copy of Children of Time in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Adrian Tchaikovsky and Pan Macmillan for the opportunity.

 Children of Time is 600-pages of extraordinary, evolution-based science fiction that features quality storytelling and worldbuilding that is rarely seen in this generation. This narrative is set over 1000's of years. We first see Doctor Kern and her scientific team of 19 as they wish to experiment with monkeys and a nanovirus on what some individuals are considering could be the new Earth. After betrayal and confrontation on their spaceship, which may be reflecting hostilities back on Earth events don't progress in the way that they envisaged.

 The action mainly follows two very different perspectives. The first is the views of a human classicist named Holsten who has travelled for two millennia to the above-mentioned planet after the end of Earth. He is onboard the spaceship Gilgamesh with the remnants of the human race and spends most of his years frozen and therefore not aging. The crew members are only awakened when their duties permit it necessary so our first contact with the human ensemble is when they are approaching the said planet. The crew features the needed components to create a new future including commanders, engineers, soldiers, intellects, etc... It transpires that the planet they are looking to land on is already occupied and it isn't by the highly evolved monkeys as was planned. This brings me to the second perspective which is written from the point of view of spiders - a species that are also receptive to the advancements in evolution that the nanovirus presents. This complication was not accounted for and may be problematic. We follow the spiders as they evolve over 100's of generations and the way it is written is truly unique. The main spiders we follow are Portia, Bianca, and Fabian. They don't live to be 1000's of years old, instead, we follow the original characters' relatives through different generations as the spiders evolve. They may share the same name but often have very different personalities. There is also a third perspective that is from a human/machine/satellite/messenger/God viewpoint and she is very protective of 'her planet' and does not wish for the humans to land. It's a superbly original tale in the way it is presented.

 Often, science fiction stories that I read are overly complex with tech-lingo and it sometimes feels like the author is trying to prove how smart he is. In the first few pages of Children of Time, I thought it would be the same again. However, after the first chapter or two, it became crystal clear that this is a novel where the story, characters, and development are the top priority. It is beautifully written, and has been extremely well researched and is expertly paced. Children of Time is packed full of highs and lows. Who could have known I'd care about the death of a revolutionary hero giant-spider? The spiders' society throughout various stages of evolution is intensely detailed and complex, still the way the species progress feels organic and natural although before this narrative I'd have never considered how a spider community would behave. Turns out they're pretty damn sexist!

 For quite a lengthy book I was reading this at a blistering pace. Chapters tend to be between 10-20 pages so it was always tempting to just read one more which soon became another 100 pages. Especially the last 100 pages with I devoured in one breathless sitting. It features an insane space battle and I could never have imagined reading something of the sort when I first picked this up. The ending is intense, unpredictable, but highly satisfying. When I finished reading this story the first thought I had upon reflection was that there is no way I could be an author because I could never write anything this good so what would be the point? It's one of the best science fiction books I've ever read and I've already started Children of Ruin. A+ Recommended.
 sci-fi
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 Choko
 1,194 reviews 2,583 followers
 January 28, 2023
 Re-read and What can I say? I loved everything about it! I can't believe I had given it only 4.65 stars the first time around. It is a full 5* and maybe some plusses:) The intricacies of the world building, both in the human and spider communities, was brilliant! The attention to detail, the thought that went in the communication, the way the one group evolved and the other devolved, the differences and the commonalities, the little gestures and the big, overwhelming occasions, just so good!!! *** 4.65 ***

 "... ““You can never know. That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.” ...

 I wanted to read this book only because it was recommended to me by a friend. I never expected to love it so much, despite never having read anything by the author. Boy am I glad I read it!

 I was raised on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Every week my family would receive in the mail the newest Sci-Fi publication and we would all fight over who is going to read it first, although we all knew my dad would be first, then my mom, if she was interested, and then would be my turn. My favorite of those were the ones with deep and logical connection to the Science side of the fiction, not so much the ones with the space battles and soap-operas in space kind of stories. I loved the real plausible what-ifs that came with books taking the known of Physics and Biology and building them up into strange and irregular ways, but still creating worlds and creatures whose existence and creation we could follow in a somewhat logical way, thinking that yeah, given just the right conditions, this could actually happen and what could we, us humans, do about it.

 Well, "Children of Time " is just this kind of book! The author has done his research into the biology of Arachnids and insects, putting them in a newly terraformed world with virgin ecosystem created to support life deriving from our Earth, mix in a Nano-Virus as a variable which acts as an accelerator for neuro-development and intelligence, and a catalyst for critically important markers of useful growth and useless excess of abilities, thus crafting a positive growth of individuals in a communal culture with always expending intellect and talents. Final result - Giant Intelligent Spiders!!!!

 "... “The act of courtship is consummated as a public ritual, where the hopeful males – in their moment of prominence – perform in front of a peer group, or even the whole city, before the female chooses her partner and accepts his package of sperm. She may then kill and eat him, which is thought to be a great honour for the victim, although even Portia suspects that the males do not quite see it that way.” ...

 Yep, not a planet for those who have an uncomfortable relationship with our eight-legged web-weaving friends. Also, not exactly what the scientist who created the Nano-Virus intended to begin with. Our human, very intelligent, and very self-centered Dr. Avrana Kern, created the virus in order to push monkeys to their most extreme intellectual growth through generations. Instead, when the virus was unleashed on the planet, the monkeys and most of the rest of the humans were sabotaged by an opponent to the project and all blew up. Dr. Avrana Kern is the only one left, in a small capsule in space, going in and out of freeze-stasis, waiting for her "creations" to contact her from the planet. During this time, life on Earth self-destructs, thousands of years later humans reemerge, and then once again only a small part of them remain, looking for another planet to settle on, frozen on an Arc ship called Gilgamesh. The spider planet looks like their only chance and the books goes through their battles to get to it and try to take it over.

 "... “She has improved the lives of her species in a dozen separate ways, for she has a mind that can see answers to problems others did not even realize were holding them back.” ...

 The book timeline measures in thousands of years and it is fascinating to follow the growth of some and the degradation and regression of others. This was done from the points of view of several pivotal characters, of which Portia and all her progeny through the centuries was my favorite. I loved everything about her/them. I loved how important the Classicist Human Holsten and the head engineer of the ship Lain were to the sustaining of the Human population on the Gilgamesh. A person who can sit back and think about communication and how it shapes our relationships with others, be it species, tribes or Peoples. And how vital the knowledge and ability to take care and advance our infrastructure is, when those skills are being overlooked at times of famine as well as at times when our martial or more lofty flights of fancy seem to rule our daily lives. We are reminded of how easy it would be for us to fall into the one or the other category, letting our roots and foundations rot, while our heads are in the clouds...

 "... “If they were of any quality or caliber, then they would ascend by their own virtues. Not if there was no structure that they could possibly climb. Not if all the structure that exists was designed to disenfranchise them. Portia,” ...

 This book is not just about evolution. It is about understanding our nature and trying to learn from our mistakes, not just following the innate instinct for destruction, cannibalism, and disseminating everything which is different from us, to the point of mortally wounding ourselves. In our superior Humans First and Only ideology, we slowly but surely erode our environment and eventually the environment will strike back, one way or another. Let's hope we don't realize this too late...

 "... “Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them – not even its own reflection. ” ...

 Now I wish you all Happy Reading and may you always find what you Need in the pages of a good Book!!!
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 Dana Ilie
 404 reviews 347 followers
 August 11, 2018
 Children of Time’ is one of those books one devours obsessively and then mourns once it’s finished. Yes, ‘Children of Time’ is that good.



 The author acknowledges our implicit arachnophobia and then very cleverly turns it on its head; indeed, after a while you kind of forget that these characters are spiders at all, even when they get stuck in to very spiderish behaviour. Their cities, for example, are great forests festooned with web complexes and, latterly, organic machinery and vehicles. The many versions of the spider society are also resolutely female and this novel is one of the few I can think of that presents a detailed, believable and sympathetic matriarchy. That it is in not in any way a utopia, without seeming unrecognisable or awful either, is another credit to the unapologetic intelligence of this book.


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 Mayim de Vries
 577 reviews 822 followers
 March 28, 2020
 “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
 Professor Stephen Hawking

 “What have you done with my monkeys?”
 Doctor Avrana Kern

 I do not sci-fi that much but when I do, I do it only with books that make me cheer for spiders.

 Adrian Tchaikovsky is famous for infusing his books with themes and motives related to his interests. He studied zoology and psychology. He is also interested in natural history, with particular emphasis on the world of insects. These are the roots of the “Children of Time”, a thrilling story about the fall of one civilisation and the birth of another. Together with human civilisation standing on the verge of destruction, we embark upon a fantastic interstellar travel. A tantalising cosmic odyssey, which takes place over the span of millennia, filled with extraordinary adventures, heroes, and dramatic twists.

 1. THE IDEA

 “We are the civilisation of transport, waiting to happen somewhere else.”

 Human civilisation has found itself on the verge of annihilation. The Earth is no longer habitable and so humanity’s last quest is a search of a planet suitable for settlement. Hundreds of thousands of years pass. A spaceship with the last surviving people finds a place similar to Earth. It turns out that the living conditions on the planet are a result of its terraforming many thousands of years ago. It is but a remnant of a wider experiment aimed at creating an intelligent species able to develop at an accelerated pace. The intention was to create a new, better man. However, not everything went as planned, and the “exalted” ones are not monkeys (or other vertebrates, indeed), but an unassuming species known as portia labiata . Yup, here come the sentient spiders . ( Don’t make my mistake and check the photos. They are absolutely awful! )

 2. THE DESIGN

 “Why should we be made thus, to improve and improve, unless it is to aspire.”

 The narration gives us two perspectives . The first is the one presents the actions of the inhabitants of the last ship-ark with the human cargo, Gilgamesh note the stroke of genius, to call the ship with the name of an ancient hero known mostly for his long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life , trying to find a new planet to settle on. The second one shows the evolution of the spiders, accelerated by a special nanovirus. Consequently, we have one chapter about the human journey through the universe, and another one about the life of spiders on the green planet. Reading the spider civilisation chapters is like watching a National Geographic or a BBC Earth documentary. And I would never expect that the adventures of insects can be so enticing!

 To the contrary, human protagonists are a considerable weakness of the book . Holsten, a scholar “at the wrong end of his career” and a historian “at the wrong end of history”, Guyen, a power-obsessed commander, control-hungry and with an utter god-complex, Lain, the engineer turned leader by necessity (come the hour, come the woman), Karst, your regular security tough-guy, or rigid, narrowly-minded scientists - they are all unremarkable, lacking perspicuity, and difficult to bond with.

 Pitched against humans, the Portias, Biancas and Fabians, even the Violas of the spider-folk are clear winners. Throughout the thousands of years, we trace the evolving story (and the civilisation) through the (many!) eyes of numerous spiders, for simplicity called by the same names. Just as much as I was quite indifferent to the human figures (I treated them as tools meant to give the spiders time to evolve and at the same time, to push the action forward), I found myself positively cheering for the insects!

 3. COSMIC WONDERS AWAIT

 “Because she needed to reach out and know there was something she could reach out to.”

 The novel was showered with prizes, and rightly so. The rich style of the Mr Tchaikovsky is impressive. “Children of Time” seduces us with an unusual ingenuity of worldbuilding, an intriguing plot, convincing descriptions and an extraordinary ambiance.

 Tchaikovsky's tale is a story about the demise of one civilisation and the birth of another. On this very simple, not to say simplistic, premise, the Author creates a brilliant cosmic epos, which contains many key elements that are the driving force of more than one classic science-fiction novel. We have the destruction of humanity, genetic experiments, interstellar journey, fighting for survival with alien forms of life, artificial intelligence, playing the god. Especially gender war in this book is delightful. Honestly, all feminists should turn into spiders.

 It is a novel written with panache, and yet carefully attending to minor details, enriched by the colourful and multifaceted picture of struggles undertaken in the defence and preservation of life, and trials related to overcoming consecutive stages of biological and cultural evolution. It is also a critical vision of the distant inheritors of the Earth, irreversibly poisoning the environment, and thus approaching the point of eliminating their own species. Despite the threat of total extermination, people still cannot get rid of deadly social mechanisms and habits, nurturing the inspiration to remain masters of the whole universe against all odds.

 4. THE ORPHANS OF TIME

 “You claim to be human. Go be human elsewhere.”

 It is evident that for Mr Tchaikovsky, humans have lost the game . In the novel, we can also see a civilisation devolving, understanding less than before, losing memory and wisdom, too busy with survival to pass on the knowledge . In the book, all the coveted achievements of civilisational development like genetic engineering or transcending the boundaries of artificial intelligence, resonate only in echoes of former splendour and mimicked copies. The old ambitions of conquest, large-scale attempts at creating terraformed planets, leave only negligible traces behind. Considering how the humans are depicted in this novel, I think that “The Orphans of Time” would be a more apt title. Additionally, humanity is crippled by its own irredeemable nature . We are poisoned by the propensity to violence which we, as a species, seem unable to transcend. Mr Tchaikovsky presents us simply as “monsters: clumsy, bickering, short-sighted monsters.”

 This very pessimist Hobessian view, determinist to the extreme, whereby humans are not able to transcend certain obstacles is contrasted with the nascent spider civilisation free from such inhibitions. The green world with giant arthropods, with its nascent civilisation where biology and custom are at constant war, where tradition is set against the progress, the known past against the unknown future, and where the intellect bent to break the shackles of yesterday triumphs, reads like a veritable paradise.

 This is something that the Author denies the humans. Where spiders are thriving on empathy and cooperation and altruistic sacrifice, humans cheat, abuse and destroy. But the worst thing is that this catastrophic tone and constant trajectory of humankind towards destruction is not substantiated by anything . Why would humanity be unable to retrace their developmental steps when the spiders basically zipped through evolution and progress?

 The last 20% killed the book for me. Particularly during the final stages of arachnid development, I was forced to resort to ‘suspension of disbelief’ which is a technique I usually apply only for fairytales. It is not that I didn’t like the ending, it is more that I didn’t get the answers as to why things worked out the way they did. Explanations for the evolutional check-mate that would anchor the ending in any kind of logic. The finale (and the epilogue) seemed terribly arbitrary and bent on proving a very controversial hypothesis. This was the decisive factor regarding my rating.

 Indubitably, “Children of Time” offers a reading adventure, which I savoured with appreciation and applause . It provided me with excellent multi-level entertainment, and at the same time raised many important issues as a poignant warning, foretelling what the humanity may face if we continue to push towards the mutual destruction of each other and the whole environment. However, Mr Tchaikovsky's humanity is one inherently unable to produce Mother Teresas, Mahatmas Ghandi, and Irenas Sendler. And this is not us.

 The story continues in:

 2. Children of Ruin ★★★☆☆
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 Phrynne
 3,214 reviews 2,047 followers
 September 21, 2022
 What a beautiful book. Six hundred totally absorbing pages. One of the best Science Fiction books I have ever read. Not being particularly coherent here but let me say again it is very, very good.

 It shows mankind at its worst - I would not have cared if the last human being in the universe had died at the end. I hate spiders but was converted to the sentient kind, and I was cheering them on as they grew smarter and smarter.

 I could not imagine how it was going to end but Adrian Tchaikovsky is some kind of genius, and the last few pages were just brilliant. Naming the ship Voyager was a touch of magic.

 Recommend reading for anyone not just sci fi enthusiasts. There is something in this book for everyone.
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 Philip
 499 reviews 672 followers
 October 24, 2017
 5ish stars.

 An unqualified masterpiece. This is some of the smartest, most exciting, and most imaginative fiction I've read in a long time. It's grand, expansive, and both character-driven and plot-driven.

 Uplifted spiders. So cool and creative. The evolution of the Portias and their clusters is endlessly compelling. The journey that the humans take over the millennia, if not as thrilling, is dramatic in its buildup to the inevitable convergence of the two groups.

 It chronicles the rise and fall of the human population and explores its recurring, natural gravitation towards malignant ambition and self-destruction. While that aspect is disheartening, there’s also hope, because the spiders, being non-human, might be able to circumvent those tragedies... It’s about nature, pride, communication, fear, change, and determination at all costs. Highly recommended.

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 Nataliya
 741 reviews 11.8k followers
 April 21, 2020
 “If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net – what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?”
 This is an excellent SF story, a modern classic in my opinion. For those of you who are not fans of the idea of SF, this is also a wonderful literary story chock-full of philosophy and allegory.
 How good is it, you ask? Well, good enough for this arachnophobe to read it twice now, and good enough to feel unexpected kinship to the giant sentient spiders - to see them as persons and not just as alien creepy crawlies. Maybe I got hit with that nanovirus too, who knows?

 In a distant future humans are terraforming planets. Avrana Kern, a scientist, is about to seed a newly terraformed planet with monkeys and add to the atmosphere a nanovirus engineered to accelerate their development and allow it to happen on the scale of millennia rather than millions of years, and allow the monkeys to develop into “a race of uplifted sentient aides and servants [who] would welcome their makers.”
 “This is the future. This is where mankind takes its next great step. This is where we become gods.”
 Except that, predictably, human squabbles on a galactic scale plunge the Earth and its colonies into Dark Ages from which they take millennia to recover, and eventually the survivors leave the dying poisoned planet in ark ships, headed for the hope of terraformed planets, zeroing on the green and beautiful Kern’s world. But things went wrong there, too. Kern’s monkeys have never made it to the planet. The nanovirus, lacking the species it was made for, manages nevertheless to find a species it could infect and change and accelerate the evolution of - the spiders. Whose civilization is robust and so different from ours. And the AI imprint of Avrana Kern still circles their world in her shuttle, the Messenger as the spiders perceive it, unaware that the monkey experiment failure has become the spider triumph.
 “In the end, he supposed, it didn't matter. Genocide was genocide. He thought of the Old Empire, which had been so civilized that it had in the end poisoned its own homeworld. And here we are, about to start ripping pieces of the ecosystem out of this new one.”
 The story is told in the alternating chapters set among humans on the spaceship, the last of the dying civilization, and the spiders that are building their civilization one generation of the time - each time a new generation of Portias (as in Portia labiata spiders), Biancas and Fabians spinning the webs of knowledge and society, making their own literal world wide web . Collision is imminent.
 “For a species that thinks naturally in terms of interconnected networks and systems, the idea of a war of conquest and extermination – rather than a campaign of conversion, subversion and co-option – does not come easily.”

 Spiders are creepy, no doubt. They might as well really be aliens, they are so fundamentally different from us in all the respects. And we are hardwired to distrust and fear those that are different, that are *other*, that are not us - that are “them”. We seem to be hell-bent on the destruction even of those who *are* kin, let alone those who are as different as can be. That’s just how our survival instincts work, I guess.
 “Sometimes all it takes, to crack a problem, is a new perspective.”
 The alternating chapters of human and spider narratives are done very well. Human parts of the story are done in a more ‘usual’ tone of SF adventure, relying on dialogue for exposition. Spider parts have a completely different voice and feel - more of the omniscient narration, less dialogue (as the spiders’ speech is nonvocal), and more of a chronicle feel. There is never a doubt that these are alien beings, not too anthropomorphic but just ‘person-ized’ enough to be relatable . The world building is masterful, immersive and vivid. And writing itself is excellent.

 The exploration of what it means to be human and what it means to be a person is also done very well. It’s easy and tempting in the books dealing with these questions to slide into philosophical navel-gazing and proselytizing, and skid the story to a halt to deal with the big ideas. Tchaikovsky avoids those pitfalls. Philosophical bits are subtly woven into the story and allow you to come to conclusions yourself without the author beating you with them anvil-like over the head. And I love it.
 “Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”
 So good.

 5 stars.
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 Mogsy (MMOGC)
 2,026 reviews 2,606 followers
 June 12, 2017
 5 of 5 stars at The BiblioSanctum https://bibliosanctum.com/2017/06/12/...

 Children of Time was my first novel by this author, and wow, what a way to start my initiation into the Adrian Tchaikovsky fan club! I have never read anything quite like this book before, and I have to say the praise it’s gotten has been well deserved. I just loved this.

 First of all we have this incredible story, which has everything in place for a space opera of the grandest proportions. Long ago, when Earth was on its last legs and humanity feared it could go no further, scientists were sent out beyond the solar system to find and terraform new planets to ensure the future of our species. One of them, the brilliant but megalomaniacal Dr. Avrana Kern was successful in locating such a world, but just as she was about to implement a nanotech virus to accelerate the development process, sabotage occurred. Kern’s monkeys that were intended for biological uplift were not deployed on the planet because they were all killed in the attack on her ship. Kern herself was forced to be transformed, reduced to an AI mind and a body preserved in stasis. However, her nanovirus, the one intended to speed up evolution in the monkeys, did in fact make it onto the planet, imbedding itself into—wait for it—a species of spiders.

 Years and years go by. Earth is no more. Desperate humans take to the stars in generation ships like the Gilgamesh to find these terraformed planets their ancestors supposedly prepared for them, but instead of a welcoming home, they find Kern’s World and the repercussions of her genetically engineered virus. For generations, the planet’s inhabitants have been evolving as well, the uplifted spiders developing their own cultures, civilizations and knowledge. It is their world now, and they don’t take kindly to the assumptions of these strange looking humans who think they can just take over and live on their planet.

 As a huge life sciences geek, I loved the ideas behind books like Children of Time or what some other science fiction fans call “biopunk”. The chapters aboard the Gilgamesh were compelling with their human drama and fight for survival, but in my opinion, it was the sections about the spiders which were the most fascinating. They were also what made this novel stand out from all the sci-fi I’ve read so far this year. Tchaikovsky details generations of evolution in the spiders’ biology as well as their culture, following compelling characters like the many iterations of Portia as her species develops language, religion, warfare, and other facets of civilization which they pass down to their descendants via a form of genetic memory. As such, they eventually become something akin to spiders but not as we understand them, having been altered by the virus but also by factors specific to their unique physiology. The author deserves extra bonus points too because it takes a real talent to write genuine, relatable and sympathetic non-human characters, and even more when they are effectively overgrown, freaky arachnids. Don’t think you can ever bring yourself to root for a giant spider? There’s a really good chance this book will change your mind.

 I was also impressed by the way Tchaikovsky managed to tell this monumental saga—which takes place over thousands of years—without once being sidetracked or losing the story’s main thread. When it dawned on me what the author was trying to do, I didn’t think it was going to work, but oh, it does. In alternating sections, he explores the changes happening on Kern’s World as well as the various side plots unfolding on the Gilgamesh. Most of humanity’s last remnants are frozen in time, traveling in the cargo bay of the ark ship, but we do get to meet and stay with several of the key players like Holsten Mason and Isa Lain who survive the centuries by going in and out of stasis. Culture is evolving in its own way too on the Gilgamesh, and every time Holsten wakes he is hit with another shock of how perspectives and attitudes on the ship have changed since the last time he emerged. It just goes to show, adaptation isn’t something that’s happening only on the surface of Kern’s World, with both the spider and human storylines mirroring and complementing each other in the coolest way possible.

 Basically, you have got to read this book. It’s gotten such high ratings for a reason. Children of Time is one of the smartest, most remarkable and innovative science fiction novels I’ve read in years and now I can’t wait to read more by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

 Audiobook Comments: I loved Mel Hudson’s narration. Having a female reader really highlighted the spider chapters, and Hudson’s voice and accent exuded the perfect amount of acuity and class to bring characters like Portia to life. I don’t think I would have enjoyed myself as much if I had read the novel in print, so needless to say, I highly recommend this audiobook.
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 Niki Hawkes - The Obsessive Bookseller
 723 reviews 1,196 followers
 September 27, 2022
 Check out my Booktube channel at: The Obsessive Bookseller

 Add Children of Time to my very short list of all-time favorites!!

 So many things about it worked for me. First of all, I’m especially drawn to Scifi stories with a strong biological component (Julie Czerneda has been a long-time favorite in that regard), and not only was this one bursting with alien flora and fauna awesomeness, but it also had a strong anthropological angle. I read so many Scifi where the most creative they get with world-building is what type of tech is used on this group of ships vs that one, so it’s wonderful to get the same level of expansive creation I usually have to defer to fantasy novels to experience.

 This is my first Tchaikovsky, and it definitely won’t be my last. He made so many brilliant writing decisions in this book that I was left in awe. He had really creative solutions to some story logistics that would’ve left me stumped. Like how to tell the story over multiple generations while maintaining your reader’s connection to the characters. Sometimes it’s as simple as giving them the same name – something I never would’ve thought of. He handled the time jumps for the humans with similar grace, establishing a trust with me very early on in his ability to deliver a satisfying story.

 What’s more, I found out mid-read that the author majored in both Zoology and Psychology – both of which spark my interest so much I can hardly stand it. And both backgrounds clearly enhanced the story. I love it when authors take a background of deep knowledge and apply that to their writing.

 The book had the perfect balance of world-building, character connection, pacing, momentum, and then he topped it all off with a brilliant finish. I’m sure I’ll be talking about this one for years to come.

 Recommendations: one of my all-time favorites! If you like Scifi with a good dose of anthropological components and creature creations, this is an excellent pick. It’s imaginative, exciting, and incredibly well-composed – I can’t recommend it highly enough!

 Thank you to my Patrons: Filipe, Dave, Frank, Sonja, Staci, Kat, and Katrin! <3

 Via The Obsessive Bookseller at www.NikiHawkes.com

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 Emma
 2,430 reviews 827 followers
 July 8, 2017
 I have really struggled with this book. Really the only science fiction I tend to like is character driven so I was up against it from the start!
 I've always thought that insect and deep sea creatures have much potential as horror/ monster elements in a story. The look of them close up is just as awful as anything fictitious- it's only that, in the case of insects, they're small and in the case of deep- sea creatures, far down and away, that saves us. So I was interested to read about Portia and the development of society, culture, technology, the ideas of god or 'the messenger'. Fascinating to read about colonialism and the subsumption of other cultures and species and its parallels with human evolution.
 But I got bored. And the human side of the story, where I would have predicted my deeper interest, had little pace for me. I can see this is a great book and deserves its high ratings, just not from me! I'm very interested to read this author's fantasy series still as I believe this may be more to my liking!
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 K.J. Charles
 Author 58 books 8,081 followers
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 August 23, 2021
 I have been avoiding this because spiders. More fool me. This is an incredible (spider-filled) book, with brilliant imaginative sweep, terrible inexorable logic, spiders, incredibly high stakes, a fascinating look at alien minds, a depressing look at human ones, and a highly satisfying bit of play with gender roles and sexism. And spiders. So many spiders. Aargh, spider.

 In fact possibly what's most impressive about this book is that by the end, despite SPIDERS, I was actually rooting for the eight-eyed horror machines. Absolutely fantastic read, exactly what SF should be. I went straight out and bought the sequel even though that has *also* got spiders in it. And I'm reading it now and after that we won't mention the S word again, okay.
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 zuza_zaksiazkowane
 344 reviews 30.9k followers
 August 30, 2020
 2.5? 2.75? Idk
 To była książka totalnie odbiegająca od moich oczekiwań, spodziewałam się czegoś innego a dostałam... dużo religijności, dużo gadania o niczym i wartką akcję na ostatnich 40 stronach. Nie jest zła, jest bardzo pomysłowa i niestandardowa, ale czy dobrze się bawiłam? Przez środkowe 300 stron - nie. Ale nie odradzam, to było dość ciekawe doswiadczenie 🤷🏼‍♀️
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 André Oliveira
 169 reviews 56 followers
 January 11, 2020
 I wasn't ready for this book. WOW

 I mean, this was awesome! It took me one month into the year to finally rate my first 5* book of 2019.

 I don't want to say a lot about this book, but:

 Earth is dying. Humans leave Earth. Humans find a world terraformed prepared for life, WITH SPIDERS.
 Don't go into this book thinking that this is an action book with a lot of "Humans killing Spiders". It is so much more than that.

 The scope of this story is unbelievably huge and it addresses some unexpected themes.

 The only downside of this story is that it took me some time to connect with the characters. But I think it makes sense in this story and I won't say anything else about it.

 If you love science-fiction, please, give this book a try.

 Some kind of sequel is coming out in May, Children of Ruin , and I couldn't be more excited!!
 sci-fi
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 Robyn
 827 reviews 132 followers
 October 23, 2015
 Five stars because this puppy had me rooting for arachnids. Five stars for carefully crafted characters, humans and otherwise alike. Five stars because of the incredible, millennia- spanning plot. Five stars because of that ENDING! Not what I expected and so satisfying.
 2015
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 Jilly
 1,838 reviews 6,160 followers
 June 28, 2020
 Once we get the whole space-travel thing going, what is the best idea that we should prioritize, as a species? Well, it turns out that future-us thinks that we need to set-up a new planet with super-intelligent monkeys ruling it. Because, apparently, future-us never saw a movie. Or are such dumbasses that we took the worst idea possible and decided to run with that.


 See? Now, this is a good idea. There's a big difference.

 But, luckily someone realized that maybe they didn't want to doom us all to be monkey-slaves someday and did the most reasonable thing to stop this from happening: they killed all the monkeys. Now, I'm not a big monkey-lover in general. They are a little too gross for my liking. Give me a baby seal, or a squirrel, or bunny over a stinking monkey any day, but couldn't there possibly have been a better way to stop this thing than burning all the monkeys up? It wasn't their idea. Why should they suffer for some idiot scientist's terrible idea? I mean, come on, Earthlings? You used to be cool. (Okay, not now, but I'm assuming somewhere along the line.)

 So, the monkeys are dead but the super-intelligence virus was already released upon the planet, and.... well, I guess you all know what has to happen.... that's right, super-intelligent spiders. Oh, and they are giant too for some reason, cuz why the hell not? When it's FUBAR, might as well go balls to walls.


 Oh yeah, this is great. Nothing can possibly go wrong here.

 Shockingly, we eventually destroy our own planet and have to send out spaceships with the last of humanity to find one of those habitable planets we discovered way back when. But, you know, nobody actually knows about the spider-thing. yeah. That's not gonna bite us in the ass.


 Or maybe it will. Literally.

 This book is a long epic tale of the evolution of the spider-planet and the last hope for the survival of mankind. Thousands of years of history is written in alternating chapters of each species. It is surprisingly fascinating. Like, I can't believe I liked this thing, but it was amazing. The spiders start out as neanderachnids and end up a sophisticated race of reasoning beings. But, we watch them go through things like the beginnings of self-awareness, to building a religion, to building cities and civilizations. You forget that they are disgusting spiders for a while. Then, they do something spidery or talk about their spider bodies and..



 *shudder*

 So, I would say if you are really arachnophobic, you won't want to read it. Since there are no pictures, though, and if you aren't that freaked out by spiders, then you will probably really like this book. It was way better than I thought it would be.
 apocalyptic-post-apocalyptic fucking-brilliant sci-fi
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 Dan Schwent
 2,916 reviews 10.6k followers
 December 29, 2018
 As humanity's fortunes fade, an engineered nanovirus, not finding the monkeys it expected, begins elevating the insects and spiders of an earth-like world. Will it be the humans aboard the space ark Gilgamesh or the spiders of the green planet inherit the universe as... The Children of Time?

 One of the lunch talkers was gushing over this book a few days ago, the rare interruption of my reading I can tolerate. Fortunately, I already had this on my kindle despite no memory of buying it. Anyway, I dug in and was quickly ensnared in its web.

 Childen of Time is told in two silky, sticky threads: the humans aboard the Gilgamesh, with Holsten Mason, a classicist, as the view point character, and generations of uplifted spiders on Kern's World. As such, we see the rise of the spiders, aided by a human-made nanovirus, across generations, as Holsten is awoken to find the Gilgamesh and its people in various states of decline.

 The worldbuilding is exquisite. Adrian Tchaikovsky's spiders are alien yet somehow familiar, not just feeling like humans in different bodies. AT clearly put a lot of thought into his worldbuilding, extrapolating a lot from spider behavior, not just plopping giant spiders down on an earthlike world. The various Portias, Biancas, and Fabians over the generations showed a lot of development and nuances. The spider civilization unfolded in an organic way and I couldn't get enough of it, with its crazy gender politics and technology based around trained ants and genetically encoded information.

 The humans coping aboard the Gilgamesh weren't quite as interesting to me, although some interesting avenues are explored. Life aboard an ark isn't easy, especially when you're repeatedly awakened to find things have gone pear-shaped. The Gilgamesh's crew and cargo undergo some interesting reversals of fortune, some expected, others not.

 By the time the two narrative threads entangled, I knew which side I wanted to come out on top. Tchaikovsky kept me guessing, though, right up until the end.

 Children of Time features lots of things I find compelling in science fiction: artificial intelligence, evolved bugs, and generation ships, albeit unintentional. For once, I'm glad someone interrupted my lunchtime reading. Five out of five stars.
 2018 2018-books
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 Apatt
 507 reviews 779 followers
 March 30, 2018
 “ Children of Time: Winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award ”. Most cumbersome book title ever (this is the full title of the edition I bought). Why did the publisher have to tag the award thing on the book’s original title? Fortunately, on the bright side, this is my only complaint about this book!

 This book takes David Brin ’s “uplift” concept and really runs with it. In Brin’s popular Uplift series , humanity have used technology to boost the intellect of selected species of animals to sentience level. I can’t quite remember the reason behind this, presumably to make them more useful and for other, more magnanimous, purposes. Indeed there is a direct tribute to Brin in Children of Time , in the form a little spaceship called Brin 2. However, the emphasis of the novel is not about the uplifting itself, but about the accidental sentient species that arise from the project and its subsequent interaction with humanity.

 The original idea was to uplift monkeys to sentient levels through an infection of an engineered “nanovirus”, and put them on a habitable planet, but someone sabotaged that project and all the monkeys are killed. However, the nanovirus is sent to the intended planet and infects several species of insects instead. Spiders turn out to be the chief beneficiaries of this project as the virus is most effective on them. This starts off one of the two main narrative threads which chronicles the rise of the spider race as the ruler of the planet. The other narrative thread concerns a group of humans fleeing from Earth which is destroyed by a final world war, on an “ark ship” called “Gilgamesh”. This massive spaceship is carrying working crew and thousands of people in suspended animation, to be defrosted when a habitable planet is found. Unfortunately the only habitable they manage to find, after hundreds of years and generations of crew have come and gone, is the nice planet now ruled by the spiders.


 Wonderful Polish edition cover

 It has been a busy month so it took me almost three weeks to finish. Somehow it makes me appreciate the book even more as my constant companion to many places. The narrative is quite interesting from the first chapter and as characters, situations and world building are gradually laid down it becomes increasingly compelling, by the end of the book I was completely riveted. While the humans and spiders plotlines are given about equal time I was much more fascinated by the spiders, the culture, language and technology they develop after receiving their “increased cognitive capacity”. The spider protagonists are also very well developed, and quite admirable. I love sci-fi biotechnology, organic devices, homes and transportations. It is fascinating how the development spiders’ technology takes a different path from the humans, due to lack of metals and electricity. Their tech is based on hyper advanced biochemistry instead. I love how their society is ruled by the female, and the physically weaker and less intelligent males are generally disposable second class citizens. That is until a radical and messianic male spider comes along.

 The human side of the story is less fascinating but it never drags down the narrative. Their state of affairs is quite pitiful compared to the spiders. They spend hundreds of years on board “the Gilgamesh”, key figures going in and out of suspended animation as needed. Generations are born on the spaceship and never set foot on a planet. The ark ship becomes a “generation ship” even though it was never designed to be used as one and the living conditions on board become rather cramped as the on board population expands. This being the case their need to settle on the spider’s planet is understandable. Unfortunately the humans believe in the cold logic of a concept called “the prisoner’s’ choice” which is based on mutual distrust because the cost of betrayal would mean complete annihilation. As the humans and the spiders head for collision that would result in genocide of one side or the other I found myself curiously rooting for the spiders; mainly because the spider characters are generally better developed and they do have the moral high ground of being the invadees , not the invaders. Thematically it is mainly a story of racial prejudice and a plea for tolerance, with both sides thinking that there is a necessity to completely wipe out the other side for the survival of the race.

 Whatever the outcome Children of Time is one of the best space operas I have ever read, with a nice and clear writing style and a straightforward linear structure of the twin plotlines that make the book very accessible. The sci-fi tech is highly imaginative and the science behind it is clearly explained without resorting to infodumping; some very good characterization, thrilling plot developments and a very good ending makes this one of the greats for me. Highly recommended.

 Notes:
 • In spite of the title this book has nothing to do with time travelling.

 • In some ways, parts of this book are like Watership Down for spiders, and that is high praise! It may also be Charlotte's Web for adults? I haven't read that one, but my spider-sense says yes. It also reminds me a little bit of a computer game called Sim Ant.

 • Tchaikovsky's study of psychology and zoology stand him in good stead here (he is also a keen amateur entomologist). Interestingly his fantasy series Shadows of the Apt is also based on insects. TBR'd!


 Quotes:
 “There had been those back on Earth who claimed the universe cared, and that the survival of humanity was important, destined, meant. They had mostly stayed behind, holding to their corroding faith that some great power would weigh in on their behalf if only things became so very bad.”

 “The enemy they face is the child of a technology she cannot conceive of, advanced beyond the dreams of her own kind’s greatest scientists, using a technology of metal and fire and lighting, all fit tools for vengeful deities. At her disposal is fragile silk, biochemistry and symbiosis, and the valour of all those who will put their lives at her disposal.”

 “Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”

 “That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”

 “I consider CoT to be an outreach program for literate-minded arachnophobics :) There has been a pleasant number of readers who really don't like spiders but (a) have got through the book; and (b) have come out of it willing to give the little guys the benefit of the doubt. Of course now I need to stealth-write a book that has spiders as utterly horrible people-destroying bad guys just to utterly throw my readership...”
 From Adrian Tchaikovsky's Reddit AMA .
 favorites sci-fi
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 Zoeytron
 1,036 reviews 667 followers
 June 21, 2020
 Well, it finally happened. Earth can no longer sustain life, having frozen over, then morphing into an oozing toxic thaw. The possibility of mankind becoming extinct is all too real, and plans have been in place for a relocation to a more welcoming sphere. It should have been ready when the spaceship arrived with its precious cargo of humans. But where have all the monkeys gone? This planet is host to evolutionized spiders. So many eyes, so many legs. Striking parallels are spun, the differences between arachnids and humans, and in some ways, the sameness. Intricate webs for communication, sticky strands and knotted ties to restrict. Basic, yet effective. The spider culture is fascinating, travelers and spitters, a mysterious crystal and its secrets, electronic life. And fire ants!
 public-library
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 Algernon (Darth Anyan)
 1,492 reviews 958 followers
 January 15, 2016

 This is the future.
 This is where mankind takes its next step.
 This is where we become gods.

 Science has given mankind the tools to travel to distant stars, to terraform their planets and to play with the building blocks of life : genetics.
 It sounds like a dream come true, an utopian future in which everything is possible.
 In practice, the deployment of miraculous scientific discoveries from the laboratory to the real world is fraught with the same issues that have plagues past generations : greed, selfishness, religious intolerance, thirst for power, irresponsible behaviour. Instead of agents of progress, scientists turn into agents of destruction. Utopias become Distopias.

 Adrian Tchaikovsky explores this deep divide between idealistic dreams and grim reality in two directions:

 - artificially accelerated evolution of a population through a nanotechnology, synthetic 'smart' virus
 - social degradation in a multi-generational arcology : a slower than lightspeed ship transporting the frozen survivors of a planetary holocaust.

 It's been done before, but Tchaikovsky manages to be here both traditional and original. The story reminds me of the golden age SF in its mostly positive atitude towards science, in looking at the big picture rather than at the lives of the individuals, in tracking social movements through the lens of technological progress, in its plain, clear-cut storytelling and often unidimensional characters.

 The originality of the project comes from the same passion of the author that made his fantasy epic special : Tchaikovsky is really keen on his arthropods. "Shadows of the Apt" is populated by a wide range of different nations that share insect and human traits. "Children of Time" invites us to view the world through alien eyes that share a lot of common features with Earth's spiders. This almost obsession with the insect world is giving Thhaikovsky an edge over his fellow writers through the huge diversity of the regnum, a much richer source of inspiration that the usual human shaped aliens. I know that for me, as a photographer, it is always fascinating to turn a macro lens on even the most common specimens of these arthropods, and that a close up look at their multifaceted eyes or at the shapes of mandibles and antennas will make me think of aliens living unnoticed among us humans.

 They are among the most diverse groups of animals on the planet, including more than a million described species and representing more than half of all known living organisms.

 "Children of Time" managed to keep my interest and to make me turn the pages faster and faster especially in its alien half of the story, mostly by this originality in perspective. I was never afraid of spiders, not even as a kid. I was more wary of dogs and chickens than of bugs. I know though that many readers would exclaim in disgust if I insist on repeating that this is a story about huge, intelligent, predatory spiders . I was already a fan of the author before his move from fantasy to SF, but this new story reinforced his position among my favorites. It's not easy to keep a good balance between action and exposition and emotionally charged characterization, especially if you have no familiar frame of reference for your social and economic structures and you have to start anew with the main actors after each generational change. The novel covers a multi-millenial timespan yet, despite all the inherent problems of such a large frame, it works like clockwork, even in the final blending together of the two main streams : human and alien.

 I am about no namedrop one of the biggest names in SF : Isaac Asimov. In the "Foundation" series, Asimov also uses a multigenerational approach that allows him to study history through the engines of science and technology, explaining wars, gender roles, growth and decay in relation to the discoveries of positronic brains or mathematical formulas that explain Fate and Chance. Tchaikovsky has his nanotechnology virus that can change a whole society from hunters/gatherers to intelligent predators, through commerce and military conquest to a modern society of scientists and artists. This alien evolution is not without its own mishaps and wrong turns in the path to the future. It starts with the promise of a mad dreamer:

 We will seed the universe with all the wonders of the Earth.

 ... a dreamer Mad Scientist who conveniently forgets that these wonders, monitored from outer space, manifest like global warming, oceans of plastic garbage, deforestation and desertification, global wars, famine and crippling poverty, indigent species hunted to extinction. Both the aliens on their terraformed planet and the humans in their multi-generational ark demonstrate that this dismal list is very close to the true heritage of humanity. Yet Tchaikovsky is also prone to remember that at the bottom of Pandora's Box there is a feeble thing called Hope. The future is not already written down, despite the claims of psychohistory and prophets of doom, and thus my last quotations from what turned out to be one of the best (SF) novels of 2015:

 Nothing. No promises. The universe promises us nothing.
 Things are the way we make them.
 2016
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 Scott
 290 reviews 298 followers
 September 30, 2019
 Hey you! Yeah you - the person reading this review!

 Stop reading. No really, if you’re a Science Fiction fan stop reading this review right now . You don’t need to. You’re going to LOVE this book. It’s going to rock your world. It’s fricking amazing. That’s all you need to know.

 Now, go, git, skeddadle, whatever, just RUN to a bookshop, as fast as you can. Get this book, then call in sick at work. Ignore your family. Turn your back on your adult responsibilities. Do what you have to do to get some serious quality time with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s bloody brilliant novel.

 What? You’re still here? Really? You need to be convinced to read one of the best science fiction novels of the 21st Century? A book that is a likely in the top fifty of any serious list of the best SF books ever written?

 Ok. Damn. You’re tough. You’re a hard-nosed reader, someone who isn’t just gonna drop some cash after reading some guy's opinion on the internet. I get it. I’m usually like you. I read reviews. I research books for my to-read list. I’m not easily impressed, I’m a bit jaded, perhaps even a touch cynical.

 But Children of Time … this is why I read Science Fiction - to experience books like this one, books that fill me with euphoria at their sheer brilliance, their audacity, their vision.
 I get it though- you need to more than ‘it’s really good’ before you’ll commit. I’ll try to control my rabid enthusiasm for long enough to give you an idea of what you’re in for.

 In the far future, humanity has fallen. An era of almost god-like technological power has passed, and the remaining humans have pulled themselves back up from the wartime devastation of Earth, scrabbled together some comparatively primitive tech, and escaped Earth in a cryo ark. The era of godlike power is so long ago that it approaches myth, and a journey that once took twenty years will now take many centuries.

 At the end of their journey is a world. A world that an entire epoch earlier was terraformed and seeded with life. They hope it will be their new home.

 The crew of this ship include a classicist – Holsten Mason – an expert on the language and history of the old empire, the dictatorial captain, Guyen - a man so obsessed with human preservation that he has become mentally imbalanced, and Lain, the ships chief engineer. As the ship travels across the millennia, the people awake from their sleep to meet challenges, sleep again, wake, and so on - hopping across time, losing touch with the universe outside their vessel.

 But the world they are travelling to is not as they think it is.

 This planet – Kern’s World – was seeded with more than life. It was seeded with a virus designed to accelerate evolution, to raise apes to human-level sentience, and it is being watched.

 The world’s namesake - Doctor Avrana Kern - is trapped above the planet in a tiny satellite, incrementally losing her mind while she waits for her apes below her to evolve far enough to respond to radio signals.

 But there are no apes. They all died entering while their ship entered the atmosphere. Instead, the virus is slowly raising the intelligence of various species on the planet, the most successful of which is a type of Spider…

 Yep, arachnophobes beware - Kern’s world is home to an evolving civilization of intelligent spiders.
 And what a civilization. Tchaikovsky deftly paints with a palette of thousands of years, showing a society evolving and growing in fascinating and enthralling detail. Following the many descendants of one of the first spiders to become more aware he takes readers into a society that is unique among all the SF novels I have read.

 It’s a total trip, filled with wonder and even humor, as Tchaikovsky uses the matriarchal nature of insect societies to make some deft allegories to patriarchal human structures (in one example, the murder of smaller male spiders by larger females for fun is palmed off by a protagonist as ‘girls will be girls’.)

 All the while of course, the human refugee ship draws closer, making conflict between humanity and their strange, lost children inevitable.

 This juxtaposition, of the last days of a desperate and dying intelligent species (us!) with the evolution of another life-form from tiny, almost mindless insects into intelligent, civilized beings is the core of the narrative, and it’s heady, wonderful stuff.

 The story twists and turns, avoiding SF clichés and forging its own unique path, leaving me genuinely surprised (and just a little giddy) by the novel’s end.

 Anyway, now back to effusive praise and un-restrained recommendation:

 If you like SF, if you like great storytelling and if you like having your mind and imagination expanded then you really must read this book - this guy is a major talent.

 Now get out there and find yourself a copy!


 Five giant, scary (yet thoughtful) spiders out of five.
 science-fiction
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 William Gwynne
 353 reviews 1,448 followers
 July 21, 2021
 I now have a YouTube channel that I run with my brother, called 'The Brothers Gwynne'. Check it out - The Brothers Gwynne


 My expanded review of this great book is now on BookNest... Children of Time Review

 “That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”

 Children of Time is my first delving into the genre of science fiction, and it served as a great introduction. When I began, I found it a bit mind-boggling because of the technical space language and sophisticated technology. But as the story progressed, I soon acclimatised to this aspect and it did not become as demanding or distracting as I first thought.

 There are some wonderfully unique aspects to this book, which I have been told cannot be compared to any other sci-fi, because of how different it is. One such idea is exploring evolution, and following the journey of this progression with different animals, in this case being a number of insect species...
 It was so interesting and fun and novel that it cemented itself as my favourite part of the book, as I found myself disappointed every time a chapter finished with this PoV.

 “Humanity is overrated”

 It took a while to get into the other PoV, who was a human on a spaceship that carries the rest of humanity. This was partly due to the technical part that I mentioned earlier, and also because there was not as much action. But when the plot started rolling, I was also looking forward to this part of the story, because of the cultural challenges presented, the fantastic prose that Tchaikovsky writes with, the unique ideas, and so many other reasons.

 There is a very small cast of named characters, definitely not over 15 in total. This is extremely different to what I am used to, but it served well to strengthen those bonds with the characters that are present, and allowed another level of depth to be added to these as they earned more page time.

 So once again, Children of Time was a great introduction to the genre, and I am sure that I will continue onto its sequel at some point, and also some other science fiction, starting with Dune.
 reviewed sci-fi
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 Peter Tillman
 3,611 reviews 324 followers
 November 28, 2021
 The good news: $1 ebook at Amazon (Nope: now 10 bucks!(2021))
 The bad news: I started it at the end of last year (2017), read to 62% and stalled out. When I picked it up again, I found I had no wish whatever to continue. It's a pretty ramshackle affair, and I'm surprised it won a major award. Not for me!

 Here's Claudia's 1-star review:
 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
 I didn't hate it quite as much as she did. But it's pretty bad. Read her review before you try the book, and a few of the other 1 and 2-star writeups. Then read something else, is my advice.
 "It's a sin to waste the reader's time" -- Larry Niven

 Here's Ann Leckie's writeup, which led me to read it:
 https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
 did-not-finish not-for-me own-copy
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 Justine
 1,130 reviews 309 followers
 November 29, 2017
 An absolutely brilliant and fantastically imaginative piece of science fiction. This is one of the best books I've read this year.
 2015-read favourites
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 Lena K.
 62 reviews 126 followers
 December 5, 2018
 DNF 40%

 I just… didn’t like it. I didn’t feel any sympathy for any of the characters, human or otherwise. I mean, the concept of a virus that’s speeding up and directing evolution sounds captivating enough. It’s just, that in my opinion, it was poorly executed. I simply didn’t care about those creatures and their problems. The writing about them was distant and ‘scientific’, while I expected it to be less disconnected, I guess.

 Let’s start from the very beginning (no spoilers here – it’s in the first or second chapters); The Human race is super advanced technologically and has colonies in space and on other planets – it uses very advanced AI and some scientists want to create smart servants from monkeys, using the mentioned above virus. WHY would they want to do that instead of just creating some robots?! Beats me… Have some mercy on those creatures!

 Then there are these terrorists that are against messing up with mother nature, which are called NUNs. Hah! Nice wordplay there! (it means - Non Ultra Natura). So, the NUNs have had enough! They start a war and basically annihilate all humanity’s space colonies. Using a computer virus. Yes, you heard right. All humanity is almost wiped out because of a computer virus, which shuts their systems and they suffocate and die in space. HOW IN THE HELL?? I mean really, haven’t you heard about antiviruses, firewalls, compartmentalization of critical systems? No? ok… then Hasta La Vista Humanity. That’s just lazy writing. It was an exposition, but even it must make sense.

 As I mentioned, I didn’t like or even sympathize with any of the characters. Not with the modified creatures, not with the crazy scientist that did everything possible to have her experiment carry on. Not with the human survivors, who obviously shoot each other in a spaceship. Guys and gals, you’re it, you’re what the human race depends on to find a place for it to survive. And what do you do? YOU START TO SHOOT AT EACH OTHER. IN A SPACESHIP. IN SPACE. Have some common sense, or better yet, just go instinct if you behave like that. Facepalm.

 I did kind of liked the Classicist who discovered that a dead language doesn’t sound like the scholars speculated it did in real life. And I liked the monkeys. Which were absent, which was a good thing, because they didn’t spoil the book for me :)

 Monkey quote:
 “She had sold it to the people back home by describing how colonists would reach the planet then, descending from the skies like deities to meet their new people. Instead of a harsh, untamed world, a race of uplifted sentient aides and servants would welcome their makers. That was what she had told the boardrooms and the committees back on Earth, but it had never been the point of the exercise for her. The monkeys were the point, and what they would become.”
 dnf science-fiction
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3,456 reviews9,600 followers     January 4, 2021    UPDATE: $2.99 Kindle US 1/4/21 Holy guacamole! This book rocked!  I had a feeling I would like this book but hells bells, I had no idea how much I would love it.  You have Earth that is pretty much going to pot, then goes to pot because of some stuff. Then people wake up a million years later on their ships. Well, okay not a million but still.  So there is space!    There is a new planet that continued to make itself from the start of terra forming many years ago &lt; -- I don't think I spelled that right but we all know what it means. They were working on making the planet livable.  AND . . .  we have freaking . . .  SPIDERS!    and I liked Portia, she was the main spider and they are like no other spiders. Dudes and dudettes, this book is like no other I have read. YOU might have, but I have not.  Loved it, looks nice on my shelf with one of his other books. I'm a happy camper.  Mel ♥     own               530 reviews58.4k followers     January 4, 2020   I adore the first contact with aliens trope so when I heard this was essentially the remanent of humanity vs intelligent spiders I jumped on it. Very unique and the ending took me pleasantly by surprise.I never thought I would end up rooting for spiders... but I did!  A must read!                   Author  6 books3,960 followers     October 27, 2015   There's something wildly giddy welling up within me, and I blame it entirely on this book.There have been a couple of brilliant SF titles to come out this year and I would swear belong on the Hugo list, and this is yet one more. Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora was one, as was Scott Hawkins's The Library at Mount Char, but if I had to break down the individual merits of each, I might wind up saying that this one deserves it the most. For pure SF, it hits the heights of ideas, memorable characters, exploration, and message, although the message is definitely not one that is apparent until the end. It has all the hallmarks of a good classic SF tale, and I was reminded every step of the way of John Brunner's The Crucible of Time, with the bringing up of an alien society from its primitive roots to space exploration, the wild quest of humanity trying to survive it's own stupidity in over ten thousand years of desperate Ark travel, and throw into the mix a great mad cyborg/AI god/scientist who's belief system gets sorely challenged.  If all that isn't enough to perk you up, then how about a society of biopunk spiders learning to tame themselves and their world with the propelling help of a nanovirus designed to uplift an entirely different species, but lacking those poor monkeys, had to make due with some jumping spiders from old Earth? Oh yeah. Now we're talking. From page one we get a precious nod to David Brin for his wonderful Uplift series, but right as we begin to suspect that it's a rip-off, everything goes to hell. I call that an auspicious beginning. And then we get slices of alien life complete with great self-contained stories, with nothing worthless to the grand over-tale being spun, including the war and eventual domestication of deadly intelligent army ants, the fight for the poor male spider's rights (who don't appreciate being eaten after mating), and the eventual discovery that the original scientist that had seeded the world with the nanovirus, who still lived as a cyborg, was not, in fact, a god. And if that isn't enough, let's get to know the human side of the equation. They've had a rough time climbing back out of a dark age only to discover that the Earth is a complete shit hole and there's nothing left to be saved. They rose on the backs of the dead society that had brought humanity to this pass and went out to search for a new home. Unfortunately, everything has gone to shit except this one little paradise that's defended by a mad cyborg god who thinks that humans are shit. (And she's right.) She'll protect her precious project from anything that dares disturb it. Great conflict ensues.  My god this was a great book. I had a bit of a learning curve in the first few dozen pages getting over the somewhat sparse writing, but there's a purpose to it. A hell of a lot has to happen to build such an enormous tale without stretching it out into a dozen equivalent and impoverished books. In this one novel, we get everything. It's brilliant. I'll revisit this review at a later time and see if it still captures my imagination as much as the other Hugo Possibles, but my mind wants to put all my bets on this one. The flaws in Aurora, despite the brilliant setup, message, and end, are just enough to push it down a rung for me. Library at Mount Char was mostly dark fantasy with a damn huge nod at turning it into a real SF title, and I still think it's awesome and mythic, but if I had to choose between something that's obviously SF to the core and beyond and a great book that has more in common with American Gods and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, (both of which won Hugos in their years despite being fantasies), then I'd choose Children of Time. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to sit on the fence. Having to choose between two novels that are very different in scope, writing, and characterizations is a hell of a thing. Both are fantastic at what they do. I cried during both. I'll just have to revisit my memories later to be certain. Oh, there is one more thing I need to mention. I hate the title.  It does absolutely NOTHING to enumerate how fucking awesome this epic SF is. Fans of any classic SF need to read this gem. It has a hell of a lot more flow to it, and just as much idea exploration as anything written by Alastair Reynolds. Go get it. Now.     biopunk fanboy-goes-squee sci-fi               1,530 reviews7,851 followers     February 7, 2017    Sympathetic spiders? Inconceivable! –I do not think that word means what you think it means–  Nope, in this case, it pretty much does. It's not that I have a spider-phobia--I like to think we have a truce regarding squishing and biting--it's that something about their structure and movement speaks to a primeval instinct to run away.  Children of Time popped up in friend reviews, but I'll be honest--it wasn't until I realized there were giant spiders and colony ships that I really became intrigued. I am usually interested in the moving island of space colonization, and the inclusion of what seemed to be genuine aliens piqued my curiosity. Could it be done? Could an author really give an alien feel and yet remain sympathetic to creatures that inspire such fear? Yes and yes. Aside from that general set-up, I went into Children blind. Tchaikovsky structures the premise and then alternates the narrative between the two species. Once settled into the story-telling rhythm, he adds another wrinkle. I appreciate the way he told the story, easing the reader in and then building on the concepts. The human narrative tends to be more dialogue oriented, the spider-narrative more internal. It makes for an interesting pace change that might have dragged had the entire book been one style or the other.  "She feels fear, a building anxiety that makes her stamp her feet and twitch her palps. Her people are more suited to offence than defence, but they have been unable to retain the initiative in this conflict. She will have to improvise. There is no plan for what comes next. She may die, and her eyes look into that abyss and feed her with a terror of extinction, of un-being, that is perhaps the legacy of all life."  Characterization proved rather intriguing, particularly at first. I thought the feel of primitive spider-thinking rather believable, and appreciated the structuring of a very different world-view. I ended up believing the premise enough to enjoy the story and not feel hampered by arguing the science in my head. Also interestingly--particularly in a genre known for its sexism--the tendency of some female spiders to eat the males after mating is turned toward matriarchic ends. I was also intrigued by the spiders' interaction with other beings on the world, as well as how they are characterized.  "She knows that individual ants themselves cannot be treated with, communicated with or even threatened. Her comprehension is coarse, of a necessity, but approximates to the truth. Each ant does not think. It has a complex set of responses based on a wide range of stimuli, many of which are themselves chemical messages produced by other ants in response to still more eventualities."  Writing is solid. It is complex enough to convey cognitive concepts of world-view as well as philosophical underpinnings of what intelligence and interconnectivity is. I didn't overtly realize it as I read, but I think there were parallel discussions of what humanity means and aims for, a particularly worthwhile topic for our time.  "The more he learned of them, the more he saw them not as spacefaring godlike exemplars, as his culture had originally cast them, but as monsters: clumsy, bickering, short-sighted monsters... In trying to be the ancients, they had sealed their own fate--neither to reach those heights, nor any others, doomed instead to a history of mediocrity and envy."  I do think Tchaikovsky loses his way somewhat near the last third of the book. Still, it ended up being a book full of unexpected twists and turns. Most worked. A few did not, and I remain ambivalent about the ending. However, there were also moments when I thought, "this reminds me of Ursula LeGuin and one of her world-building, sci-fi masterpieces." A good story, intriguing world-building and a layered exploration of humanity and civilization. Overall, I'd definitely recommend it to someone who is in the mood for classic-feeling science fiction with modern sensibilities. Four and a half webs, rounding up because it deserves recognition for Big Ideas, not because it's screaming to be included in my personal library.     animals-and-people classic et-phone-home               954 reviews532 followers     February 16, 2018   Hard science fiction = a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific accuracy or technical detail or both. Just to be sure what are we talking about.The detailed info about Portia, the jumping spider and Scytodes, the spitting spider are as accurate as they can be, no doubt here. In fact, there is an entire chapter at the beginning with characterizations of both species, which is, after all, fascinating, but non-fiction. So, nothing new. (BTW, all this info about the spiders is on Wikipedia). The story line: on another planet, Dr. Kern initiated an experiment on a new terraformed planet.  On the other hand, the two main human factions on Earth, those in favor and against nanotechnology and the like, manage the performance to almost destroy the Earth. There are survivors but all the knowledge and technology of their ancestors is lost (how much time did pass between the experiment above and the war we don’t know, but appears not too long. However, they are called ancestors and from the old empire or something…). But - there is a big BUT: they had built a few arks (space ships) in which they gathered the survivors and the long trip in finding another Earth begins. How did they build those arks if they had no tech, no knowledge and no resources left?! Ok, moving on. The key crew wakes after 1800 years when they arrive near the planet in question and discover the ship in which Dr. Kern is still guarding her planet, half mad. And the ones from the ark are amazed by the technology (they being in a space ship capable of interstellar travels, remember?). Should I go on? No. I forced myself to read up to 52% and then I went straight to the last chapter and guess what: exactly what I have imagined.Where is the hard science fiction? All the info thrown into the story is disjointed. The various ideas contradict one another. And I can give a lot of other nonsense ideas but I already bored myself… And the writing is so flat; just words thrown to fill the pages; endless explanations; absurd development; moron characters; etc.I’ll stop here. I’m rarely so virulent about a story, given the fact that I have the utmost respect for writers. It’s not minor deal to be able to create a world of words. But I had such a big disappointment with this one, given all the five stars rating it has. Too much hype behind it with no real ground.     sci-fi utterly-disappointing               672 reviews42.6k followers     October 31, 2017    Smart and imaginative, highly recommended for everyone who loves Sci-Fi and not recommended for anyone with arachnophobia. Children of Time is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s first Sci-Fi and also my first experience with his work. This is a highly praised book, it won Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel in 2016 and most likely, will be 5 stars read for anyone who has never read anything like it. Plus, for even more praise, the film rights to the book has also been sold to Lionsgate.  It’s a great story. The plot revolved around the race for survival between races on attaining a single terraformed planet; The races being the last surviving humanity that fled their dying Earth, and the sentient spiders accidentally evolved by a mad scientist; these beings were born and live on the planet.  Picture: Children of Time (Polish cover)    This standalone encompassed a lot of relatable topics to our society such as gender discrimination, greed, and on the bright side, empathy. It’s unique and epic, with tale spanning between generations to generations. Unfortunately for me, I have read something very similar to this in a manga called Terra Formars and because of that, my experience on this was a bit ruined. The premise of this book with that particular manga is very similar, with the differences being the planet is Mars and the sentient creatures are cockroaches. It’s not fair for me to compare the topic unrelated form of speculative fiction but I want you to first look at this gif so I can explain my reasoning. (Warning: gory scene ahead)   That, ladies and gentleman is a sentient evolved cockroach killing humans. This somehow affected me into thinking that this standalone will be action-packed because of the similar premise; it’s not. Children of Time plot direction is almost the total opposite. I expected more interaction between the two species but they happened only twice throughout the entire book, one very briefly too. I also felt the entire middle section from the alien’s side felt a bit boring; it was a bit too long and felt like learning biology and history from a textbook because there’s almost no dialogue on it. Finally, I don’t think it was necessary to divide the prose for the two races POV’s, the human side was written in past tense while the alien side was written in present tense; this made their stories felt disconnected to me. I may sound a bit too negative here. This is because up until the 80% section of the book, I totally felt like this is a 3 stars book at best. However, I was wrong. The author has saved everything for the last 20% of the book and it was brilliant. No loose ends, the conclusion of this book was truly incredible and made all my struggle through the middle section of the book worth it. Knowing that this is the author’s first Sci-Fi, I foresee a very bright future ahead of him. I highly recommend this to every Sci-Fi fans but not to anyone with arachnophobia; because.. sentient spiders.  For anyone who loved this book and wants something more epic, I recommend reading Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Cixin Liu. Trust me, the last book of that trilogy made everything this book looks like an ant regarding its scope.  You can find  this  and the rest of my Adult Epic/High Fantasy &amp; Sci-Fi reviews at  BookNest                      310 reviews1,325 followers     May 8, 2019   I received a review copy of Children of Time in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Adrian Tchaikovsky and Pan Macmillan for the opportunity. Children of Time is 600-pages of extraordinary, evolution-based science fiction that features quality storytelling and worldbuilding that is rarely seen in this generation. This narrative is set over 1000's of years. We first see Doctor Kern and her scientific team of 19 as they wish to experiment with monkeys and a nanovirus on what some individuals are considering could be the new Earth. After betrayal and confrontation on their spaceship, which may be reflecting hostilities back on Earth events don't progress in the way that they envisaged. The action mainly follows two very different perspectives. The first is the views of a human classicist named Holsten who has travelled for two millennia to the above-mentioned planet after the end of Earth. He is onboard the spaceship Gilgamesh with the remnants of the human race and spends most of his years frozen and therefore not aging. The crew members are only awakened when their duties permit it necessary so our first contact with the human ensemble is when they are approaching the said planet. The crew features the needed components to create a new future including commanders, engineers, soldiers, intellects, etc... It transpires that the planet they are looking to land on is already occupied and it isn't by the highly evolved monkeys as was planned. This brings me to the second perspective which is written from the point of view of spiders - a species that are also receptive to the advancements in evolution that the nanovirus presents. This complication was not accounted for and may be problematic. We follow the spiders as they evolve over 100's of generations and the way it is written is truly unique. The main spiders we follow are Portia, Bianca, and Fabian. They don't live to be 1000's of years old, instead, we follow the original characters' relatives through different generations as the spiders evolve. They may share the same name but often have very different personalities. There is also a third perspective that is from a human/machine/satellite/messenger/God viewpoint and she is very protective of 'her planet' and does not wish for the humans to land. It's a superbly original tale in the way it is presented.  Often, science fiction stories that I read are overly complex with tech-lingo and it sometimes feels like the author is trying to prove how smart he is. In the first few pages of Children of Time, I thought it would be the same again. However, after the first chapter or two, it became crystal clear that this is a novel where the story, characters, and development are the top priority. It is beautifully written, and has been extremely well researched and is expertly paced. Children of Time is packed full of highs and lows. Who could have known I'd care about the death of a revolutionary hero giant-spider? The spiders' society throughout various stages of evolution is intensely detailed and complex, still the way the species progress feels organic and natural although before this narrative I'd have never considered how a spider community would behave. Turns out they're pretty damn sexist!  For quite a lengthy book I was reading this at a blistering pace. Chapters tend to be between 10-20 pages so it was always tempting to just read one more which soon became another 100 pages. Especially the last 100 pages with I devoured in one breathless sitting. It features an insane space battle and I could never have imagined reading something of the sort when I first picked this up. The ending is intense, unpredictable, but highly satisfying. When I finished reading this story the first thought I had upon reflection was that there is no way I could be an author because I could never write anything this good so what would be the point? It's one of the best science fiction books I've ever read and I've already started Children of Ruin. A+ Recommended.     sci-fi               1,194 reviews2,583 followers     January 28, 2023   Re-read and What can I say? I loved everything about it! I can't believe I had given it only 4.65 stars the first time around. It is a full  5* and maybe some plusses:)  The intricacies of the world building, both in the human and spider communities, was brilliant! The attention to detail, the thought that went in the communication, the way the one group evolved and the other devolved, the differences and the commonalities, the little gestures and the big, overwhelming occasions, just so good!!! *** 4.65 ***  
 "... ““You can never know. That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.” ...
  I wanted to read this book only because it was recommended to me by a friend. I never expected to love it so much, despite never having read anything by the author. Boy am I glad I read it!  I was raised on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Every week my family would receive in the mail the newest Sci-Fi publication and we would all fight over who is going to read it first, although we all knew my dad would be first, then my mom, if she was interested, and then would be my turn. My favorite of those were the ones with deep and logical connection to the Science side of the fiction, not so much the ones with the space battles and soap-operas in space kind of stories. I loved the real plausible what-ifs that came with books taking the known of Physics and Biology and building them up into strange and irregular ways, but still creating worlds and creatures whose existence and creation we could follow in a somewhat logical way, thinking that yeah, given just the right conditions, this could actually happen and what could we, us humans, do about it.  Well, "Children of Time " is just this kind of book! The author has done his research into the biology of Arachnids and insects, putting them in a newly terraformed world with virgin ecosystem created to support life deriving from our Earth, mix in a Nano-Virus as a variable which acts as an accelerator for neuro-development and intelligence, and a catalyst for critically important markers of useful growth and useless excess of abilities, thus crafting a positive growth of individuals in a communal culture with always expending intellect and talents. Final result - Giant Intelligent Spiders!!!!   
 "... “The act of courtship is consummated as a public ritual, where the hopeful males – in their moment of prominence – perform in front of a peer group, or even the whole city, before the female chooses her partner and accepts his package of sperm. She may then kill and eat him, which is thought to be a great honour for the victim, although even Portia suspects that the males do not quite see it that way.” ...
  Yep, not a planet for those who have an uncomfortable relationship with our eight-legged web-weaving friends. Also, not exactly what the scientist who created the Nano-Virus intended to begin with. Our human, very intelligent, and very self-centered Dr. Avrana Kern, created the virus in order to push monkeys to their most extreme intellectual growth through generations. Instead, when the virus was unleashed on the planet, the monkeys and most of the rest of the humans were sabotaged by an opponent to the project and all blew up. Dr. Avrana Kern is the only one left, in a small capsule in space, going in and out of freeze-stasis, waiting for her "creations" to contact her from the planet. During this time, life on Earth self-destructs, thousands of years later humans reemerge, and then once again only a small part of them remain, looking for another planet to settle on, frozen on an Arc ship called Gilgamesh. The spider planet looks like their only chance and the books goes through their battles to get to it and try to take it over.   
 "... “She has improved the lives of her species in a dozen separate ways, for she has a mind that can see answers to problems others did not even realize were holding them back.” ...
  The book timeline measures in thousands of years and it is fascinating to follow the growth of some and the degradation and regression of others. This was done from the points of view of several pivotal characters, of which Portia and all her progeny through the centuries was my favorite. I loved everything about her/them. I loved how important the Classicist Human Holsten and the head engineer of the ship Lain were to the sustaining of the Human population on the Gilgamesh. A person who can sit back and think about communication and how it shapes our relationships with others, be it species, tribes or Peoples. And how vital the knowledge and ability to take care and advance our infrastructure is, when those skills are being overlooked at times of famine as well as at times when our martial or more lofty flights of fancy seem to rule our daily lives. We are reminded of how easy it would be for us to fall into the one or the other category, letting our roots and foundations rot, while our heads are in the clouds...  
 "... “If they were of any quality or caliber, then they would ascend by their own virtues. Not if there was no structure that they could possibly climb. Not if all the structure that exists was designed to disenfranchise them. Portia,” ...
  This book is not just about evolution. It is about understanding our nature and trying to learn from our mistakes, not just following the innate instinct for destruction, cannibalism, and disseminating everything which is different from us, to the point of mortally wounding ourselves. In our superior Humans First and Only ideology, we slowly but surely erode our environment and eventually the environment will strike back, one way or another. Let's hope we don't realize this too late...  
 "... “Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them – not even its own reflection. ” ...
  Now I wish you all Happy Reading and may you always find what you Need in the pages of a good Book!!!     sci-fi-fantasy               404 reviews347 followers     August 11, 2018   Children of Time’ is one of those books one devours obsessively and then mourns once it’s finished. Yes, ‘Children of Time’ is that good.The author acknowledges our implicit arachnophobia and then very cleverly turns it on its head; indeed, after a while you kind of forget that these characters are spiders at all, even when they get stuck in to very spiderish behaviour. Their cities, for example, are great forests festooned with web complexes and, latterly, organic machinery and vehicles. The many versions of the spider society are also resolutely female and this novel is one of the few I can think of that presents a detailed, believable and sympathetic matriarchy. That it is in not in any way a utopia, without seeming unrecognisable or awful either, is another credit to the unapologetic intelligence of this book.     bookclub               577 reviews822 followers     March 28, 2020    “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”  Professor Stephen Hawking  “What have you done with my monkeys?”  Doctor Avrana Kern  I do not sci-fi that much but when I do, I do it only with books that make me cheer for spiders. Adrian Tchaikovsky is famous for infusing his books with themes and motives related to his interests. He studied zoology and psychology. He is also interested in natural history, with particular emphasis on the world of insects. These are the roots of the “Children of Time”, a thrilling story about the fall of one civilisation and the birth of another. Together with human civilisation standing on the verge of destruction, we embark upon a fantastic interstellar travel. A tantalising cosmic odyssey, which takes place over the span of millennia, filled with extraordinary adventures, heroes, and dramatic twists.  1. THE IDEA   “We are the civilisation of transport, waiting to happen somewhere else.”  Human civilisation has found itself on the verge of annihilation. The Earth is no longer habitable and so humanity’s last quest is a search of a planet suitable for settlement. Hundreds of thousands of years pass. A spaceship with the last surviving people finds a place similar to Earth. It turns out that the living conditions on the planet are a result of its terraforming many thousands of years ago. It is but a remnant of a wider experiment aimed at creating an intelligent species able to develop at an accelerated pace. The intention was to create a new, better man. However, not everything went as planned, and the “exalted” ones are not monkeys (or other vertebrates, indeed), but an unassuming species known as portia labiata. Yup, here come the sentient spiders. ( Don’t make my mistake and check the photos. They are absolutely awful!) 2. THE DESIGN   “Why should we be made thus, to improve and improve, unless it is to aspire.”  The narration gives us two perspectives. The first is the one presents the actions of the inhabitants of the last ship-ark with the human cargo, Gilgamesh , trying to find a new planet to settle on. The second one shows the evolution of the spiders, accelerated by a special nanovirus. Consequently, we have one chapter about the human journey through the universe, and another one about the life of spiders on the green planet. Reading the spider civilisation chapters is like watching a National Geographic or a BBC Earth documentary. And I would never expect that the adventures of insects can be so enticing!  To the contrary, human protagonists are a considerable weakness of the book. Holsten, a scholar “at the wrong end of his career” and a historian “at the wrong end of history”, Guyen, a power-obsessed commander, control-hungry and with an utter god-complex, Lain, the engineer turned leader by necessity (come the hour, come the woman), Karst, your regular security tough-guy, or rigid, narrowly-minded scientists - they are all unremarkable, lacking perspicuity, and difficult to bond with.   Pitched against humans, the Portias, Biancas and Fabians, even the Violas of the spider-folk are clear winners. Throughout the thousands of years, we trace the evolving story (and the civilisation) through the (many!) eyes of numerous spiders, for simplicity called by the same names. Just as much as I was quite indifferent to the human figures (I treated them as tools meant to give the spiders time to evolve and at the same time, to push the action forward), I found myself positively cheering for the insects!   3. COSMIC WONDERS AWAIT   “Because she needed to reach out and know there was something she could reach out to.”  The novel was showered with prizes, and rightly so. The rich style of the Mr Tchaikovsky is impressive. “Children of Time” seduces us with an unusual ingenuity of worldbuilding, an intriguing plot, convincing descriptions and an extraordinary ambiance.  Tchaikovsky's tale is a story about the demise of one civilisation and the birth of another. On this very simple, not to say simplistic, premise, the Author creates a brilliant cosmic epos, which contains many key elements that are the driving force of more than one classic science-fiction novel. We have the destruction of humanity, genetic experiments, interstellar journey, fighting for survival with alien forms of life, artificial intelligence, playing the god. Especially gender war in this book is delightful.  It is a novel written with panache, and yet carefully attending to minor details, enriched by the colourful and multifaceted picture of struggles undertaken in the defence and preservation of life, and trials related to overcoming consecutive stages of biological and cultural evolution. It is also a critical vision of the distant inheritors of the Earth, irreversibly poisoning the environment, and thus approaching the point of eliminating their own species. Despite the threat of total extermination, people still cannot get rid of deadly social mechanisms and habits, nurturing the inspiration to remain masters of the whole universe against all odds.  4. THE ORPHANS OF TIME   “You claim to be human. Go be human elsewhere.”  It is evident that for Mr Tchaikovsky, humans have lost the game. In the novel, we can also see a civilisation devolving, understanding less than before, losing memory and wisdom, too busy with survival to pass on the knowledge. In the book, all the coveted achievements of civilisational development like genetic engineering or transcending the boundaries of artificial intelligence, resonate only in echoes of former splendour and mimicked copies. The old ambitions of conquest, large-scale attempts at creating terraformed planets, leave only negligible traces behind. Considering how the humans are depicted in this novel, I think that “The Orphans of Time” would be a more apt title. Additionally, humanity is crippled by its own irredeemable nature. We are poisoned by the propensity to violence which we, as a species, seem unable to transcend. Mr Tchaikovsky presents us simply as “monsters: clumsy, bickering, short-sighted monsters.”  This very pessimist Hobessian view, determinist to the extreme, whereby humans are not able to transcend certain obstacles is contrasted with the nascent spider civilisation free from such inhibitions. The green world with giant arthropods, with its nascent civilisation where biology and custom are at constant war, where tradition is set against the progress, the known past against the unknown future, and where the intellect bent to break the shackles of yesterday triumphs, reads like a veritable paradise.  This is something that the Author denies the humans. Where spiders are thriving on empathy and cooperation and altruistic sacrifice, humans cheat, abuse and destroy. But the worst thing is that this catastrophic tone and constant trajectory of humankind towards destruction is not substantiated by anything. Why would humanity be unable to retrace their developmental steps when the spiders basically zipped through evolution and progress?   The last 20% killed the book for me. Particularly during the final stages of arachnid development, I was forced to resort to ‘suspension of disbelief’ which is a technique I usually apply only for fairytales. It is not that I didn’t like the ending, it is more that I didn’t get the answers as to why things worked out the way they did. Explanations for the evolutional check-mate that would anchor the ending in any kind of logic. The finale (and the epilogue) seemed terribly arbitrary and bent on proving a very controversial hypothesis. This was the decisive factor regarding my rating.  Indubitably, “Children of Time” offers a reading adventure, which I savoured with appreciation and applause. It provided me with excellent multi-level entertainment, and at the same time raised many important issues as a poignant warning, foretelling what the humanity may face if we continue to push towards the mutual destruction of each other and the whole environment. However, Mr Tchaikovsky's humanity is one inherently unable to produce Mother Teresas, Mahatmas Ghandi, and Irenas Sendler. And this is not us.  The story continues in:  2. Children of Ruin ★★★☆☆                   3,214 reviews2,047 followers     September 21, 2022   What a beautiful book. Six hundred totally absorbing pages. One of the best Science Fiction books I have ever read. Not being particularly coherent here but let me say again it is very, very good.It shows mankind at its worst - I would not have cared if the last human being in the universe had died at the end. I hate spiders but was converted to the sentient kind, and I was cheering them on as they grew smarter and smarter.  I could not imagine how it was going to end but Adrian Tchaikovsky is some kind of genius, and the last few pages were just brilliant. Naming the ship Voyager was a touch of magic. Recommend reading for anyone not just sci fi enthusiasts. There is something in this book for everyone.                   499 reviews672 followers     October 24, 2017   5ish stars. An unqualified masterpiece. This is some of the smartest, most exciting, and most imaginative fiction I've read in a long time. It's grand, expansive, and both character-driven and plot-driven. Uplifted spiders. So cool and creative. The evolution of the Portias and their clusters is endlessly compelling. The journey that the humans take over the millennia, if not as thrilling, is dramatic in its buildup to the inevitable convergence of the two groups. It chronicles the rise and fall of the human population and explores its recurring, natural gravitation towards malignant ambition and self-destruction. While that aspect is disheartening, there’s also hope, because the spiders, being non-human, might be able to circumvent those tragedies... It’s about nature, pride, communication, fear, change, and determination at all costs. Highly recommended.  Posted in Mr. Philip's Library      2015-releases author-man dying-earth               741 reviews11.8k followers     April 21, 2020    
 “If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net – what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?”
This is an excellent SF story, a modern classic in my opinion. For those of you who are not fans of the idea of SF, this is also a wonderful literary story chock-full of philosophy and allegory.How good is it, you ask? Well, good enough for this arachnophobe to read it twice now, and good enough to feel unexpected kinship to the giant sentient spiders - to see them as persons and not just as alien creepy crawlies. Maybe I got hit with that nanovirus too, who knows?  In a distant future humans are terraforming planets. Avrana Kern, a scientist, is about to seed a newly terraformed planet with monkeys and add to the atmosphere a nanovirus engineered to accelerate their development and allow it to happen on the scale of millennia rather than millions of years, and allow the monkeys to develop into “a race of uplifted sentient aides and servants [who] would welcome their makers.” 
  “This is the future. This is where mankind takes its next great step. This is where we become gods.”
Except that, predictably, human squabbles on a galactic scale plunge the Earth and its colonies into Dark Ages from which they take millennia to recover, and eventually the survivors leave the dying poisoned planet in ark ships, headed for the hope of terraformed planets, zeroing on the green and beautiful Kern’s world. But things went wrong there, too. Kern’s monkeys have never made it to the planet. The nanovirus, lacking the species it was made for, manages nevertheless to find a species it could infect and change and accelerate the evolution of - the spiders. Whose civilization is robust and so different from ours. And the AI imprint of Avrana Kern still circles their world in her shuttle, the Messenger as the spiders perceive it, unaware that the monkey experiment failure has become the spider triumph.  
 “In the end, he supposed, it didn't matter. Genocide was genocide. He thought of the Old Empire, which had been so civilized that it had in the end poisoned its own homeworld. And here we are, about to start ripping pieces of the ecosystem out of this new one.” 
The story is told in the alternating chapters set among humans on the spaceship, the last of the dying civilization, and the spiders that are building their civilization one generation of the time - each time a new generation of Portias (as in Portia labiata spiders), Biancas and Fabians spinning the webs of knowledge and society, making their own literal world wide web. Collision is imminent.
“For a species that thinks naturally in terms of interconnected networks and systems, the idea of a war of conquest and extermination – rather than a campaign of conversion, subversion and co-option – does not come easily.”   Spiders are creepy, no doubt. They might as well really be aliens, they are so fundamentally different from us in all the respects. And we are hardwired to distrust and fear those that are different, that are *other*, that are not us - that are “them”. We seem to be hell-bent on the destruction even of those who *are* kin, let alone those who are as different as can be. That’s just how our survival instincts work, I guess.
  “Sometimes all it takes, to crack a problem, is a new perspective.”
The alternating chapters of human and spider narratives are done very well. Human parts of the story are done in a more ‘usual’ tone of SF adventure, relying on dialogue for exposition. Spider parts have a completely different voice and feel - more of the omniscient narration, less dialogue (as the spiders’ speech is nonvocal), and more of a chronicle feel. There is never a doubt that these are alien beings, not too anthropomorphic but just ‘person-ized’ enough to be relatable. The world building is masterful, immersive and vivid. And writing itself is excellent.The exploration of what it means to be human and what it means to be a person is also done very well. It’s easy and tempting in the books dealing with these questions to slide into philosophical navel-gazing and proselytizing, and skid the story to a halt to deal with the big ideas. Tchaikovsky avoids those pitfalls. Philosophical bits are subtly woven into the story and allow you to come to conclusions yourself without the author beating you with them anvil-like over the head. And I love it. 
 “Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”
So good.  5 stars.      2017-reads 2020-reads               2,026 reviews2,606 followers     June 12, 2017   5 of 5 stars at The BiblioSanctum https://bibliosanctum.com/2017/06/12/... Children of Time was my first novel by this author, and wow, what a way to start my initiation into the Adrian Tchaikovsky fan club! I have never read anything quite like this book before, and I have to say the praise it’s gotten has been well deserved. I just loved this. First of all we have this incredible story, which has everything in place for a space opera of the grandest proportions. Long ago, when Earth was on its last legs and humanity feared it could go no further, scientists were sent out beyond the solar system to find and terraform new planets to ensure the future of our species. One of them, the brilliant but megalomaniacal Dr. Avrana Kern was successful in locating such a world, but just as she was about to implement a nanotech virus to accelerate the development process, sabotage occurred. Kern’s monkeys that were intended for biological uplift were not deployed on the planet because they were all killed in the attack on her ship. Kern herself was forced to be transformed, reduced to an AI mind and a body preserved in stasis. However, her nanovirus, the one intended to speed up evolution in the monkeys, did in fact make it onto the planet, imbedding itself into—wait for it—a species of spiders. Years and years go by. Earth is no more. Desperate humans take to the stars in generation ships like the Gilgamesh to find these terraformed planets their ancestors supposedly prepared for them, but instead of a welcoming home, they find Kern’s World and the repercussions of her genetically engineered virus. For generations, the planet’s inhabitants have been evolving as well, the uplifted spiders developing their own cultures, civilizations and knowledge. It is their world now, and they don’t take kindly to the assumptions of these strange looking humans who think they can just take over and live on their planet. As a huge life sciences geek, I loved the ideas behind books like Children of Time or what some other science fiction fans call “biopunk”. The chapters aboard the Gilgamesh were compelling with their human drama and fight for survival, but in my opinion, it was the sections about the spiders which were the most fascinating. They were also what made this novel stand out from all the sci-fi I’ve read so far this year. Tchaikovsky details generations of evolution in the spiders’ biology as well as their culture, following compelling characters like the many iterations of Portia as her species develops language, religion, warfare, and other facets of civilization which they pass down to their descendants via a form of genetic memory. As such, they eventually become something akin to spiders but not as we understand them, having been altered by the virus but also by factors specific to their unique physiology. The author deserves extra bonus points too because it takes a real talent to write genuine, relatable and sympathetic non-human characters, and even more when they are effectively overgrown, freaky arachnids. Don’t think you can ever bring yourself to root for a giant spider? There’s a really good chance this book will change your mind. I was also impressed by the way Tchaikovsky managed to tell this monumental saga—which takes place over thousands of years—without once being sidetracked or losing the story’s main thread. When it dawned on me what the author was trying to do, I didn’t think it was going to work, but oh, it does. In alternating sections, he explores the changes happening on Kern’s World as well as the various side plots unfolding on the Gilgamesh. Most of humanity’s last remnants are frozen in time, traveling in the cargo bay of the ark ship, but we do get to meet and stay with several of the key players like Holsten Mason and Isa Lain who survive the centuries by going in and out of stasis. Culture is evolving in its own way too on the Gilgamesh, and every time Holsten wakes he is hit with another shock of how perspectives and attitudes on the ship have changed since the last time he emerged. It just goes to show, adaptation isn’t something that’s happening only on the surface of Kern’s World, with both the spider and human storylines mirroring and complementing each other in the coolest way possible. Basically, you have got to read this book. It’s gotten such high ratings for a reason. Children of Time is one of the smartest, most remarkable and innovative science fiction novels I’ve read in years and now I can’t wait to read more by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Audiobook Comments: I loved Mel Hudson’s narration. Having a female reader really highlighted the spider chapters, and Hudson’s voice and accent exuded the perfect amount of acuity and class to bring characters like Portia to life. I don’t think I would have enjoyed myself as much if I had read the novel in print, so needless to say, I highly recommend this audiobook.     aliens audiobook review-copy               723 reviews1,196 followers     September 27, 2022    Check out my Booktube channel at: The Obsessive Bookseller  Add Children of Time to my very short list of all-time favorites!! So many things about it worked for me. First of all, I’m especially drawn to Scifi stories with a strong biological component (Julie Czerneda has been a long-time favorite in that regard), and not only was this one bursting with alien flora and fauna awesomeness, but it also had a strong anthropological angle. I read so many Scifi where the most creative they get with world-building is what type of tech is used on this group of ships vs that one, so it’s wonderful to get the same level of expansive creation I usually have to defer to fantasy novels to experience. This is my first Tchaikovsky, and it definitely won’t be my last. He made so many brilliant writing decisions in this book that I was left in awe. He had really creative solutions to some story logistics that would’ve left me stumped. Like how to tell the story over multiple generations while maintaining your reader’s connection to the characters. Sometimes it’s as simple as giving them the same name – something I never would’ve thought of. He handled the time jumps for the humans with similar grace, establishing a trust with me very early on in his ability to deliver a satisfying story. What’s more, I found out mid-read that the author majored in both Zoology and Psychology – both of which spark my interest so much I can hardly stand it. And both backgrounds clearly enhanced the story. I love it when authors take a background of deep knowledge and apply that to their writing. The book had the perfect balance of world-building, character connection, pacing, momentum, and then he topped it all off with a brilliant finish. I’m sure I’ll be talking about this one for years to come. Recommendations: one of my all-time favorites! If you like Scifi with a good dose of anthropological components and creature creations, this is an excellent pick. It’s imaginative, exciting, and incredibly well-composed – I can’t recommend it highly enough!  Thank you to my  Patrons : Filipe, Dave, Frank, Sonja, Staci, Kat, and Katrin! &lt;3  Via The Obsessive Bookseller at www.NikiHawkes.com  Other books you might like: 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
      favorites my-ya-library-catalogue               2,430 reviews827 followers     July 8, 2017   I have really struggled with this book. Really the only science fiction I tend to like is character driven so I was up against it from the start! I've always thought that insect and deep sea creatures have much potential as horror/ monster elements in a story. The look of them close up is just as awful as anything fictitious- it's only that, in the case of insects, they're small and in the case of deep- sea creatures, far down and away, that saves us. So I was interested to read about Portia and the development of society, culture, technology, the ideas of god or 'the messenger'. Fascinating to read about colonialism and the subsumption of other cultures and species and its parallels with human evolution.But I got bored. And the human side of the story, where I would have predicted my deeper interest, had little pace for me. I can see this is a great book and deserves its high ratings, just not from me! I'm very interested to read this author's fantasy series still as I believe this may be more to my liking!    science-fiction               Author  58 books8,081 followers      Read  August 23, 2021   I have been avoiding this because spiders. More fool me. This is an incredible (spider-filled) book, with brilliant imaginative sweep, terrible inexorable logic, spiders, incredibly high stakes, a fascinating look at alien minds, a depressing look at human ones, and a highly satisfying bit of play with gender roles and sexism. And spiders. So many spiders. Aargh, spider. In fact possibly what's most impressive about this book is that by the end, despite SPIDERS, I was actually rooting for the eight-eyed horror machines. Absolutely fantastic read, exactly what SF should be. I went straight out and bought the sequel even though that has *also* got spiders in it. And I'm reading it now and after that we won't mention the S word again, okay.      sf               344 reviews30.9k followers     August 30, 2020   2.5? 2.75? IdkTo była książka totalnie odbiegająca od moich oczekiwań, spodziewałam się czegoś innego a dostałam... dużo religijności, dużo gadania o niczym i wartką akcję na ostatnich 40 stronach. Nie jest zła, jest bardzo pomysłowa i niestandardowa, ale czy dobrze się bawiłam? Przez środkowe 300 stron - nie. Ale nie odradzam, to było dość ciekawe doswiadczenie 🤷🏼‍♀️    in-my-home-library science-fiction               169 reviews56 followers     January 11, 2020   I wasn't ready for this book. WOWI mean, this was awesome! It took me one month into the year to finally rate my first 5* book of 2019. I don't want to say a lot about this book, but: Earth is dying. Humans leave Earth. Humans find a world terraformed prepared for life, WITH SPIDERS.Don't go into this book thinking that this is an action book with a lot of "Humans killing Spiders". It is so much more than that. The scope of this story is unbelievably huge and it addresses some unexpected themes. The only downside of this story is that it took me some time to connect with the characters. But I think it makes sense in this story and I won't say anything else about it. If you love science-fiction, please, give this book a try. Some kind of sequel is coming out in May, Children of Ruin, and I couldn't be more excited!!     sci-fi               827 reviews132 followers     October 23, 2015   Five stars because this puppy had me rooting for arachnids. Five stars for carefully crafted characters, humans and otherwise alike. Five stars because of the incredible, millennia- spanning plot. Five stars because of that ENDING! Not what I expected and so satisfying.     2015               1,838 reviews6,160 followers     June 28, 2020   Once we get the whole space-travel thing going, what is the best idea that we should prioritize, as a species? Well, it turns out that future-us thinks that we need to set-up a new planet with super-intelligent monkeys ruling it. Because, apparently, future-us never saw a movie. Or are such dumbasses that we took the worst idea possible and decided to run with that. See? Now, this is a good idea. There's a big difference. But, luckily someone realized that maybe they didn't want to doom us all to be monkey-slaves someday and did the most reasonable thing to stop this from happening: they killed all the monkeys. Now, I'm not a big monkey-lover in general. They are a little too gross for my liking. Give me a baby seal, or a squirrel, or bunny over a stinking monkey any day, but couldn't there possibly have been a better way to stop this thing than burning all the monkeys up? It wasn't their idea. Why should they suffer for some idiot scientist's terrible idea? I mean, come on, Earthlings? You used to be cool. (Okay, not now, but I'm assuming somewhere along the line.) So, the monkeys are dead but the super-intelligence virus was already released upon the planet, and.... well, I guess you all know what has to happen.... that's right, super-intelligent spiders. Oh, and they are giant too for some reason, cuz why the hell not? When it's FUBAR, might as well go balls to walls.  Oh yeah, this is great. Nothing can possibly go wrong here. Shockingly, we eventually destroy our own planet and have to send out spaceships with the last of humanity to find one of those habitable planets we discovered way back when. But, you know, nobody actually knows about the spider-thing. yeah. That's not gonna bite us in the ass.  Or maybe it will. Literally. This book is a long epic tale of the evolution of the spider-planet and the last hope for the survival of mankind. Thousands of years of history is written in alternating chapters of each species. It is surprisingly fascinating. Like, I can't believe I liked this thing, but it was amazing. The spiders start out as neanderachnids and end up a sophisticated race of reasoning beings. But, we watch them go through things like the beginnings of self-awareness, to building a religion, to building cities and civilizations. You forget that they are disgusting spiders for a while. Then, they do something spidery or talk about their spider bodies and..   *shudder* So, I would say if you are really arachnophobic, you won't want to read it. Since there are no pictures, though, and if you aren't that freaked out by spiders, then you will probably really like this book. It was way better than I thought it would be.     apocalyptic-post-apocalyptic fucking-brilliant sci-fi               2,916 reviews10.6k followers     December 29, 2018   As humanity's fortunes fade, an engineered nanovirus, not finding the monkeys it expected, begins elevating the insects and spiders of an earth-like world. Will it be the humans aboard the space ark Gilgamesh or the spiders of the green planet inherit the universe as... The Children of Time?One of the lunch talkers was gushing over this book a few days ago, the rare interruption of my reading I can tolerate. Fortunately, I already had this on my kindle despite no memory of buying it. Anyway, I dug in and was quickly ensnared in its web. Childen of Time is told in two silky, sticky threads: the humans aboard the Gilgamesh, with Holsten Mason, a classicist, as the view point character, and generations of uplifted spiders on Kern's World. As such, we see the rise of the spiders, aided by a human-made nanovirus, across generations, as Holsten is awoken to find the Gilgamesh and its people in various states of decline. The worldbuilding is exquisite. Adrian Tchaikovsky's spiders are alien yet somehow familiar, not just feeling like humans in different bodies. AT clearly put a lot of thought into his worldbuilding, extrapolating a lot from spider behavior, not just plopping giant spiders down on an earthlike world. The various Portias, Biancas, and Fabians over the generations showed a lot of development and nuances. The spider civilization unfolded in an organic way and I couldn't get enough of it, with its crazy gender politics and technology based around trained ants and genetically encoded information. The humans coping aboard the Gilgamesh weren't quite as interesting to me, although some interesting avenues are explored. Life aboard an ark isn't easy, especially when you're repeatedly awakened to find things have gone pear-shaped. The Gilgamesh's crew and cargo undergo some interesting reversals of fortune, some expected, others not. By the time the two narrative threads entangled, I knew which side I wanted to come out on top. Tchaikovsky kept me guessing, though, right up until the end. Children of Time features lots of things I find compelling in science fiction: artificial intelligence, evolved bugs, and generation ships, albeit unintentional. For once, I'm glad someone interrupted my lunchtime reading. Five out of five stars.     2018 2018-books               507 reviews779 followers     March 30, 2018   “Children of Time: Winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award”. Most cumbersome book title ever (this is the full title of the edition I bought). Why did the publisher have to tag the award thing on the book’s original title? Fortunately, on the bright side, this is my only complaint about this book!This book takes  David Brin’s “uplift” concept and really runs with it. In Brin’s popular Uplift series, humanity have used technology to boost the intellect of selected species of animals to sentience level. I can’t quite remember the reason behind this, presumably to make them more useful and for other, more magnanimous, purposes. Indeed there is a direct tribute to Brin in Children of Time, in the form a little spaceship called Brin 2. However, the emphasis of the novel is not about the uplifting itself, but about the accidental sentient species that arise from the project and its subsequent interaction with humanity. The original idea was to uplift monkeys to sentient levels through an infection of an engineered “nanovirus”, and put them on a habitable planet, but someone sabotaged that project and all the monkeys are killed. However, the nanovirus is sent to the intended planet and infects several species of insects instead. Spiders turn out to be the chief beneficiaries of this project as the virus is most effective on them. This starts off one of the two main narrative threads which chronicles the rise of the spider race as the ruler of the planet. The other narrative thread concerns a group of humans fleeing from Earth which is destroyed by a final world war, on an “ark ship” called “Gilgamesh”. This massive spaceship is carrying working crew and thousands of people in suspended animation, to be defrosted when a habitable planet is found. Unfortunately the only habitable they manage to find, after hundreds of years and generations of crew have come and gone, is the nice planet now ruled by the spiders.  Wonderful Polish edition cover It has been a busy month so it took me almost three weeks to finish. Somehow it makes me appreciate the book even more as my constant companion to many places. The narrative is quite interesting from the first chapter and as characters, situations and world building are gradually laid down it becomes increasingly compelling, by the end of the book I was completely riveted. While the humans and spiders plotlines are given about equal time I was much more fascinated by the spiders, the culture, language and technology they develop after receiving their “increased cognitive capacity”. The spider protagonists are also very well developed, and quite admirable. I love sci-fi biotechnology, organic devices, homes and transportations. It is fascinating how the development spiders’ technology takes a different path from the humans, due to lack of metals and electricity. Their tech is based on hyper advanced biochemistry instead. I love how their society is ruled by the female, and the physically weaker and less intelligent males are generally disposable second class citizens. That is until a radical and messianic male spider comes along. The human side of the story is less fascinating but it never drags down the narrative. Their state of affairs is quite pitiful compared to the spiders. They spend hundreds of years on board “the Gilgamesh”, key figures going in and out of suspended animation as needed. Generations are born on the spaceship and never set foot on a planet. The ark ship becomes a “generation ship” even though it was never designed to be used as one and the living conditions on board become rather cramped as the on board population expands. This being the case their need to settle on the spider’s planet is understandable. Unfortunately the humans believe in the cold logic of a concept called “the prisoner’s’ choice” which is based on mutual distrust because the cost of betrayal would mean complete annihilation. As the humans and the spiders head for collision that would result in genocide of one side or the other I found myself curiously rooting for the spiders; mainly because the spider characters are generally better developed and they do have the moral high ground of being the invadees, not the invaders. Thematically it is mainly a story of racial prejudice and a plea for tolerance, with both sides thinking that there is a necessity to completely wipe out the other side for the survival of the race. Whatever the outcome Children of Time is one of the best space operas I have ever read, with a nice and clear writing style and a straightforward linear structure of the twin plotlines that make the book very accessible. The sci-fi tech is highly imaginative and the science behind it is clearly explained without resorting to infodumping; some very good characterization, thrilling plot developments and a very good ending makes this one of the greats for me. Highly recommended.  Notes: • In spite of the title this book has nothing to do with time travelling. • In some ways, parts of this book are like  Watership Down for spiders, and that is high praise! It may also be  Charlotte's Web for adults? I haven't read that one, but my spider-sense says yes. It also reminds me a little bit of a computer game called Sim Ant. • Tchaikovsky's study of psychology and zoology stand him in good stead here (he is also a keen amateur entomologist). Interestingly his fantasy series Shadows of the Apt is also based on insects. TBR'd!   Quotes:  “There had been those back on Earth who claimed the universe cared, and that the survival of humanity was important, destined, meant. They had mostly stayed behind, holding to their corroding faith that some great power would weigh in on their behalf if only things became so very bad.”   “The enemy they face is the child of a technology she cannot conceive of, advanced beyond the dreams of her own kind’s greatest scientists, using a technology of metal and fire and lighting, all fit tools for vengeful deities. At her disposal is fragile silk, biochemistry and symbiosis, and the valour of all those who will put their lives at her disposal.”   “Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”   “That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”   “I consider CoT to be an outreach program for literate-minded arachnophobics :) There has been a pleasant number of readers who really don't like spiders but (a) have got through the book; and (b) have come out of it willing to give the little guys the benefit of the doubt. Of course now I need to stealth-write a book that has spiders as utterly horrible people-destroying bad guys just to utterly throw my readership...”  From Adrian Tchaikovsky's Reddit AMA.    favorites sci-fi               1,036 reviews667 followers     June 21, 2020   Well, it finally happened.  Earth can no longer sustain life, having frozen over, then morphing into an oozing toxic thaw.  The possibility of mankind becoming extinct is all too real, and plans have been in place for a relocation to a more welcoming sphere.  It should have been ready when the spaceship arrived with its precious cargo of humans.  But where have all the monkeys gone?  This planet is host to evolutionized spiders.  So many eyes, so many legs.  Striking parallels are spun, the differences between arachnids and humans, and in some ways, the sameness.  Intricate webs for communication, sticky strands and knotted ties to restrict.  Basic, yet effective.  The spider culture is fascinating, travelers and spitters, a mysterious crystal and its secrets, electronic life.  And fire ants!    public-library               1,492 reviews958 followers     January 15, 2016      This is the future.This is where mankind takes its next step.This is where we become gods.  Science has given mankind the tools to travel to distant stars, to terraform their planets and to play with the building blocks of life : genetics.It sounds like a dream come true, an utopian future in which everything is possible.In practice, the deployment of miraculous scientific discoveries from the laboratory to the real world is fraught with the same issues that have plagues past generations : greed, selfishness, religious intolerance, thirst for power, irresponsible behaviour. Instead of agents of progress, scientists turn into agents of destruction. Utopias become Distopias. Adrian Tchaikovsky explores this deep divide between idealistic dreams and grim reality in two directions: 	- artificially accelerated evolution of a population through a nanotechnology, synthetic 'smart' virus	- social degradation in a multi-generational arcology : a slower than lightspeed ship transporting the frozen survivors of a planetary holocaust. It's been done before, but Tchaikovsky manages to be here both traditional and original. The story reminds me of the golden age SF in its mostly positive atitude towards science, in looking at the big picture rather than at the lives of the individuals, in tracking social movements through the lens of technological progress, in its plain, clear-cut storytelling and often unidimensional characters. The originality of the project comes from the same passion of the author that made his fantasy epic special : Tchaikovsky is really keen on his arthropods. "Shadows of the Apt" is populated by a wide range of different nations that share insect and human traits. "Children of Time" invites us to view the world through alien eyes that share a lot of common features with Earth's spiders. This almost obsession with the insect world is giving Thhaikovsky an edge over his fellow writers through the huge diversity of the regnum, a much richer source of inspiration that the usual human shaped aliens. I know that for me, as a photographer, it is always fascinating to turn a macro lens on even the most common specimens of these arthropods, and that a close up look at their multifaceted eyes or at the shapes of mandibles and antennas will make me think of aliens living unnoticed among us humans.   They are among the most diverse groups of animals on the planet, including more than a million described species and representing more than half of all known living organisms.   "Children of Time" managed to keep my interest and to make me turn the pages faster and faster especially in its alien half of the story, mostly by this originality in perspective. . I was already a fan of the author before his move from fantasy to SF, but this new story reinforced his position among my favorites. It's not easy to keep a good balance between action and exposition and emotionally charged characterization, especially if you have no familiar frame of reference for your social and economic structures and you have to start anew with the main actors after each generational change. The novel covers a multi-millenial timespan yet, despite all the inherent problems of such a large frame, it works like clockwork, even in the final blending together of the two main streams : human and alien. I am about no namedrop one of the biggest names in SF : Isaac Asimov. In the "Foundation" series, Asimov also uses a multigenerational approach that allows him to study history through the engines of science and technology, explaining wars, gender roles, growth and decay in relation to the discoveries of positronic brains or mathematical formulas that explain Fate and Chance. Tchaikovsky has his nanotechnology virus that can change a whole society from hunters/gatherers to intelligent predators, through commerce and military conquest to a modern society of scientists and artists. This alien evolution is not without its own mishaps and wrong turns in the path to the future. It starts with the promise of a mad dreamer:   We will seed the universe with all the wonders of the Earth.   ... a dreamer who conveniently forgets that these wonders, monitored from outer space, manifest like global warming, oceans of plastic garbage, deforestation and desertification, global wars, famine and crippling poverty, indigent species hunted to extinction. Both the aliens on their terraformed planet and the humans in their multi-generational ark demonstrate that this dismal list is very close to the true heritage of humanity. Yet Tchaikovsky is also prone to remember that at the bottom of Pandora's Box there is a feeble thing called Hope. The future is not already written down, despite the claims of psychohistory and prophets of doom, and thus my last quotations from what turned out to be one of the best (SF) novels of 2015:   Nothing. No promises. The universe promises us nothing.Things are the way we make them.          2016               290 reviews298 followers     September 30, 2019    Hey you! Yeah you - the person reading this review!Stop reading. No really, if you’re a Science Fiction fan stop reading this review right now. You don’t need to. You’re going to 
 LOVE
 this book. It’s going to rock your world. It’s fricking amazing. That’s all you need to know.  Now, go, git, skeddadle, whatever, just RUN to a bookshop, as fast as you can. Get this book, then call in sick at work. Ignore your family. Turn your back on your adult responsibilities. Do what you have to do to get some serious quality time with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s bloody brilliant novel. What? You’re still here? Really? You need to be convinced to read one of the best science fiction novels of the 21st Century? A book that is a likely in the top fifty of any serious list of the best SF books ever written? Ok. Damn. You’re tough. You’re a hard-nosed reader, someone who isn’t just gonna drop some cash after reading some guy's opinion on the internet. I get it. I’m usually like you. I read reviews. I research books for my to-read list. I’m not easily impressed, I’m a bit jaded, perhaps even a touch cynical. But Children of Time… this is why I read Science Fiction - to experience books like this one, books that fill me with euphoria at their sheer brilliance, their audacity, their vision.I get it though- you need to more than ‘it’s really good’ before you’ll commit. I’ll try to control my rabid enthusiasm for long enough to give you an idea of what you’re in for. In the far future, humanity has fallen. An era of almost god-like technological power has passed, and the remaining humans have pulled themselves back up from the wartime devastation of Earth, scrabbled together some comparatively primitive tech, and escaped Earth in a cryo ark. The era of godlike power is so long ago that it approaches myth, and a journey that once took twenty years will now take many centuries.  At the end of their journey is a world. A world that an entire epoch earlier was terraformed and seeded with life. They hope it will be their new home. The crew of this ship include a classicist – Holsten Mason – an expert on the language and history of the old empire, the dictatorial captain, Guyen - a man so obsessed with human preservation that he has become mentally imbalanced, and Lain, the ships chief engineer. As the ship travels across the millennia, the people awake from their sleep to meet challenges, sleep again, wake, and so on - hopping across time, losing touch with the universe outside their vessel.  But the world they are travelling to is not as they think it is. This planet – Kern’s World – was seeded with more than life. It was seeded with a virus designed to accelerate evolution, to raise apes to human-level sentience, and it is being watched. The world’s namesake - Doctor Avrana Kern - is trapped above the planet in a tiny satellite, incrementally losing her mind while she waits for her apes below her to evolve far enough to respond to radio signals. But there are no apes. They all died entering while their ship entered the atmosphere. Instead, the virus is slowly raising the intelligence of various species on the planet, the most successful of which is a type of Spider… Yep, arachnophobes beware - Kern’s world is home to an evolving civilization of intelligent spiders. And what a civilization. Tchaikovsky deftly paints with a palette of thousands of years, showing a society evolving and growing in fascinating and enthralling detail. Following the many descendants of one of the first spiders to become more aware he takes readers into a society that is unique among all the SF novels I have read.  It’s a total trip, filled with wonder and even humor, as Tchaikovsky uses the matriarchal nature of insect societies to make some deft allegories to patriarchal human structures (in one example, the murder of smaller male spiders by larger females for fun is palmed off by a protagonist as ‘girls will be girls’.)  All the while of course, the human refugee ship draws closer, making conflict between humanity and their strange, lost children inevitable.  This juxtaposition, of the last days of a desperate and dying intelligent species (us!) with the evolution of another life-form from tiny, almost mindless insects into intelligent, civilized beings is the core of the narrative, and it’s heady, wonderful stuff. The story twists and turns, avoiding SF clichés and forging its own unique path, leaving me genuinely surprised (and just a little giddy) by the novel’s end. Anyway, now back to effusive praise and un-restrained recommendation: If you like SF, if you like great storytelling and if you like having your mind and imagination expanded then you really must read this book - this guy is a major talent. Now get out there and find yourself a copy! Five giant, scary (yet thoughtful) spiders out of five.     science-fiction               353 reviews1,448 followers     July 21, 2021    
 I now have a YouTube channel that I run with my brother, called 'The Brothers Gwynne'. Check it out - The Brothers Gwynne 
 My expanded review of this great book is now on BookNest... Children of Time Review   “That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”  Children of Time is my first delving into the genre of science fiction, and it served as a great introduction. When I began, I found it a bit mind-boggling because of the technical space language and sophisticated technology. But as the story progressed, I soon acclimatised to this aspect and it did not become as demanding or distracting as I first thought. There are some wonderfully unique aspects to this book, which I have been told cannot be compared to any other sci-fi, because of how different it is. One such idea is exploring evolution, and following the journey of this progression with different animals, in this case being a number of insect species...It was so interesting and fun and novel that it cemented itself as my favourite part of the book, as I found myself disappointed every time a chapter finished with this PoV.  “Humanity is overrated”  It took a while to get into the other PoV, who was a human on a spaceship that carries the rest of humanity. This was partly due to the technical part that I mentioned earlier, and also because there was not as much action. But when the plot started rolling, I was also looking forward to this part of the story, because of the cultural challenges presented, the fantastic prose that Tchaikovsky writes with, the unique ideas, and so many other reasons. There is a very small cast of named characters, definitely not over 15 in total. This is extremely different to what I am used to, but it served well to strengthen those bonds with the characters that are present, and allowed another level of depth to be added to these as they earned more page time. So once again, Children of Time was a great introduction to the genre, and I am sure that I will continue onto its sequel at some point, and also some other science fiction, starting with Dune.     reviewed sci-fi               3,611 reviews324 followers     November 28, 2021   The good news: $1 ebook at Amazon (Nope: now 10 bucks!(2021))The bad news: I started it at the end of last year (2017), read to 62% and stalled out. When I picked it up again, I found I had no wish whatever to continue. It's a pretty ramshackle affair, and I'm surprised it won a major award. Not for me!Here's Claudia's 1-star review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... I didn't hate it quite as much as she did. But it's pretty bad. Read her review before you try the book, and a few of the other 1 and 2-star writeups. Then read something else, is my advice. "It's a sin to waste the reader's time" -- Larry Niven Here's Ann Leckie's writeup, which led me to read it: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...      did-not-finish not-for-me own-copy               1,130 reviews309 followers     November 29, 2017   An absolutely brilliant and fantastically imaginative piece of science fiction. This is one of the best books I've read this year.    2015-read favourites               62 reviews126 followers     December 5, 2018    DNF 40% I just… didn’t like it. I didn’t feel any sympathy for any of the characters, human or otherwise. I mean, the concept of a virus that’s speeding up and directing evolution sounds captivating enough. It’s just, that in my opinion, it was poorly executed. I simply didn’t care about those creatures and their problems. The writing about them was distant and ‘scientific’, while I expected it to be less disconnected, I guess. Let’s start from the very beginning (no spoilers here – it’s in the first or second chapters); The Human race is super advanced technologically and has colonies in space and on other planets – it uses very advanced AI and some scientists want to create smart servants from monkeys, using the mentioned above virus. WHY would they want to do that instead of just creating some robots?! Beats me… Have some mercy on those creatures!  Then there are these terrorists that are against messing up with mother nature, which are called NUNs. Hah! Nice wordplay there! (it means - Non Ultra Natura). So, the NUNs have had enough! They start a war and basically annihilate all humanity’s space colonies. Using a computer virus. Yes, you heard right. All humanity is almost wiped out because of a computer virus, which shuts their systems and they suffocate and die in space. HOW IN THE HELL?? I mean really, haven’t you heard about antiviruses, firewalls, compartmentalization of critical systems? No? ok… then Hasta La Vista Humanity. That’s just lazy writing. It was an exposition, but even it must make sense.  As I mentioned, I didn’t like or even sympathize with any of the characters. Not with the modified creatures, not with the crazy scientist that did everything possible to have her experiment carry on. Not with the human survivors, who obviously shoot each other in a spaceship. Guys and gals, you’re it, you’re what the human race depends on to find a place for it to survive. And what do you do? YOU START TO SHOOT AT EACH OTHER. IN A SPACESHIP. IN SPACE. Have some common sense, or better yet, just go instinct if you behave like that. Facepalm.  I did kind of liked the Classicist who discovered that a dead language doesn’t sound like the scholars speculated it did in real life. And I liked the monkeys. Which were absent, which was a good thing, because they didn’t spoil the book for me :) Monkey quote: 
 “She had sold it to the people back home by describing how colonists would reach the planet then, descending from the skies like deities to meet their new people. Instead of a harsh, untamed world, a race of uplifted sentient aides and servants would welcome their makers. That was what she had told the boardrooms and the committees back on Earth, but it had never been the point of the exercise for her. The monkeys were the point, and what they would become.”
      dnf science-fiction
Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-time
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8908.World_War_Z
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
2012-10-11
Author
<div><div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1124121-ellen"></a></section><section><p>13 reviews88 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/22701390">June 5, 2008</a></section><div><p>This book was initially recommended to me by several people in the office and since I love zombies and apocalyptic themes, well, I was pretty excited. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations and I struggled to finish it. (I'm going to write this review under the assumption that the reader has some inkling about the story and how it's constructed.)<p>There are two issues that killed it for me. Firstly, most of the characters had the same--or similar--voice. Of course this is partly to do with the fact that the voices all originate from the mind of one individual, the author. Also, the more journalistic/interview approach to constructing the narrative limits how much color the author can impart on any given character. Q and A is inherently dry, no matter how exciting the events described are intended to be. This is a minor gripe, though, and one that can be lived with.</p><p>A more serious complaint, however, is that this book can be seen as completely lacking any and all dramatic tension that a person (or, me) expects from a survival horror-themed story. The primary draw--the zombie war and how humanity survived--is such a compelling hook, but it's told...by the people who survived. As in, past tense, as in we are left with their impressions of things that happened to them. Basically, then, the story devolves into an excercise in basic exposition: "And then this happened, and then that happened." And so the author is free to weave his story without any pesky things like character development, story arcs, plotting, and personal details that are shown and not told. It seems to me like an extraordinarily easy (maybe even lazy) way to tell a story. </p><p>One other minor point: For me, accounts of survival when the victims are real have meaning that allows them to transcend the limitations described above. WW2 Holocaust survivors' accounts, for example, can take your breath away. The difference is, of course, that they were real events that happened to real people. </p><p>Since all the classic storytelling elements are dispensed with, we're basically left with the author's views on our current world, particularly and naturally, the wars and our culture(s). However, it's my view that there are dozens of books written about these subjects already; books that haven't needed to sex the discussion up with a horde of shambling undead. </p><p>So, in summary, if I'm going to read an apocalyptic recounting of the end of civilization as we know it, I want to read about people in real time, struggling to survive, not being told how people surivived after it was over. </p><p>(I realize, though, that it's all a matter of taste, as I know half a dozen people whose views I respect that absolutely loved this book.) :D</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/147289-jason-pettus"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>12 books1,262 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/18521838">March 24, 2008</a></section><div><p>(My full review of this book is longer than Goodreads' word-count limitations; find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)<p>Anytime I hear of some funny, gimmicky book suddenly becoming popular among the hipster set, I always squint my eyes and brace myself for the worst; because usually when it comes to such books, the worst is all you can expect to find, an endless series of fluffy pop-culture pieces designed specifically for crafty point-of-purchase display at your favorite corporate superstore, and then a year later to be forgotten by society altogether. And so it's been in the last six months as I've heard more and more about this book <i>World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War</i>, which supposedly is a hilarious "actual" oral history about an apocalyptic war with the undead that supposedly almost wiped out the human race as we know it; even worse, that it had been inspired by an actual gimmicky point-of-purchase humor book, the dreadful <i>Zombie Survival Guide</i> from a few years ago which had been published specifically and only to make a quick buck off the "overly specific survival guide" craze of the early 2000s. And even worse than all this, the author of both is Max Brooks, as in the son of comedy legend Mel Brooks; and if the son of a comedy legend is trawling the literary gutters of gimmicky point-of-purchase humor books, the chances usually are likely that they have nothing of particular interest to say.</p><p>So what a surprise, then, to read the book myself this month, and realize that it's not a gimmicky throwaway humor book at all, but rather a serious and astute look at the next 50 years of global politics, using a zombie outbreak as a metaphorical stand-in for any of the pervasive challenges facing us as an international culture these days (terrorism, global warming, disease, natural disasters), showing with the precision of a policy analyst just how profoundly the old way of doing things is set to fail in the near future when some of these challenges finally become crises. It is in fact an astoundingly intelligent book, as "real" as any essay by Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell, basically imagining the debacle of New Orleans multiplied by a million, then imagining what would happen if the Bushists were to react to such a thing in the same way; and even more astounding, Brooks posits that maybe the real key to these future challenges lies with the citizens of third-world countries, in that they are open to greater and faster adaptability than any fat, lazy, middle-class American or European ever could be. Oh yeah, and it's got face-eating zombies too. Did I mention the face-eating zombies?</p><p>Because that's the thing to always remember, that this comes from an author who has spent nearly his entire life in the world of comedy and gimmicky projects, not only from family connections but also his own job as a staff writer at <i>Saturday Night Live</i> from 2001 to '03; that no matter how smart <i>World War Z</i> gets (and it gets awfully smart at points), it is still ultimately a fake oral history of an apocalyptic zombie war that supposedly takes place just five or ten years from now, starting as these messes often do as a series of isolated outbreaks in remote third-world villages. And in fact this is where Brooks first starts getting his political digs in, right from the first page of the manuscript itself, by using the initial spread of the zombie virus to comment on the way such past epidemics like HIV have been dealt with by the corrupt old white males who used to be in charge of things; basically, by ignoring the issue as long as it wasn't affecting fellow white males, then only paying attention after it's become an unstoppable epidemic. In Brooks' world, just like the real one of pre-9/11 intelligence-gathering, we see that a few government smarties from around the world really were able to catch the implications of this mysterious new virus while it was still theoretically controllable; just that their memos and papers went ignored for political reasons by those actually in charge, as well as getting lost in the vast bureaucratic shuffle that the Cold War has created in the Western military-industrial complex.</p><p>That's probably the most pleasurable part of the first half, to tell you the truth, and by "pleasurable" I mean "witty and humorous in a bleak, horrifying, schauenfreude kind of way" -- of watching the virus become more and more of a threat, of watching entire cities start to go under because of the zombie epidemic, then watching Brooks paint an <i>extremely</i> thinly-veiled portrait of how the Bush administration would deal with such a situation, and by extension any government ruled by a small cabal of backwards, power-hungry religious fundamentalists. And in this, then, <i>World War Z</i> suddenly shifts from a critique about AIDS to a critique about Iraq, showing how in both situations (the Middle East and zombies, that is) the real priority of the people currently in charge is to justify all the trillions of dollars spent at traditional weapon manufacturing companies under the old Cold-War system (companies, by the way, where all the people in charge have lucrative executive jobs when they're not being the people in charge), leading to such ridiculous situations as a full-on tank and aircraft charge mostly for the benefit of the lapdog press outlets who are there covering the "first grand assault." In Iraq, unfortunately, we found that a billion dollars in tanks still can't stop a teenage girl with a bomb strapped to her chest; and metaphorically that might be the most chilling scene in the entirety of <i>World War Z</i> as well, the press-friendly "zombie response" set up by the Bush-led government in New York's Yonkers neighborhood, done not for good strategic reasons but rather to show off the billions of dollars in weapons the government had recently acquired, leading to a virtual slaughter of all the soldiers and journalists there by the chaotic zombie hoard that eventually arrives.</p><p>This, then, gets us into the first futuristic posit of Brooks in the novel to not have actually happened in real life yet -- the "Great Panic," that is, when the vast majority of humans suddenly lose faith in whatever government was formerly running their section of the world, and where mass anarchy and chaos leads to the accidental and human-on-human deaths of several hundreds of millions of more people. And again, by detailing a fictional tragedy like a global zombie epidemic, and the complete failure of a Bush-type administration to adequately respond to it, Brooks is eerily predicting here such real situations like last week's complete meltdown of Bear Stearns (the fifth largest investment bank in the entire United States), leading many to start wondering for the first time what exactly would happen if the US dollar itself was to experience the same kind of whirlwind collapse, a collapse that happens so fast (in a single business day in the case of Bear Stearns) that no one in the endless red tape of the government itself has time to actually respond to it?</p><p>Brooks' answer here is roughly the same one Cormac McCarthy proposed in last year's Pulitzer-winning <i>The Road</i>; chaos, bloodshed, violence, inhumanity, an everyone-for-themselves mentality from the very people we trusted to lead us in such times of crisis. Make no mistake, <i>this is a damning and devastating critique</i> of the corrupt conservatives currently in charge of things; a book that uses the detritus of popular culture to masquerade as a funny and gross book about zombies, but like the best fantastical literature in history is in fact a prescient look at our current society. It's unbelievable, in fact, how entertaining and engrossing this novel is throughout its middle, given how this is usually the part of any book that is the slowest and least interesting; here Brooks uses the naturally slow middle of his own story to make the majority of his political points, and to get into a really wonky side of global politics that is sure to satisfy all you hardcore policy junkies (as well as military fetishists).</p><p>Because that's the final thing important to understand about <i>World War Z</i>, is that it's a novel with a truly global scope; Brooks here takes on not only what such a zombie epidemic would do to our familiar US of A, but also how such an epidemic would spread in the village-centric rural areas of southeast Asia, the infrastructure-poor wastelands of Russia and more, and especially how each society fights the epidemic in slightly different ways, some with more success than others. For example, Brooks posits that in such places as India, population density is just too high to do much of any good; in his fictional world history, such countries are basically decimated by such a catastrophe, with there basically being few humans even left in India by the time everything is over. Other countries, though, used to picking up as a nation and fleeing for other lands, survive the zombie outbreaks quite well; those who are already used to being refugees, for example, see not too much of a difference in their usual lifestyle from this latest turn in events, ironically making them the societies most suited for survival in such a world. (This is opposed to all the clueless middle-class Americans in the novel, for example, who in a panic make for the wilds of northern Canada, in the blind hope that the winter weather will freeze the zombies into non-action; although that turns out to be true, poor planning unfortunately results in the deaths of tens of millions of people anyway, from hypothermia and starvation and plain ol' mass-murder.)</p><p>And this is ultimately what I mean by this book being such a politically astute one; because as...</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/71848701-miranda-reads"></a></section><section><p>1,588 reviews153k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2177746793">December 10, 2020</a></section><div><p><blockquote>
<p>New week, <b><u> <a href="https://youtu.be/WVQUrDNX89I">New BookTube Video</a></u></b> - all about the best (and worst) literary apocalypses to live through!</p></blockquote><b>The Written Review</b><p> </p><p><b>Humanity survived Zombie apacolypse. </b></p><p> Like after any great tragedy, the government wants a record.</p><p><b> Max Brooks is their oral historian. </b></p><p> Only, when he hands his documents, the bureaucracy <b> whittles it </b>down to the bare facts. </p><p>Humans, over every nation, <i> dragged </i>their bone weary bodies through this war. </p><p> They are now faced with the <i>numbing task </i>of rebuilding society. </p><p>They <b>deserve to have their stories told. </b> So, he publishes the true account of World War Z.</p><p>Told in a series of vignettes, we listen in on interviews as Brooks travels both the country and the world. And one thing is certain, life with zombies<i> <b>is a chilling tale. </b> </i></p><blockquote>
 <i>The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts</i>
</blockquote>The vignettes are absolutely riveting. There's a bit of the regular <b>zombie murder mayhem </b>but the story focuses on the human side of things. How the survivors, survived. <p> There's the blind man who fought off a hoard with no more than a blunt staff. Some people lost their minds - succumbing to tree belief <b> that they have joined the dead.</b> There's the unintentionally cannibalistic family - and so much more. </p><blockquote>
 <i>Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has.</i>
</blockquote><b>Audiobook comments</b>:<br />--Read by Max Brooks, Alan Alda, John Turturro, Rob Reiner, Mark Hamill, Alfred Molina, Simon Pegg, Henry Rollins and Martin Scorsese<br />--Highly recommended you listen to this novel - it's a quality production. <br />--Every voice is country-specific and the actors read very convincingly. It feels like I'm next to Max as he interviews the survivors.<p><a href="http://bit.ly/33ii2CT">YouTube</a> | <a href="http://www.mirandareads.com/">Blog</a> | <a href="https://www.instagram.com/miranda_reads/?hl=en">Instagram</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/Miranda_Reads">Twitter</a> | <a href="https://www.facebook.com/mirandareads1">Facebook</a> | Snapchat @miranda_reads</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/71848701?shelf=audiobook">audiobook</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/78485297-mario-the-lone-bookwolf"></a></section><section><p>733 reviews3,398 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2315438470">January 2, 2023</a></section><div><p>A perfect vivisection<p>Of the social, economic, environmental, and political consequences of zombie outbreaks<br />One day, it might be a helpful or even lifesaving work one hopefully has as a paperback and not on an ebook reader. The seriousness and attention to detail Brooks put in his work are part of the satire, because it really feels as if a real reporter is investigating a story.</p><p>Each one reacts differently<br />As in the ironic Zombie survival guide, Brooks uses all possible aspects of a zombie apocalypse, from its beginning until how it could end, including each human's individual reaction to it to describe the happenings.</p><p>Less action, more characters<br />Switching between the interviews, the book gives a new and more personal view on this very prominent topic, avoiding stereotypes and overused tropes, and is instead telling it from the points of view of very different people that wouldn´t normally be used to write the standard book or movie script.</p><p>Could be used in other genres too<br />The idea of using interviews as the main element for telling a story is a rare style element, but full of potential for more frequent use in fiction, although it might get very tricky to integrate it in a way that doesn´t interrupt the flow. But a Fantasy or Sci-Fi novel told from those perspectives would be a nice variation of the scheme. </p><p>Not as superficial as the Zombie survival guide<br />While the zombie survival guide was more a pure fun read, Brooks pimps his writing this time with innuendos, criticism, and social commentary.</p><p>It´s maybe also a satire of journalism itself<br />But I haven´t enough expertise to be competent in that. So maybe Brooks even imitated and satirized the tone of autobiographical monologues and endless introspections that are often unintentional satires already, when reporters are losing rhetorical control.</p><p>Tropes show how literature is conceived and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique: <br /><a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/WorldWarZ">https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/78485297?shelf=horror">horror</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/679025-penny"></a></section><section><p>215 reviews1,354 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/99966735">November 10, 2012</a></section><div><p>I know what you're thinking. "Five stars for <i>this</i> book? Why???" <p>If you've been following my reviews then you know I tend to stress over how many stars to give a book, and I'm not one to hand out five-star ratings willy-nilly. I'm usually quite cautious when it comes to handing out that all-important fifth star. I'm stingy. That being said, every once in a while a book, that may or may not be amazing, comes along and wows me. </p><p>And now you're (probably) thinking: "But Penny, it's a book about zombies. <i>Zombies!</i> Disgusting rotting corpses that stumble around, looking to sink their teeth into any living thing. How--how could that sort of thing wow you? Are you, like, smoking crack???" </p><p>First things first: No--I'm not smoking crack. Everyone knows crack is cheap--I much prefer the real thing*. Now that I've cleared that up, lets move on, shall we? </p><p>So. World War Z. I really enjoyed it, which was a surprise because I didn't think I would. This book is not something I would've picked up on my own. Had it not been for a couple of really nice Barnes &amp; Noble employees who practically shoved this book in my hands while gushing about its supreme awesomeness, I definitely wouldn't have purchased it. But since they didn't have the book I was looking for (Storm Front by Jim Butcher), and since I'd already been bitten by the zombie bug over a year ago (The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan) I took a chance and purchased this book.</p><p>Despite the fact that Max Brooks used to write for SNL, and also happens to be Mel Brooks son, this book isn't funny, nor is it meant to be. Max Brooks tells this story through a series of interviews given by survivors of The Great Panic, or World War Z (the Z stands for Zombie, in case you didn't, you know, put two and two together...).</p><p>The interviewees come from different parts of the world and they tell their accounts of what happened to them, what they thought when they first heard of what was first referred to as "African Rabies"; what happened when the Great Panic started in their part of the world. A lot of these stories are sad and/or terrifying, but mostly I found them incredibly intriguing. </p><p>Before I go on I need to add that I totally geek-out over documentaries, and this book--were it in movie form--would be a documentary. I'm one that appreciates the method Max Brooks uses to tell this story. </p><p>To me the beginning of this book has more to do with the way things are done in this world--politics wise--than anything else. Of course, as the book goes on and more and more governments are collapsing due to the fact that zombies are basically taking over the world, we get a good look at human nature during times of crisis. I found the whole thing fascinating.. </p><p>Hardcore zombie lovers need to know that this isn't a book that follows one set of characters, though some interviews have been broken up, and so a few characters are featured in this book more than once. Rather it is one story told by several different people. There is continuity in the order in which the stories are told to us, and sometimes one survivor's account answers a question that was raised by another survivor.</p><p>All that said, there is quite a bit of zombie slaying action. Lots of blood and guts and gore. We get to learn how best to stop a zombie--and let me assure you, there are many ways. We also learn about newest in improvised zombie killing weaponry and effective warfare techniques to decimate a raging-out-of-control zombie population. </p><p>But seriously, I loved reading it, everything in this whole entire book. Me. A church-going mother of three. Although, yeah, I'm not your typical church-going mother of three. But still... </p><p>P.S. I'd have finished this book a long time ago had it not been for my husband, who kept stealing this book away from me so he could read it too. He's really liking it, btw. </p><p><b>UPDATE 11/10/12:</b> About a year ago I bought the audiobook from Audible only to discover, after purchasing, that it was the abridged version. I soon found out that was all they had to offer which was quite disappointing because some of my favorite eyewitness accounts from the book were not included. I've since heard from the World War Z's Facebook page that they are going to make an unabridged version. I am unaware of when it will be available for purchase. That said, I did end up liking the (abridged) audiobook well enough. The performances are pretty top notch. </p><p>*To those who have zero sense of humor, it must be said: I'm kidding, I don't do any drugs, and you need to chill.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/679025?shelf=reviewed-books">reviewed-books</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/679025?shelf=zombies-aliens-vampires-dinos">zombies-aliens-vampires-dinos</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1159175-rebecca-delatorre"></a></section><section><p>12 reviews15 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/24387018">July 8, 2008</a></section><div><p> I just can't get on this bandwagon. The pseudo-government reports the book is written in handicap it in many ways. First, there are no protagonists to grow with, no story arc, no climax, etc. You know what's going to happen from day one--there was a world crisis involving zombies and at least some people live to tell the tale. The sure knowledge of the outcome deflates any tension and book feels flacid. The pseudo-scientific jargon is a poor imitation (my sister, a nurse, tossed aside Brooks' other Zombie manfesto in disgust within the first few pages and this one fairs no better)and there are far too many emotional pauses and descriptive introductions for what amounts to an addendum to a government study of events. The thing that put me over the edge with this book is the inconsistency--one chapter has a boy with bloody knuckles sliding his hands about in zombie goo and remaining uninfected and in the next chapter there is an expression of gratitutde that no one exposed to detrius from a headshot has open wounds to be infected through. What editor let that get by? On top of that, racial, national stereotypes abound and are crude and unappealing. Brooks is obviously a big fan of Israel, as they are the heroes of the day, even going so far as to selflessly save Palestinian refugees (yeah, right)and remnants of South Africa's apartheid system are given a reprieve due to their pragmatism. Russians are wacky comrades, Chinamen are inscrutable and Americans are cowboys weakened by education and consumerism. Ugh.<p>I won't recommend this book to anyone, even a die hard zombie fan, lest World War Z ruin the genre for them forever.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3427339-jeffrey-keeten"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>2 books247k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1437278549">February 19, 2019</a></section><div><p><b>”The book of war, the one we’ve been writing since one ape slapped another was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.”</b><p>With most apocalyptic situations, I think the hardest part to deal with is that there are no wrong decisions or right decisions. There are simply too many variables to consider if your ultimate goal is to survive. The most meticulously planned strategies can still result in failure. You make the best decisions you can and then hope for a bit of luck. Should we barricade ourselves hoping to be saved, or go North hoping the zombies will eventually become popsicles when winter hits? Are we safer in the underground tunnels of Paris or on a cruise ship or living in the woods by ourselves? Whatever decision you make, you must think long game and short game. The short game, the immediate concerns, involve food, water, and shelter. The short and long game both come into play when trying to figure out how to avoid becoming zombie chow. </p><p>Once you survive the first wave of contagion, then what?</p><p>This book is written as an investigative report, collecting all the experiences of survivors from around the world. Different cultures reacted differently to the apocalypse. Some were more successful than others. The learning curve, unfortunately, has to be short with apocalyptic situations, especially if the hope is to actually salvage civilisation. The lights go out, and many of the comforts we’ve become accustomed to are gone instantly, and the possessions that have come to define us, such as electronic devices, suddenly become useless. </p><p>If the whole idea of a zombie apocalypse is too wild a concept for you to grasp, you might be relieved that for the most part the zombies are really just part of the background. What Max Brooks is really dealing with goes well beyond the concept of zombies and focuses more on how people survived the collapse of civilisation. He could have used microbes or conventional war or a devastating meteorite hitting the earth or any of the other fascinating concepts that people have come up with as ways to end the world. It reads like books of a similar nature that collect the stories of people who survived World War Two. The scope is huge and impressive. Brooks addresses aspects about a zombie apocalypse that I have never thought about before. </p><p><b>Quislings</b> <i>”Yeah, you know, the people that went nutballs and started acting like zombies.”</i> Ok, I’ve read a handful of zombie books, not enough to make myself an expert, but certainly enough to have some background on the lore of a zombie apocalypse. <b>WTH?</b> Now Brooks didn’t just make this term up. It is a term from WW2. <b>”A quisling is a person who collaborates with an enemy occupying force. The word originates from the Norwegian war-time leader Vidkun Quisling, who headed a domestic Nazi collaborationist regime during the Second World War.”</b></p><p>The minds of survivors, I’m sure, snapped in all kinds of strange and wonderful and terrifying ways, but unfortunately pretending to be a zombie was a quick way to find yourself...well...dead. First, any reasonably sane human who notices you lurching toward them, performing your very best mimicry of the undead, will smash your brain. Second, you don’t blend with the zombies. They know you are alive. You become a zombie delight!</p><p>People also just went to sleep perfectly healthy and didn’t wake up. This was called ADS, short for Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome or Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome. <i>”It killed as many people in those early stalemate months as hunger, disease, interhuman violence, or the living dead.”</i> I’ve heard of things like this happening to people who experience long term stress situations. The body just reaches a point where the brain decides to just shut down the power to the spacecraft and let the mind drift away. </p><p><b>RIP</b></p><p>People will put up with a lot as long as there is hope that someday their situation will improve. Babies die when they are not held. People die when things become hopeless. </p><p>Brooks also told stories about zombies underwater. <b>WTH?</b> Yeah, people reanimated as the living dead on ships and eventually managed to fall off the ship in the water. It wasn’t unusual for zombies to just walk out of the water onto beaches or grab divers or attack fishermen in boats. Somehow they are more scary underwater than on land. It gives me the shivers just thinking about it. I’m having a <i>Jaws</i> flashback. </p><p>During and after WWZ, people had to relearn things that our grandparents and great grandparents knew. </p><p>A chimney sweep. <i>”I help keep my neighbors warm.” he said proudly.</i></p><p>A cobbler. <i>”You see those shoes. I made them.”</i></p><p>A shepherd. <i>”That sweater, that’s my sheep’s wool.”</i></p><p>A gardener/farmer. <i>” Like that corn? My garden.”</i></p><p><b>”That was the upshot of a more localized system. It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a clear, concrete contribution to victory, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I was part of that. I needed that feeling. It kept me sane for the other part of my job.”</b></p><p>The other part of his job?...killing zombies. Several of the survivors talked about how important it was not to think of them as people or of who they were or of who they might have become. They couldn’t see them as people or what they were doing was genocide. </p><p>This is by far the most serious zombie book I’ve ever read. The stories are compelling. This is a panoramic view of a society in crises. The observations are thoughtful. The writing is convincing. By the end I had the feeling I’d just read a history book, not a speculative zombie apocalyptic book. </p><p>The book is unfilmable, but the movie industry knew a catchy title when they saw one. They certainly borrowed aspects from the book, but really the movie should be considered a completely different entity. The zombies in Brooks book are the George Romero lurching, yucky living dead. In the movie, they are super charged, fast moving, aggressive, nasty creatures. The virus in the movie is fast acting. Someone bitten is transformed within seconds. In the book, the virus takes much longer to take effect. </p><p>Did it bother me that the director Marc Forster took such liberties? </p><p>Not one </p><s>bite</s> bit. <p>I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I was thoroughly entertained. I certainly intend to watch the movie again. So read the book to discover new depths to an overly exploited genre, and watch the movie to experience a whirlwind of fear and dread. Just a suggestion, have someone else hold the popcorn. </p><p>If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit <a href="http://www.jeffreykeeten.com/">http://www.jeffreykeeten.com</a><br />I also have a Facebook blogger page at:<a href="https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten">https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3427339?shelf=book-to-film">book-to-film</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3427339?shelf=post-apocalyptic">post-apocalyptic</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3270188-kat-kennedy"></a></section><section><p>475 reviews16k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/102388596">May 18, 2010</a></section><div><p>At this current moment in time my husband and I do not actually have a working will. We are the legal definition of intestate. We have not yet made any preparations for our death and we only have life insurance/house insurance because his mother organized the whole damn thing (come to mention it she is also the reason we have electricity, water and a phone line - the internet though was all us because we'd die without it.)<p>So believe me when I say that we don't organize... anything. Except our zombie kit. That's right. We have a zombie kit. Should zombies suddenly strike while I type out this review we would be able to take our son and get in our car and drive away without a backward glance. Everything we need is in the boot of the car. If we're holed up inside the house we have our second zombie kit to live off of and use to defend ourselves. We have several plans in place as to where to go, what to do if we're separated at time of crisis, who we're taking with us, how we'll stay in contact etc.</p><p>Some may call his paranoia. Some may call this stupidity. Do you know what I call these naysayers? </p><p>Zombie food.</p><p>It is this obsessive and weird need to ensure survival during a zombie apocalypse, despite every rational reason to believe that all our efforts are for naught, that has made me the prime candidate and target group of this book. </p><p>It is not the norm of the zombie genre. In general a zombie movie tends to be about a small group of individuals against the undead hordes looking to floss with intestines. </p><p>This book is not about a small group of individuals - it is about a large collection of humanity. This book is how HUMANITY would survive and deal with a zombie infestation. It is a collection of small, broken narratives from people all over the world, across many social, economic and political classes. </p><p>Some of them were amazing, others horrifying. Some were inspirational, others so depressing or introspective that I wondered if there was any hope.</p><p>I would argue that many of the "voices" from certain nationalities were not really very accurate and didn't really match the cultural region they came from - but I'm lazy. Either you "get" the voice of the narratives or you don't.</p><p>This book was a fascinating, thoughtful read in a field that I'm personally obsessed with. I could easily understand how those who've never stayed up until three in the morning, drunk off their heads with a group of people yelling that if they head into the city then they're zombie meat (Zombie meat I say! You ridiculous idiots!) probably will find this book a hard read.</p><p>It's also a difficult read in the sense that you are continually sucked into one story, only to have it end abruptly and shift to another. I kept getting frustrated and wanting to scream, "No! Go back! I want to know what else happened!" but alas. It's like little snap shots from all over the world, except when it comes to several of the snapshots, I'd really rather see the whole picture.</p><p>Other than that, I loved it. I had a hoot reading it. It gave me plenty of fodder with which to have many drunken debates with my husband, brothers and friends.</p><p>Much to their disgust...</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3270188?shelf=contemporary-fiction">contemporary-fiction</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3270188?shelf=kat-s-book-reviews">kat-s-book-reviews</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/45618-karen"></a></section><section><p>3,968 reviews170k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/75939770">September 14, 2018</a></section><div><p>this book is about zombies the same way the bible is about god. they are mostly background actors who are the reason other characters do what they do and occasionally they will rarrrr in and kill a bunch of people because they cant help it, but mostly they are an invisible presence, always to be feared but never given a voice. <p>this whole book takes place after the zombies have already destroyed most of the world and is a collection of the testimonials of hundreds (?) of different characters detailing their experiences with the zombie outbreak, and how they have survived. because of this, there arent really any action scenes, or any immediate terror. this book is more about politics and global concerns and human nature and dissatisfaction with the way the government handles natural disasters and (im gonna say it, im gonna say it) the zeitgeist (woohoo) than it is about man-eating corpses. it takes into account so many different aspects of post-zombie experience that i never would have considered like what will the actors do now? and what happens if a zombie gets on board your boat? and how will this affect the rest of the food chain? very multi-faceted, if not what i was expecting. </p><p>also interesting: the role of castles in a zombie holocaust, and the underground tunnels in paris: unsafe. so for people like alfonso, who do not enter a room without first considering their escape routes should zombies attack, this could give some interesting perspectives about what may have been overlooked, and provide some good food for thought. brains are for thought. brains are zombie food. you do the math.</p><p>uh-oh - book avalanche... maybe more later...</p><p><a href="http://bloggycomelately.com/">come to my blog!</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/45618?shelf=zombies-r-bitey">zombies-r-bitey</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/614778-ahmad-sharabiani"></a></section><section><p>9,568 reviews55.6k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2959759121">April 28, 2022</a></section><div><p><b>World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks</b><p>World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a 2006 zombie apocalyptic horror novel written by American author Max Brooks. The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. </p><p>He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. </p><p>Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War. </p><p>Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, <i>"By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?"</i></p><p>تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز سی و یکم ماه آگوست سال2016میلادی</p><p>عنوان: جنگ جهانی (زد) تاریخ شفاهی جنگ زامبی‌ها؛ نویسنده مکس بروکس؛ مترجم: حسین شهرابی؛ تهران: کتابسرای تندیس، سال‏‫1393؛ در432ص؛ شابک9786001821219؛ چاپ دوم سال1395؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده21م‬</p><p>جنگ جهانی ز (زد) عنوان یک رمان وحشت آخرالزمانی و زامبی است، که توسط نویسنده آمریکایی «مکس بروکس» نوشته شده است؛ دهسال است که بشر بر زامبیها پیروز شده، و سرانجام توانسته صلح را، به دنیا برگرداند؛ نماینده ی سازمان ملل، مشغول تهیه گزارشی از علت شیوع بیماری زامبیها، چرایی شکست دولتهای دنیا از آن، و در نهایت چگونگی پیروزی انسان است؛ در این سفر نخست به «چین» میرود، که «بیمار صفر» در آن پیدا شد، و سپس هم کم کم به همه ی دنیا از «کره شمالی» گرفته، که مردمانش غیب شده اند، تا «روسیه»، که اکنون به امپراتوری مقدس «روسیه»، مبدل شده، از «کوبا» که به ابرقدرتی سرمایه دار تبدیل شده، تا «آمریکا» که به سوسیالیسم روی آورده است؛ در این کتاب داستان مادرانی را خواهید خواند، که فرزندانشان را از ترس زامبیها میکشند، و نیز داستان فضانوردانی که از مدار زمین، یورش زامبیها را زیر نظر دارند؛</p><p>نقل از متن: (هشدارها: «چونگ چینگ» بزرگ، «فدراسیون متحد چین»: این ناحیه، در اوجِ شکوهِ پیشاجنگش، جمعیتی بالغ بر سی و پنج میلیون نفر را، در خود جا داده بود؛ امروز بعید است به پنجاه هزار نفر هم برسند؛ سرمایه های بازسازی، هنوز پایشان به این بخش از کشور باز نشده، و دولت ترجیح داده، بر سواحل تمرکز کند، که تراکمِ جمعیتیشان بالاتر است؛ هیچ شبکه ی نیروگاهی، و برق رسانی در کار نیست، و بجز رودخانه ی «یانگ تسه» هم هیچ آبی جاری نیست؛ اما در خیابانها زباله و خاک و خاشاک به چشم نمیخورَد، و «شورای امنیتیِ» محلی هم اجازه ی وقوعِ هیچ شیوعی را پس از جنگ نداده است؛ رئیس شورا «کوانگ جینگ شو» نام دارد؛ پزشک عمومی است، و به رغم سنِ بالا، و جراحتهای جنگیش، هنوز به تک تک بیمارانش سر میزند</p><p>اولین ظهوری که از بیماری دیدم در دهکده ای دورافتاده بود، که رسماً هیچ اسمی نداشت؛ ساکنانش میگفتند: «داچانگِ نو»، اما این اسم فقط به خاطرِ نوستالژی بود، تا هر چیز دیگری؛ خانه های پیشینشان در «داچانگ قدیم»، از روزگارِ «سه امپراتوری»، سرپا باقیمانده بود، و میگفتند مزارع و خانه ها، و حتا درختهایش سده ها عمر دارند؛ وقتی سدّ «سه دره» تکمیل شد، و آب مخازن سد، کم کم بالا آمد، بخش اعظم «داچانگ» را، آجر به آجر، برداشتند و دوباره در زمین بالاتری ساختند؛ اما این «داچانگ نو» دیگر شهر نبود، و به «موزه ی تاریخ ملی» مبدل شده بود؛ حتماً طعن و طنزِ تلخی برای آن زارعهای بینوا بوده، که دیدند شهرشان نجات پیدا کرده، اما الان دیگر مجبورند بلیت بخرند، تا از آن دیدن کنند؛ شاید به همین دلیل بود که بعضی از آنها ترجیح دادند اسمِ آبادیِ تازه سازشان را «داچانگ نو» بگذارند، بلکه پیوندی با میراث کهنشان برقرار بماند؛ حتا اگر فقط به اسم باشد؛ من اصلاً خبر نداشتم که جایی به اسم «داچانگ نو» وجود دارد؛ پس امیدوارم ��فهمید که چرا وقتی به من تلفن زدند، و صحبتِ آنجا را کردند، چقدر تعجب کردم</p><p>در بیمارستان خبری نبود؛ حتا به رغمِ افزایشِ آمارِ تصادفهای ناشی از مستی، شب بی سروصدایی بود؛ استفاده از موتورسیکلت کم کم رایج میشد؛ بین خودمان زیاد میگفتیم که آن «هارلی - دِیویدسون»های شما بیشتر چینی به کشتن داد، تا کلِ سربازهای امریکایی توی جنگ «کره»؛ به همین خاطر قدردانِ آن شیفت خلوت بودم؛ خسته بودم و کمر و پاهایم درد میکردند؛ میخواستم بروم بیرون سیگار بکشم، و طلوع را تماشا کنم، که شنیدم اسمم را پیج میکنند؛ مسئول پذیرش آن شب تازه کار بود، و متوجهِ لهجه ی فردِ پشت خط نشد، یک تصادفی شده بود، یا مریضی ای...؛ وضعِ اضطراری است -این بخش معلوم بود-، و آیا ممکن بود ما بدون اتلاف وقت کمک بفرستیم؟ چه میتوانستم بگویم؟ پزشکهای جوان، این بچه هایی که خیال میکنند طبابت یعنی چاق و چله کردنِ حسابهای بانکی...؛ اینها حاضر نبودند بروند، و بی جیره و مواجب، به چند تایی نونگمینِ بدبخت بیچاره کمک کنند؛ به نظرم من هنوز ته دلم از آن انقلابیهای پیر هستم؛ «وظیفه ی ما آن است که خود را در قبالِ خلق مسئول بدانیم» این کلمه ها برای من معنا داشت...؛ این کلمه ها یادم بود وقتی وانتِ دییرِ کهنه ام توی جاده خاکی ای بالا و پایین میپرید، که دولت قول داده بود آسفالت کند، اما هیچوقت سراغش هم نیامد؛ دردسر زیادی کشیدم تا محل را پیدا کنم؛ رسماً آن محل وجود نداشت، و به همین دلیل روی نقشه هم نیاورده بودند.؛ چند بار راه را گم کردم، و مجبور شدم از محلیها پرس و جو کنم، که البته خیال میکردند منظورم همان شهر - موزه است؛ وقتی به مجموعه ی ��وچک خانه های سرِ تپه رسیدم، واقعاً کاسه ی صبرم لبریز شده بود؛ یادم هست که با خودم گفتم کاش واقعاً قضیه حاد باشد، وگرنه...؛ بعد وقتی چهره ی آدمهای آنجا را دیدم، از حرفم پشیمان شدم.)؛ پایان نقل</p><p>تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 19/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 07/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/614778?shelf=21th-century">21th-century</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/614778?shelf=fantasy">fantasy</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/614778?shelf=fiction">fiction</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/12772859-mischas"></a></section><section><p>785 reviews1,332 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2754677710">August 20, 2019</a></section><div><p>So, I've seen the movie several times when it was on TV, and I have to say that I even watched a scene or two a couple of dozen times on Youtube. Yes, the action and visuals are fantastic. (Okay, except the one where the guy tears his own tooth, yuck!)<br />But after reading the comments where people were angry at the movie, saying that it does not hold a candle to the book, I knew I had to read it. <br />And yes, I do agree that the only things the movie took from the book were the zombies and Israel building a wall. Oh, and the title.<p>Right away, I was very surprised by the format of this book; it was not all what I was expecting. And the more I think about it; I believe it would be better if I picked up an audiobook instead of a book. Yeah, shocking, I never thought I would say such a thing. <br />Every interview is done with a different person, so, soon I stopped paying attention to their names, so when they again appeared later in the book I had a hard time connecting them with their previous chapters. </p><p>Also, like one third into the book, I got stuck after several boring chapters where I seriously considered DNFing this book, but then I pushed through, and yes, it was worth it. </p><p>I loved that we got to see how so many different parts of the world battled with the zombies. The different approaches, what do to the countries, did they go all savage? Did they bomb their own people? Did they just lose all control? That was fantastic to watch.</p><p>And surprisingly, this book made me even laugh! I just loved the boy who almost missed the zombies because he was focused on his computer. I did not expect that.</p><p><i>That's the one thing you can always depend on; as we're fighting on war, we're always preparing for the next one.</i></p><p>I did not very much grasp how they were suddenly able to fight the zombies when they previously failed with much better equipment but alright. But I have to say that zombie cleaning is funny to imagine. Especially of those underwater, I bet it will be fun if a zombie managed to get stuck in the Mariana Trench. </p><p>However, the scene I was sort of hoped for was post-war when some scientists have a zombie in a lab for studying, that would be fantastic! I honestly would love to see some experiments on these creatures. The book stated that it seemed that the state of the zombies deteriorated, but I wonder what would happen if they maybe starved for years. So many possibilities! </p><p>What sort of surprised me is that I expected that when the humans would go so close to extinction that the environment would get better, no factories running, no one is dumping anything in the water etc. but it was otherwise and it sort of made sense! There had to be so many fires; it's terrifying to imagine. But I wonder about the impact of all those nukes used!</p><p>And that's another thing I wish was different, the last part was sort of jumping from character to character, for short conclusions but I would love to see more about the brand new world. Honestly, I think I would be able to read a book dedicated to each country! Especially Russia, Iceland and Israel would be interesting. Also, I wish we really knew what happened in North Korea. </p><p>I also wonder about Patient Zero, because when the doctor in China informed his friend, they knew what was going on, the military seemed ready for what was happening there. That does not seem like the first case</p><p>Overall, the book is 3,5/5🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️ for me; I think I will get the audiobook to see if I'll like that format better.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/12772859?shelf=english">english</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/12772859?shelf=movie-series-seen-first">movie-series-seen-first</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/12772859?shelf=pb">pb</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1805180-seak"></a></section><section><p>429 reviews475 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/72694031">November 15, 2021</a></section><div><p>Hey, I have a booktube channel (youtube for book reviews) and I do video reviews for books like this one, epic fantasy, science fiction, media related to them, and more. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOnhWRIfXctWhOhB-TAZarw"> Please subscribe here!</a><p><b>Update:</b> See end of review for movie review.</p><p>I've broken my cardinal rule for reading books just before the movie comes out. This rule I've alluded to is the following - I don't read the book directly before the movie (at least 1 year before or it must be read after or just wait on the movies). The reason for this is that I want to enjoy the story through both mediums and if you read the book just before the movie, you've set yourself up to be a critic - analyzing everything and complaining about every detail that's inevitably left out, but which is more often than not necessary for the medium.</p><p>If you read the book at least a year before, at least with my shoddy memory, the movie becomes a happy time of fond remembrances. Oh yeah, I remember that part, so cool! Yay! Happy! In this instance, I hear the movie doesn't quite follow the book exactly and what else can that mean than that it's a typical zombie movie. I don't think I've ruined much here.</p><p>You know, it could have been partly because of all the hype, but I didn't love this book. I didn't hate it either, which makes these the hardest reviews to write, but I think I have a few ideas why World War Z just didn't work all that well for me.</p><p>I'm studying for the bar at the moment, so you get an extremely well-organized review (at least with headings aplenty) since that's how my brain is thinking at the moment. :)</p><p><b>The Plot</b></p><p>Doesn't really exist. Yeah, there's a loose series of events that defines the book, or the Zombie War, but it's told through interviews with different survivors from different countries. And they're short too, I even checked this with the book (paper-form). Each interview amounts to a page or two, maybe 5 max. Each tends to discuss a certain important event, which ends up getting referred to by characters later in the book and often mentioned by the one directly following.</p><p>It's extremely clever and lets you see how well developed this whole idea is.</p><p><b>It's extremely clever</b></p><p>Max Brooks has literally thought of everything when it comes to a war against zombies. I thought the same in my reading of <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/100081867">The Zombie Survival Guide</a>, and it goes just as well here. EVERYTHING!</p><p>He goes into why tanks are all but useless against hordes of zombies - because you have to take out their heads! Anything else, and they'll still shamble and probably even become more dangerous when you trip over them on the ground. The airforce is just as useless because it's so much money and effort for such a little amount of good. Better spent on a bunch of soldiers with tons of amo. He even goes into better strategies for fighting this war, why the zombies are such a good enemy - because they don't need to be bred, fed, or led as I'll let the book explain. </p><p>Very clever and not even pretentious about it. Just captivating. And this isn't the only thing I liked although we're getting into the middle ground because I didn't love the audio either.</p><p><b>The Audio</b></p><p>One of the things that got me excited to listen to this on audio was that it's read by a full cast. That means they're trying REALLY hard and that tends to be a good thing, especially if you don't like one or two of the voices, it's okay, it's only temporary. With just one narrator, that can really kill a book. I mentioned that this is told through many different people in different countries and they have actors like Rob Reiner and John Turturro. Even Max Brooks himself plays the part of the interviewer. </p><p><br />(John Turturro from <i>The Big Lebowski</i>)</p><p>Very cool...until the point of distraction. There are so many different countries represented that the accents started to distract heavily from the story. I found myself pondering why the German guy had such a heavy accent on his "R's" and yet could perfectly pronounce "TH" every time. And this was just the one guy. One of the benefits of a single narrator is that even when they do an accent, it's easier to understand because English is their primary language. </p><p>The audio's great for the most part, outside of that little niggle about the accents, but one thing I absolutely HATE about it is...it's abridged!</p><p><b>Abridged</b></p><p>I would probably never forgive myself if I listened to this abridged audio version and never actually read the entire book if I actually thought that mattered. Maybe others are better sleuths than myself, but I can't find a reading of World War Z that's not abridged. At the same, after having read the book, the abridged version seems to do enough justice to the entirety of the novel, what with how it is organized, that it just cuts out a few of the interviews.</p><p>Normally this is heresy, but I can live with it for this one time only.</p><p><b>What I didn't like</b></p><p>I think the thing that just makes this an okay to good book for me is that while it's style and organization is unique and highly clever, it also takes away from my ability to care. Without just following one person or a group of people, there's no attachment to any specific person. </p><p><b>The Movie</b><br /><br />(Brad Pitt will make everything better.)</p><p>After writing the above, I actually do think the movie will make it all better. It seems like it will be following one single person and that's what this reader needs. Movie's set for a June 2013 release. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcwTxRuq-uk">Here's the trailer too.</a></p><p><b>In the end (in the sense of my final feelings not any post-apocalyptic sense)</b></p><p>Let's just say, if we ever do get into a Zombie War, you better have a copy of World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide on you. Someone's already gone through the effort of thinking up EVERY situation that can occur, what's effective, what's not and put it down in words. No sense reinventing the wheel.</p><p>While an entertaining idea and clever execution, these were the exact things that made World War Z a book I could never love. It's worth a read if only to see how in-depth you have not thought about zombies.</p><p>3 out of 5 Stars (Recommended with Reservations)</p><p><b>The movie, an update</b><br />I just wanted to make a quick note about the movie. I'm happy to say I called it correctly. I enjoyed the movie much more than the book even though you can really only say the movie is a loose adaptation (if you can even say that). I thought it was much better to visit all those countries through the single character of the UN agent as opposed to interviews of random characters. I felt for him trying to protect his family, I rooted for him when he was in danger, and it had the same effect of exploring the reaction of different cultures (to a much smaller degree of course). And it actually scared me, which for a zombie book, was completely lacking in WWZ.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1805180?shelf=2013">2013</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1805180?shelf=audio">audio</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1805180?shelf=braaains">braaains</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8734459-tadiana-night-owl"></a></section><section><p>1,878 reviews22.6k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2781306703">February 22, 2020</a></section><div><p>The deadly epidemic started in China. This time it’s ... zombies.<p>4.5 stars, rounding up because sheer brilliance.</p><p>I'm not, generally speaking, a fan of horror fiction in general or zombie tales in particular, but <i>World War Z</i> popped up on my radar so many times that I finally decided to give it a go. (I checked it out from the library; I wasn't going to stick my neck <i>that</i> far out for this book that I'd pay actual money for it.)</p><p>Anyway. <i>World War Z</i> takes the quasi-historical documentary approach to the zombie apocalypse, as a set of loosely-connected interviews gradually builds a picture of humanity's reaction to the zombie infection that quickly spreads around the world. Max Brooks examines the many ways this kind of a disaster would affect us: socially, militarily, psychologically, and more. The lies that government leaders tell their citizens. The lies that people tell themselves. The determination and heroism of some characters that infuses this otherwise depressing story with hope.</p><p>It's definitely not your standard zombie-flavored horror story. The horror is as much in the way some people react to the catastrophe (e.g., profiteering) as in the moaning, grasping and biting (a 100% death sentence if you get bit) of the zombie hordes.</p><p>Recommended if you're interested in a more analytical approach to the genre. I thought it was fascinating. VERY different from the movie that it inspired.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8734459?shelf=brainsss">brainsss</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8734459?shelf=library-has">library-has</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8734459?shelf=science-fiction">science-fiction</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2868168-alex-duncan"></a></section><section><p>40 reviews7 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/652999076">July 10, 2013</a></section><section><div><p>This book is not a novel. You learn very little about the characters (even the narrator) and cannot follow them from story to story. There's no common thread, no arc, etc. It's a hodgepodge. For many of you, this is all you need to know about this book.<p>If you're looking for a great zombie NOVEL, my favorite is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cryonic-Zombie-Novel-Travis-Bradberry/dp/0974320668/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1372389208&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=cryonic">Cryonic: A Zombie Novel</a></p><p>I suppose there are parallels between the book and the movie in the sense that both are disjointed. It's too big a story to tell and to be done properly Brooks should have written a door stopper of a novel.</p><p>That said, he did piece together an interesting scenario: a world where humans have fought back against the zombies and won. This aspect is shown at the end of the film, as they elude to the inevitable sequel, and it's actually the most interesting part of the book, that is:</p><p>- how did they fight and how'd they win<br />- what challenges did they face<br />- in what ways were they no match for the zombies</p><p>That third bullet is an aspect I have the most difficulty with as there's so much of "bombs didn't work on the zombies" type of statements from those the narrators interviewed. Call me crazy, but if you drop a big 'ole bomb on a zombie hord there aren't going to be many "walking" dead around after that.</p><p>I suppose this book's format will appeal to some people, as many seem to be OK with what he's done, but it's such a huge disappointment when you were expecting a novel and don't get one. </p><p>The book actually has a decent start with the story of patient zero and the images of zombies grabbing ankles from beneath the depths of a flooded city, but it goes downhill quickly from there. </p><p>It's really a chore to read because the stories are so short that they don't allow you to connect with the characters. I have a feeling if Brooks hadn't had so much success with his Zombie Survival Guide that publishers would have turned their nose up at the structure of this book and made him rewrite it. </p><p>At the same time, Brooks and his publisher have made quit a bit of coin on this one so who can blame them?</p><p>Some stories provide enough detail to suck you in and get good (that is just before the end on you abruptly), but others are what I call Brooks' bastards because he gives them so little attention you wonder why they are in there at all.</p><p>There's also one story that despite being long is incredibly boring about a stolen Chinese submarine that takes up enough pages to account for several other stories. Definitely an err in judgment there.</p><p>With no one to root for and no characters to follow, you'll find yourself not caring whether you open the book back up or not. To me, this is the ultimate sin any book can commit. To call this the best zombie book ever written, etc. etc. is so far off the mark I can't even tell you.</p><p>If any of what I'm saying is speaking to you I wouldn't spend your money on the book as it will surely disappoint.</p></p></div><div><p>This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.</p></div></section><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2863914-joel"></a></section><section><p>551 reviews1,575 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77384043">April 6, 2012</a></section><div><p>ME JUST SIMPLE ZOMBIE BUT NO UNDERSTAND WHY LIVING SO PREJUDICED AGAINST DEAD TOLERATE SUCH HATEFUL BOOK BOOK PRESENT TOTAL ONE-SIDED CASE OF FAKE WAR MAN VERSUS ZOMBIES PORTRAYS ZOMBIES AS MINDLESS AND HAS NO COMPASSION FOR FEELINGS HOPES DREAMS DESIRES OF RECENTLY ALIVE LIKE SMELL THE PRETTY FLOWERS ON GRAVE AND WHERE DID LEG GO USED TO HAVE TWO AND WHAT DOES BRAIN TASTE LIKE SO SUE ME AM CURIOUS ANYWAY BOOK GOES AROUND WORLD SHOWING MAN FIGHT ZOMBIES AND ALL TIMES MAN EITHER KILL ZOMBIE WITH RELISH OR ZOMBIE EAT MAN WITH RELISH HA HA SMALL JOKE BUT SERIOUSLY SEEM RACIST THAT AUTHOR NO THINK MAN AND ZOMBIE CAN LIVE PEACE LIKE WHY NOT GIVE ZOMBIE JUST SMALL TASTE OF HUMAN AND ALL GO ABOUT BUSINESS BUT NO MUST BE KILL KILL KILL HUMAN SO SENSITIVE BITE HEAD ONE TIME AND THINK WANT EAT NOTHING BUT BRAINS NEWSFLASH BRAINS NOT ALL THAT TASTY CONCLUSION WHY OK TO MAKE WAR WITH ZOMBIES ZOMBIES NOT EXACTLY NAZIS <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap4TiNIKQJ8">EXCEPT ONE TIME</a></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2863914?shelf=2009">2009</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2863914?shelf=audiobooks">audiobooks</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2863914?shelf=braaaains">braaaains</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/147818-john-wiswell"></a></section><section><p>Author <i></i>44 books373 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3971356">January 9, 2010</a></section><div><p>There are reasons to be wary of this book. The title is a little silly, and Max Brooks's <i>Zombie Survival Guide</i> was tongue in cheek. Hell, he's the son of legendary comedy director Mel Brooks. And zombies are creatures that gained popularity thanks to film, which is contrary to the nature of most good creatures. Vampires, ghosts, wizards, witches, dragons, orcs, goblins, angels, werewolves and even Frankenstein's undead abomination came from literature first, and entered film later. Film seldom contributes originality to prose. Fortunately Max Brooks pulled off a minor miracle in adapting the largely theatrical terror into the written word, by use of the literary apocalypse convention and oral stories. Our familiarity with the outlines of a zombie outbreak (or any plague outbreak) from so many films helps fill in the gaps between his various storytellers' accounts.<p>Brooks has a remarkable sense of voice, and places the various interviewees well, such that they sound all the more distinct in contrast to the preceeding and following speaker. We get a lot of interesting subjects, from the country doctor in China who treated the first "bite," to a hitman hired to protect a millionaire mogul, to a blind man who somehow managed to survive in the most infested parts of Japan - Hiroshima. Thus we also get a total sense of the rise and fall of the outbreak, with each arc illustrated by brilliant personal narratives of "true" stories from those periods that give us a sense of not just the plot, but how culture changed in this fictional earth. The narrative is unified by the interviewer who visits them and directs parts of their story, but only enough so that we can both enjoy the overarching plot and the survivors' stories.</p><p>Like the best science fiction the outlandish premise allows us to get a fresh view of real human issues. Brooks approaches such issues on multiple levels, from simple human interests like base selfishness and how we act in desperation, to political crises, such as early on in the book when the Israelis and Palestinians blame each other for the plague, and even claim it is a hoax perpetrated by their enemies. Many of the characters are inspired by people from real life, like Howard Dean, Karl Rove and Nelson Mandela - but rather than coming off as cheesy, they lend an air of authenticity to the tale. There is just enough real tension, both base and topical, to lend it the right aura for a great exercise in modern fantasy/sci fi - it's easily one of the best fantasy/sci fi books set in the modern world I've read in quite some time.</p><p>The quality of Brooks's book was totally unexpected. This was supposed to be a spin-off from an impulse-buy. But by the time you finish <i>World War Z</i> I think you'll hope along with me that this, his first work of fiction, won't be his last.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/131922-mark-monday"></a></section><section><p>1,620 reviews4,957 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/148491619">June 23, 2012</a></section><div><p>On the menu tonight: <b>
 <i>WORLD WAR Z</i>
</b><u>Amuse Bouche</u><br />Our rich Tartare à la Homo Sapien will astonish you with its hauntingly familiar flavors, its bright and vivid colors, and the truly gamey taste of terror, tears, and trauma. Fresh kill will never appear so carefully arranged and presented: prepare yourself for a buffet that appeases both the palate and the intellect.<u>Appetizer</u><br />A surprisingly hearty summer soup: tantalizing hints of summer flavors frozen solid, then slowly re-animated to surprise the unwary diner. You will literally gasp in amazement as the flavors you thought had come and passed during the colder months rise again to challenge your taste buds! The stew contains a veritable global village of ingredients: you will taste the inscrutable flavors of the mysterious Orient, the refined and subtle tastes of English manor and European castle, the bold and ruthless tang of Mother Russia, and at its core, the zesty essence of woodsy North Americana will serve to keep this dish firmly anchored in the classic Western tradition. This bold starter will act as a bullet straight into your palate’s head! <u>Entrée</u><br />One could perhaps assume that a multi-course, zombified meal will be centered around a choice cut of rare beef steak; our menu will sorely disappoint such traditional diners. Instead we offer as the centerpiece of our prix fixe meal an array of delights that appease not the base emotional senses, but the higher appetites of the intellect! Never fear, diner, your hunger will be truly satiated – but only if you are able to cast aside your yearnings for an old fashioned cheeseburger and partake in a less sensual but perhaps more fulfilling menu. To that end, we offer a buffet of international flavors: taste the crusty unleavened bread of walled Israel, savor the rainbow flavors of a South African duo of rib and grain, relish the fatty riches of Canadian poutine (we understand that Americans will often flee north simply to indulge in this dish!), enjoy a classic sampling of melancholy Japanese swordfish... the world is yours to consume, in a carefully planned and constructed rejoinder that laughs in the face of undead chaos, and shouts: I Am the Decider!<u>Dessert</u><br />For our last dish, we offer you this stunning plate: a downed, half-mad pilot, communicating with phantoms as she hurtles through dense bog and over abandoned freeway, bravely resisting the hungry hands and teeth of the undead!<u>Wine Pairing</u><br />We are proud to offer a new vintage “Max Brooks”, heretofore enjoyed only by ironic survivalists, now available to the world at large.</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/131922?shelf=after-the-fall">after-the-fall</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/131922?shelf=horror-modern">horror-modern</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/131922?shelf=rain-man-reviews">rain-man-reviews</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3978225-carol"></a></section><section><p>1,504 reviews7,566 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/439969174">November 1, 2012</a></section><div><p>Thoughtful and thought-provoking. Not at all the typical zombie book, and not at all what I expected. Published in 2006, the issues and underlying plot points are as pertinent today as then. What would happen in a real zombie apocalypse? Given current politics, economics, cultural trends, and geography, I'd be willing to bet it happens closely to Brooks' vision.<u>World War Z </u> is structured along the lines of a documentary, a collection of remembrances about the world-wide zombie war. Divided by chronological order, one can get the feel of the evolution from chapter headings: "Warnings," "Blame," "The Great Panic," "Turning the Tide" "Home Front USA," "Around the World and Above," "Total War," and "Good-byes." <p>"Warnings" begins with a doctor in China responding to a remote village to a request for help. His tale lures the reader in, giving an intimate view of the initial confusion, the fear, the drastic response by the state, and the systemic holes that lead to ultimate break down. From there, the interviewer talks to a human smuggler in Tibet, drug war agents in Greece, a black-market surgeon in Brazil, a laborer from South Africa, a member of Israeli intelligence, and a repatrioted Palestinian. It's a brilliant idea for a narrative about a global issue, because each culture group frames the problem in terms of its own narrow focus (how could it not?), giving the reader insight into how confronting any issue takes place in a morass of history--but also how similar we are at the individual level. And, unfortunately, the degree to which personal selfishness, both altruistic (saving loved ones) and greedy, pave the way for worsening disaster.</p><p>Further interviews include the ordinary survivor (who was anything but), soldiers, an astronaut, and various government officials including the vice-president and a diplomat. It makes for an extremely interesting analysis, because it covers both the personal, private story and the larger, world arc.</p><p>Ultimately, it was a sobering and satisfying commentary on humanity and the current state of the world. While that sounds potentially dull and analytical, structuring the story around a zombie war is frosting on the vegan cupcake. While it possibly could have been as strong of a narrative if Brooks was imagining a virulent and lethal virus, zombies gave it a flash factor that draws dystopia fans in. Besides, reanimated dead do create challenges of their own that would be unique in warfare. One general talks about how traditional warfare centers around people that are "bred, led and fed." Zombies require none of those things--their ranks grow with death, they require no leaders, so it is not possible to remove key strategists in a campaign, and they don't require any sort of supplies or rest, so there is no possibility of destroying a supply line. Underwater environments prove to be the long-term zombie reservoir, presenting unique challenges to world-wide eradication.</p><p>Minor quibbles include a lack of some of the science behind the outbreak, as well as that of the lone survivors. And, while it is a thought-provoking story over all, it's not exactly a gripping one that kept me up at night. That's actually okay, as it proved more satisfying in the long run. Just temper your expectations.</p><p>In some ways, this was the complete antithesis of <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/10365343.Zone_One">Zone One</a>, (review: <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/301193391">http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...</a>) which examines the zombie post-apocalypse through the individual and humanity's slide downward. This looks at zombie wars through multiple viewpoints on a world-wide scale, and it's ultimate message is hope with cost. </p><p>I highly recommend to zombie or science-dabbling fans. Four flesh-eaten stars.</p><p><a href="http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/world-war-z-by-max-brooks-or-zombies-the-documentary/">http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/0...</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3978225?shelf=audio">audio</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3978225?shelf=end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it">end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/3978225?shelf=zombies">zombies</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2922102-blaine"></a></section><section><p>712 reviews573 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/512528658">July 15, 2020</a></section><div><p><blockquote> Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature.<br />...<br />Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.</blockquote><br />I first read this book at least ten years ago, back when Mr. Brooks’ choice to use the science and language of epidemiology was simply considered a clever way to write a zombie novel. So, how does this story feel now that we’re living through an actual pandemic? It’s even more impressive. Mr. Brooks spent considerable effort making his story realistic, and life has shown how right he was. A pandemic that begins in China and engulfs the world, helped by a Chinese government suppressing the truth. The willful blindness of the public (aided by a broken media system) to grasp the true magnitude of the outbreak. Cynical charlatans selling bogus cures. The failure of the international community to work together to stop the outbreak, and politicians sadly more focused on the economy than the public health. There are so many things in this book that might have felt farfetched before but look eerily prescient now.<p>The oral history method of storytelling is used to great effect here. The interviewees come from all walks of life; this is not just a ‘heroes and generals’ type of story. These first-person vignettes are often narrow in focus, moving, and even harrowing, and each character has a distinctive voice and manner of speaking. But by regularly shifting to a new narrator—across all seven continents, in cities and under them, on and under the oceans, even in outer space—we eventually get the full, grand scope of the story: the initial outbreak, safe zones, refugees, ecological problems, the loss of and eventual rebuilding of hope and civilization. </p><p>World War Z is a completely original, wonderfully imaginative, and chillingly realistic novel. It’s a good read that has become a must read.</p><p>P.S. If you can find the unabridged audiobook (it was originally released with only an abridged one), it’s very good and has a great cast. </p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2922102?shelf=2020">2020</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2922102?shelf=trade-paperback">trade-paperback</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5253785-lyn"></a></section><section><p>1,847 reviews16.3k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2206055207">February 20, 2019</a></section><div><p>A very pleasant surprise.<p>TBT, not a huge fan of the zombie sub-genre: never watched an episode of the Walking Dead, never really bought into it as a fantasy vehicle.</p><p>So – I picked this up with not so much trepidation as an allowance that I probably would not love it. I didn’t LOVE it, but liked it a lot more than I expected I would.</p><p>Here’s the thing:</p><p>It’s not JUST about an <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/14064.I_Am_Legend">I Am Legend</a> scenario where the world turns into monsters. Well – it sort of IS about that – but it’s also about a lot more. Author Max Brooks (son of Mel “It’s good to be the KING!” Brooks) serves this up with a steaming hot portion of socio-economic views, cultural observations and more than a generous side order of HAVEATYOU! post-apocalyptic fudge.</p><p>You probably already can guess the premise, so no spoilers – there is a global pandemic where damn near everyone gets turned into zombies. We’re talking Aliens Bill Paxton “GAME OVER MAN!” world-wide catastrophe. MOST of humanity is wiped out.</p><p>But Brooks’ narrative, told from the shifting perspectives of the survivors in a kind of post-war journalistic oral history novel (patterned after Studs Turkel’s 1984 <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/306399.The_Good_War">The Good War</a>), is appealing for it’s plucky spirit and charismatic delivery. Not just blood and guts, we get to know first hand about this event from start to finish and all the details in between. It’s the human element of this that works so well, the near remembrances of the survivors told from their perspectives.</p><p>I loved that Brooks develops a working vocabulary for the post-war survivors. The human soldiers call their zombie opponents “Zach” and he makes the astute observation that they no longer needed consultants and executive directors – humanity needed carpenters and gunsmiths. I was also drawn to one of the survivor’s recollection that his group loved to go into battle to the ear splitting tunes of Iron Maiden’s The Trooper.</p><p>So if you were like me and avoided this because it was just another zombie book – go ahead and give it a try, it’s actually pretty good.</p><p></p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1036893-fabian"></a></section><section><p>935 reviews1,527 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/958888841">October 22, 2020</a></section><div><p>Having just read the most literary of all zombie novels makes one thing quite clear: haute lit &amp; this particular horror genre simply don't mix. But that doesn't make the effort any less outstanding, unique, or outrageous. "WWZ" takes a scatterplot approach to begin to tell what's happened to the world after the zombie apocalypse has transpired. All accounts are so definitive, so individual as to seem 100% authentic. We get accounts all the way from the very heights of the social echelons (Veep, Army generals...) to the rantings of average civilians (like a woman with a 5 year-old's sensibility, for instance).<p>There is a type of reader out there for this type of narrative. They will adore the militaristic accounts-- though, admittedly, not my cup of tea. But the additions to zombie lore are awesome! From quislings (i.e. live zombie impersonators) to zombie-detecting dogs.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/16254355-matthew"></a></section><section><p>1,219 reviews8,687 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/500804066">September 9, 2016</a></section><div><p>I read this book a few years ago - the Zombie Survival Guide was super-hyped so I wanted to check this followup out as soon as it came out. I love the documentary format. Brooks did so well in telling it in such a way that it really did feel like non-fiction.<p>One of my favorite parts of the zombie genre is not necessarily the horror and gore, but how the survivors deal with the threat and rebuilding. The before, during, and after stories in this book are raw and real. Because of this, this zombie tale will likely appeal to more than just horror fans.</p><p>Concerning the movie: I enjoyed the movie, but it is barely like the book. They are each enjoyable in their own right. </p><p>Max Brooks: Probably the most entertaining fact about this book is that it is written by Mel Brooks' son (but don't expect any comedy!)</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/16254355?shelf=borrowed">borrowed</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/16254355?shelf=favorites">favorites</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/16254355?shelf=post-apocalyptic-dystopian">post-apocalyptic-dystopian</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/405390-kemper"></a></section><section><p>1,388 reviews6,652 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/38931938">October 13, 2020</a></section><div><p>*Updated after rereading. 10/12/20*<p>This still holds up remarkably well even if I'm not the zombie enthusiast I used to be. I did the Audible version this time and the all-star cast does a fantastic job. The weird thing is that the jumping off point for the American political aspect had that 2006 W. Bush era mindset which seemed kind of dark and cynical at the time, but now seems incredibly naïve and quaint these days. The stuff about how various governments around the world either react swiftly or fail completely in a time of crisis really hits home these days.</p><p>*Original review.*<br />While his previous book was a tongue-in-cheek zombie survival guide, Brooks turns deadly serious here. Written as a series of survivors' stories in a UN report following a world wide war with the undead, Brooks crafted a classic horror novel that reads like history. Inventive, scary and a must read for anyone who ever enjoyed a George Romero zombie movie.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/405390?shelf=2020-reread">2020-reread</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/405390?shelf=apocalypse-now">apocalypse-now</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/405390?shelf=favorites">favorites</a> </ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/58160628-emily-books-with-emily-fox"></a></section><section><p>525 reviews56.7k followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1853222251">May 17, 2017</a></section><div><p>Well this didn't go as I expected...<br />I love post-apocalyptic books. When I learned after watching the movie that there was a book I couldn't wait to read it! Turns out I was bored and had to skim through the last part...<br />Love the story but hated the format with the "interviews".</p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/58160628?shelf=2-star-y-am-i-doing-this-to-myself">2-star-y-am-i-doing-this-to-myself</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/58160628?shelf=dnf">dnf</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/58160628?shelf=post-apocalyptic">post-apocalyptic</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/416390-paul-bryant"></a></section><section><p>2,162 reviews9,039 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/11206044">June 4, 2013</a></section><div><p>update...update...<p>To everything there is a time - a time to reap and a time to plant, a time to listen to Schoenberg and a time to listen to Lez Zeppelin, the all-girl tribute band, a time to read Marcel Proust and a time to read about zombie apocalypses. That time, for me, passed some years ago. I shouldn't've picked up this novel but I was seduced by shedloads of great reviews on this very site.</p><p> Although my copy has a front-cover blurb by Simon Pegg, it's his very own great little zom-romcom Shaun of the Dead, plus George Romero's splendid zombie trilogy which Shaun beautifully parodies, plus other movies like 28 Days Later and I Am Legend, and a thousand other post-apocalypse novels and B-movies, and plus NOW the fab series THE WALKING DEAD which I only just discovered, wow, I love it - it's all of these things which cumulatively undermine the not inconsiderable energy and sociopolitical insight of Max Brooks' own version of The War Against the People You Really Hoped You'd Never See Again. Every scene in this book we've seen or read several times before, and alas, mostly by less truthful writers. This is really an excellent novel, but for younger readers who haven't already slogged, as I have, through a lifetime of pulp. </p><p>Brooks's imagination is tough and unflinching, but you have to concede that zombie apocalypses bring out the macho in pretty much everybody. This really is a war book, chock full of pumped-up acronym-heavy military jargon. World War Z is mainly fought with TESTOSTERONE!!!</p><p>This book wanted to be for zombies what THE WIRE is for Baltimore, and for that I give it a crisp military salute and a bag of red tops. I think my 15 year old self would have rated this one four fat ones but that guy didn't have the best taste really. </p><p>**</p><p>That said, myself and daughter Georgia will be lurching, shambling and jerking our bodies towards the cinema when the Brad Pitt zombuster film-of-the-book is released soon. Me and Georgia love that stuff. Gwan, destroy the world again... and again...</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/416390?shelf=novels">novels</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/416390?shelf=verysleazyfun">verysleazyfun</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4342402-tl"></a></section><section><p>1,765 reviews35 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/649266037">April 27, 2020</a></section><div><p>2020 re-read:<br />Still a comfort read for me, despite everything going on right now. Reason why it took me so long this was I lost my job a couple days after I started this and wasn't in the right frame of mind for it, plus less driving so cutting down on commute.<p>I would like to see Netflix adapt this as a series, I think they'd do a good job.</p><p>*Make sure you go for the unabridged version of the audiobook of this, well worth it*</p><p>I even got mom to listen to a few parts with me when we had to go out and about. She would ask me questions after certain parts :).</p><p>Not alot to say really, just that this is still one of my favorite books &lt;3</p><p>I remember seeing the movie of this and thinking "Youins screwed this up big time." I've heard the story of how this particular plot was decided on and rolled my eyes but I still gave it a chance. I was mostly bored during it.</p><p>IMHO, I hope the sequel doesn't ever get made if its gonna be anything like the first one. Worst book adaptation (for me) alongside the *coughPercyJacksoncough* films.</p><p>This was a balm after crazy busy or frustrating work nights (and there were QUITE a few)... few of these are still my top favorites and I still applaud the cast of voices. They make what could be dry retellings more compelling and fascinating. </p><p>Can't say much more than I've already said.. if you decide to go for this.. have fun:)<br />---</p><p>1st time June (paperback), second time (audiobook) October 2013.. Third read : near end of September to October 9th 2015</p><p>4th read: June 2017<br />---</p><p>For a list of the audiobook cast:<br /><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World...</a><br />---</p><p>Not a bad way to kick off October hmm? I had planned to take my time with this but flee through it haha. The diverse cast of the audiobook adds to the enjoyment alot... half the fun for me was guessing who the sort of familiar voices belonged to (got a few right ).<br />A couple I was impressed by their accent change, Simon Pegg I didn't recognize at all the first time till I listened to the cast list at the end.. Good job Simon :)</p><p>There's not a plot persay really, its a bunch of survior accounts with a couple intersecting that follows the war from beginning to end. </p><p>Some of the parts were overlong and a bit dry/rambling but it didn't deter my enjoyment of the novel. </p><p>It's a book where you'll love it, or find it 'meh' probably... not a quick read but worth your time:)</p><p>I remember having fun tracking down the unabridged version of the audiobook at the time. I didn't know at first only an abridged one was out (those make no sense to me ).. I think I found mine either just after I saw the movie or before. Would highly recommend the full version!</p><p>Happy reading, I probably dig this out again in a couple years:)<br />(Excuse any spelling errors right now haha, on my phone)</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4342402?shelf=favorites">favorites</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4426615-jason"></a></section><section><p>137 reviews2,270 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/147944833">July 17, 2013</a></section><div><p><i>ZOMG!</i><p>The first time I ever saw that chat acronym my brain immediately registered <i>zombie</i>. Is that weird? I mean, I figured out pretty quickly that the acronym is nothing more than a joke, a mere play on words (so to speak) made at the expense of lazy n00bs whose left fingers slip off the shift key in an attempt to type, “OMG!” But somehow that initial association has stuck with me, as even now when I see someone type it (and usually it’s Ceridwen, Queen of Internet Memes, doing it ironically), I think of the undead. Or when I’m walking alone at night and hear a scraping shuffle and a familiar guttural moan, and some cold, rotting fingers fall lazily onto my left shoulder, my immediate reaction is never anything short of an instinctually exclaimed, “ZOMG!”</p><p>Shudder.</p><p>So yeah, this rating is no accidental slip of the Apple trackpad; <i>World War Z</i> really is 4-star material. Instead of presenting a been-there-done-that narrative wherein a group of protagonists fall prey to a zombie epidemic, whose lives change with shifting priorities, whose outlook becomes fundamentally survivalist, and who ultimately learn to cope with their situation and depend on themselves and each other to combat the swarms of undead infesting their world, Max Brooks takes a different tack. Here, we get Bolaño-style interviews with key political and military figures from across the globe who are involved in the conflict, along with individual accounts of those who have survived the epidemic. It is a cross-sectional human-interest look at what occurred at the onset of the epidemic, who failed to heed the warning signs and why, who was responsible for its spread and how, and what the world did—both on a grand scale as well as in Joe the Plumber’s backyard—to tackle it.</p><p>And tackle it they do. Essentially a “current events” book, this is not meant to project the possibilities of a distant future. It is the here and now of a planetary disaster with painstaking attention paid to the details of not only the epidemic’s spread, but also to the practical logistics encountered on the path to its defeat. The stories are short, but effective. And like Bolaño’s interviews, there is a uniformity in their voice (even with interviewees hailing from different countries), which could be seen as a failure on Brooks’s part, but it nonetheless worked for me. Brooks has a lot to say in this novel, from opinions on American foreign policy to a belief in the indefatigable spirit of humanity, and—<i>ZOMG!</i>—he says it well.</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4426615?shelf=2013">2013</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4426615?shelf=for-kindle">for-kindle</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4426615?shelf=reviewed">reviewed</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/274033-brownbetty"></a></section><section><p>342 reviews162 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/116146630">August 11, 2010</a></section><div><p>This book is like ordering ice-cream and receiving a punch in the mouth.<p>I've been wanting to read this book for a while, since it seemed right up my alley; I love a good apocafic, and zombies are always fun. I made it to page 69 before putting it down with great force--I would have thrown it, except it was a library book.</p><p>This book is, as advertised, about the global zombie apocalypse as told by the survivors. You don't stay with a narrative voice very long; each one speaks to the 'interviewer', telling their experience of the global plague, and then moves on. It's not worth becoming fond of any of them, and frankly, not very likely either; personalities only go about as far as classing a person as “stupid,” "naive", or “evil,” with the occasional “if only we'd listened to that farsighted man!” </p><p>The personality that comes through the strongest is the writer, not the in-story journalist who has supposedly compiled the stories, but in fact <a href="https://goodreads.com/search/search?q=max%20brooks">max brooks</a>. I don't know the man, but from the 69 pages of his writing I already dislike him. </p><p>The overall tone I get from this book is 'smug.' I twitched in the introduction when the journalist describes his motivation writing the book; his boss who pays him rejects his first draft which contains the interviews which contain the “human factor”, dismissing them as “too intimate … too many feelings.” Obviously, this boss is a robot-hearted beaurocrat!</p><p>Or maybe the journalist is an <i>idiot</i>. He was told to write up a report containing “cold, hard data,” and “clear facts and figures,” and he handed in an oral history? What did he <i>think</i> was going to happen?</p><p>I could handle it if the framing device was “idiot-journalist is idiot,” but it's not just him. It quickly becomes apparent that the actual subtitle of this book is “How the people and institutions I despise will doom us all in the upcoming zombie apocalypse.” Nearly every account falls into “Oh, I was so foolish and innocent then!” or “I remain a selfish bastard, and refuse to feel guilty for my actions.” It's like a whole book of stories ending with “And then the entire bus gave me a standing ovation, and the bus driver told me I was his adopted brother.”</p><p>AUGH. Look, 69 pages produced that much aggravation. Imagine if I'd <i>finished</i> it.</p></p></div><section><ul></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1219253-amanda"></a></section><section><p>282 reviews315 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/25569432">January 27, 2013</a></section><div><p>I have biblio-cooties.<p>There. I said it and I accept it. Because the majority of my friends really, really loved this book. And I fear they will reject me now that they know that it did little to nothing for me. I shall have to sit alone in the library, other readers keeping a wide berth for fear of contagion, but I cannot tell a lie and I stand by my pronouncement: Hi, my name is Amanda and I did not enjoy <i>World War Z</i>. </p><p>In the past, I have ripped into books I disliked with a gleeful, almost maniacal abandon, and so there are some who may suspect that I will do so here. But this is an entirely different case, for <i>World War Z</i>'s fault is not that it's a bad book. It's well-written, it's got an intriguing conceit (the tale of the zombie apocalypse told in journalistic hindsight from the perspective of those who survived), and some imaginative scenarios (sure, we've all thought about zombies on land, but what about zombies <i>underwater</i>?). </p><p>In fact there's no fault at all here other than the fact that, as far as undead ghouls go, I'm Team Vampire. I've never really found anything that frightening about zombies, other than a certain "Eww" factor that compels me to think about how I need to stock up on hand sanitizer and wet wipes in a zombiefied world because they're leaving nasty bits and pieces <i>everywhere</i>. To me, there is nothing more frightening than intellect coupled with either undeniable evil or with moral apathy. Since zombies are basically husks driven by a biological imperative instead of conscious thought, they're not my monster of choice. The only zombie flicks I've enjoyed have been <i>Shaun of the Dead</i> or <i>Zombieland</i>. Humor + zombies = a win. Horror + zombies = not so much.</p><p>So I knew going in that this was likely a swing and a miss, but it had received such rave reviews that I couldn't resist. I thought the journalistic style might appeal to me, but few of the voices were clearly differentiated enough for me to connect with any one character. There were 3 or 4 stories that really engaged me, but not enough to enjoy the overall experience. What was really frightening, however, is that Brooks does an excellent job of showing how ill-equipped we are globally to deal with any type of rapidly-spreading contagion. He also captures the fear and panic that comes out of facing an unknown. Particularly in first world countries, we are so complacent with "knowing all the answers" and controlling everything that the mental toll of facing a problem we can not solve would be just as damaging as the physical threat. Brooks does an excellent job of realistically portraying this.</p><p>So, I'll say it again: not a bad book. Just not for me. Now I'll go sit in my corner and wait for someone else to catch biblio-cooties. It shouldn't be long. I just have to wait for someone to write a 1 star review of an Orson Scott Card or Janet Evanovich book and my transgressions will be forgotten. </p><p>Cross posted at <a href="http://viiamanda.blogspot.com/">This Insignificant Cinder</a></p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1219253?shelf=blog">blog</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1219253?shelf=meh">meh</a></ul></section><hr /></section></article></div><div><article><div><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4013351-stacia-the-2010-club"></a></section><section><p>1,045 reviews3,935 followers</p></section></div><section><section><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/113793023">June 26, 2013</a></section><div><p>Doing something in reverse bit me in the butt this time. I started the book but didn't get very far in before seeing the movie.<p><b>What I thought the movie was going to be :</b><br /></p><p><b>What I actually got :</b><br /><br /><b>Damn, those zombies were fast.</b></p><p>Yes, I am only doing all of this to amuse myself, for the rest of you probably see my self-perceived cleverness as silly. But <i>World War Z</i> the book was a series of interviews, so of course my mind goes right to Brad Pitt's <i>other</i> role having to do with interviews...what was I to do???</p><p>Anyway, let's get back to the point. If you are expecting the book and movie to match up, you'll be completely frustrated.</p><p><b>WWZ the movie :</b> action packed, time on the run, most of it told in one person's PoV.</p><p><b>WWZ the book :</b> the complete opposite of that. No joke.</p><p>Anyhoooo (help me, I'm turning into my mother), after I got back from the movie (which was quite entertaining, btw) and picked up the book again, I was all WHAT THE EFF? Is this the same thing? </p><p>So I put it down for a couple of days. You know, to clear my head and all that. </p><p>Then I picked it up again. And read it for real. And it wasn't bad. </p><p>I really wish I'd read it first now because the warped not-alike movie was more entertaining, and it hampered my ability to get into the book the same way that I might have before. But what can you do? </p><p>Oh yeah. Right. Don't watch the movie first. That's what you can do. </p><p>Or do watch the movie first, if you have no desire to read a book in which much of it is about the retelling of events, interview style. If you'd rather just start out your time with people on the run from zombies, I'd gather that the movie is a safer bet.</p><p>Was this supposed to be a book review? Because I don't think I said much about the book, did I? I thought the book was okay but can't really say why. It was all over the place. The jumping around between viewpoints isn't my favorite style of story-telling, especially when you can't get a feel for who is telling the story/giving the recollection. </p><p>I felt sort of detached because of the writing style. I'm sure that it works for a lot of people, but it didn't completely work for me. This was good enough that I was able to get through it, but there's nothing compelling enough to make me want to re-read it or even recommend it.</p><p>Movie Grade : B (even with failing to stick to the book)<br />Book Grade : C (even though it was more unique than the movie)</p></p></div><section><ul><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4013351?shelf=action-and-adventure">action-and-adventure</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4013351?shelf=adult">adult</a> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/4013351?shelf=dystopia-or-apocalyptic">dystopia-or-apocalyptic</a> </ul></section></section></article></div></div>||||I|||| * Home
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 World War Z

 World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

 Max Brooks

 4.02
 496,852 ratings 28,215 reviews
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 The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

 Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

 Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, "By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?"

 Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.
 Genres Horror Fiction Zombies Science Fiction Fantasy Post Apocalyptic Dystopia
 ...more

 342 pages, Hardcover

 First published September 12, 2006

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 About the author

 Max Brooks

 90 books 6,519 followers
 Max Brooks is The New York Times bestselling author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. He has been called ”the Studs Terkel of zombie journalism.“

 Brooks is the son of director Mel Brooks and the late actress Anne Bancroft. He is a 1994 graduate of Pitzer College. His wife, Michelle, is a screenwriter, and the couple have a son, Henry.

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 Ellen
 13 reviews 88 followers
 June 5, 2008
 This book was initially recommended to me by several people in the office and since I love zombies and apocalyptic themes, well, I was pretty excited. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations and I struggled to finish it. (I'm going to write this review under the assumption that the reader has some inkling about the story and how it's constructed.)

 There are two issues that killed it for me. Firstly, most of the characters had the same--or similar--voice. Of course this is partly to do with the fact that the voices all originate from the mind of one individual, the author. Also, the more journalistic/interview approach to constructing the narrative limits how much color the author can impart on any given character. Q and A is inherently dry, no matter how exciting the events described are intended to be. This is a minor gripe, though, and one that can be lived with.

 A more serious complaint, however, is that this book can be seen as completely lacking any and all dramatic tension that a person (or, me) expects from a survival horror-themed story. The primary draw--the zombie war and how humanity survived--is such a compelling hook, but it's told...by the people who survived. As in, past tense, as in we are left with their impressions of things that happened to them. Basically, then, the story devolves into an excercise in basic exposition: "And then this happened, and then that happened." And so the author is free to weave his story without any pesky things like character development, story arcs, plotting, and personal details that are shown and not told. It seems to me like an extraordinarily easy (maybe even lazy) way to tell a story.

 One other minor point: For me, accounts of survival when the victims are real have meaning that allows them to transcend the limitations described above. WW2 Holocaust survivors' accounts, for example, can take your breath away. The difference is, of course, that they were real events that happened to real people.

 Since all the classic storytelling elements are dispensed with, we're basically left with the author's views on our current world, particularly and naturally, the wars and our culture(s). However, it's my view that there are dozens of books written about these subjects already; books that haven't needed to sex the discussion up with a horde of shambling undead.

 So, in summary, if I'm going to read an apocalyptic recounting of the end of civilization as we know it, I want to read about people in real time, struggling to survive, not being told how people surivived after it was over.

 (I realize, though, that it's all a matter of taste, as I know half a dozen people whose views I respect that absolutely loved this book.) :D

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 Jason Pettus
 Author 12 books 1,262 followers
 March 24, 2008
 (My full review of this book is longer than Goodreads' word-count limitations; find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

 Anytime I hear of some funny, gimmicky book suddenly becoming popular among the hipster set, I always squint my eyes and brace myself for the worst; because usually when it comes to such books, the worst is all you can expect to find, an endless series of fluffy pop-culture pieces designed specifically for crafty point-of-purchase display at your favorite corporate superstore, and then a year later to be forgotten by society altogether. And so it's been in the last six months as I've heard more and more about this book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War , which supposedly is a hilarious "actual" oral history about an apocalyptic war with the undead that supposedly almost wiped out the human race as we know it; even worse, that it had been inspired by an actual gimmicky point-of-purchase humor book, the dreadful Zombie Survival Guide from a few years ago which had been published specifically and only to make a quick buck off the "overly specific survival guide" craze of the early 2000s. And even worse than all this, the author of both is Max Brooks, as in the son of comedy legend Mel Brooks; and if the son of a comedy legend is trawling the literary gutters of gimmicky point-of-purchase humor books, the chances usually are likely that they have nothing of particular interest to say.

 So what a surprise, then, to read the book myself this month, and realize that it's not a gimmicky throwaway humor book at all, but rather a serious and astute look at the next 50 years of global politics, using a zombie outbreak as a metaphorical stand-in for any of the pervasive challenges facing us as an international culture these days (terrorism, global warming, disease, natural disasters), showing with the precision of a policy analyst just how profoundly the old way of doing things is set to fail in the near future when some of these challenges finally become crises. It is in fact an astoundingly intelligent book, as "real" as any essay by Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell, basically imagining the debacle of New Orleans multiplied by a million, then imagining what would happen if the Bushists were to react to such a thing in the same way; and even more astounding, Brooks posits that maybe the real key to these future challenges lies with the citizens of third-world countries, in that they are open to greater and faster adaptability than any fat, lazy, middle-class American or European ever could be. Oh yeah, and it's got face-eating zombies too. Did I mention the face-eating zombies?

 Because that's the thing to always remember, that this comes from an author who has spent nearly his entire life in the world of comedy and gimmicky projects, not only from family connections but also his own job as a staff writer at Saturday Night Live from 2001 to '03; that no matter how smart World War Z gets (and it gets awfully smart at points), it is still ultimately a fake oral history of an apocalyptic zombie war that supposedly takes place just five or ten years from now, starting as these messes often do as a series of isolated outbreaks in remote third-world villages. And in fact this is where Brooks first starts getting his political digs in, right from the first page of the manuscript itself, by using the initial spread of the zombie virus to comment on the way such past epidemics like HIV have been dealt with by the corrupt old white males who used to be in charge of things; basically, by ignoring the issue as long as it wasn't affecting fellow white males, then only paying attention after it's become an unstoppable epidemic. In Brooks' world, just like the real one of pre-9/11 intelligence-gathering, we see that a few government smarties from around the world really were able to catch the implications of this mysterious new virus while it was still theoretically controllable; just that their memos and papers went ignored for political reasons by those actually in charge, as well as getting lost in the vast bureaucratic shuffle that the Cold War has created in the Western military-industrial complex.

 That's probably the most pleasurable part of the first half, to tell you the truth, and by "pleasurable" I mean "witty and humorous in a bleak, horrifying, schauenfreude kind of way" -- of watching the virus become more and more of a threat, of watching entire cities start to go under because of the zombie epidemic, then watching Brooks paint an extremely thinly-veiled portrait of how the Bush administration would deal with such a situation, and by extension any government ruled by a small cabal of backwards, power-hungry religious fundamentalists. And in this, then, World War Z suddenly shifts from a critique about AIDS to a critique about Iraq, showing how in both situations (the Middle East and zombies, that is) the real priority of the people currently in charge is to justify all the trillions of dollars spent at traditional weapon manufacturing companies under the old Cold-War system (companies, by the way, where all the people in charge have lucrative executive jobs when they're not being the people in charge), leading to such ridiculous situations as a full-on tank and aircraft charge mostly for the benefit of the lapdog press outlets who are there covering the "first grand assault." In Iraq, unfortunately, we found that a billion dollars in tanks still can't stop a teenage girl with a bomb strapped to her chest; and metaphorically that might be the most chilling scene in the entirety of World War Z as well, the press-friendly "zombie response" set up by the Bush-led government in New York's Yonkers neighborhood, done not for good strategic reasons but rather to show off the billions of dollars in weapons the government had recently acquired, leading to a virtual slaughter of all the soldiers and journalists there by the chaotic zombie hoard that eventually arrives.

 This, then, gets us into the first futuristic posit of Brooks in the novel to not have actually happened in real life yet -- the "Great Panic," that is, when the vast majority of humans suddenly lose faith in whatever government was formerly running their section of the world, and where mass anarchy and chaos leads to the accidental and human-on-human deaths of several hundreds of millions of more people. And again, by detailing a fictional tragedy like a global zombie epidemic, and the complete failure of a Bush-type administration to adequately respond to it, Brooks is eerily predicting here such real situations like last week's complete meltdown of Bear Stearns (the fifth largest investment bank in the entire United States), leading many to start wondering for the first time what exactly would happen if the US dollar itself was to experience the same kind of whirlwind collapse, a collapse that happens so fast (in a single business day in the case of Bear Stearns) that no one in the endless red tape of the government itself has time to actually respond to it?

 Brooks' answer here is roughly the same one Cormac McCarthy proposed in last year's Pulitzer-winning The Road ; chaos, bloodshed, violence, inhumanity, an everyone-for-themselves mentality from the very people we trusted to lead us in such times of crisis. Make no mistake, this is a damning and devastating critique of the corrupt conservatives currently in charge of things; a book that uses the detritus of popular culture to masquerade as a funny and gross book about zombies, but like the best fantastical literature in history is in fact a prescient look at our current society. It's unbelievable, in fact, how entertaining and engrossing this novel is throughout its middle, given how this is usually the part of any book that is the slowest and least interesting; here Brooks uses the naturally slow middle of his own story to make the majority of his political points, and to get into a really wonky side of global politics that is sure to satisfy all you hardcore policy junkies (as well as military fetishists).

 Because that's the final thing important to understand about World War Z , is that it's a novel with a truly global scope; Brooks here takes on not only what such a zombie epidemic would do to our familiar US of A, but also how such an epidemic would spread in the village-centric rural areas of southeast Asia, the infrastructure-poor wastelands of Russia and more, and especially how each society fights the epidemic in slightly different ways, some with more success than others. For example, Brooks posits that in such places as India, population density is just too high to do much of any good; in his fictional world history, such countries are basically decimated by such a catastrophe, with there basically being few humans even left in India by the time everything is over. Other countries, though, used to picking up as a nation and fleeing for other lands, survive the zombie outbreaks quite well; those who are already used to being refugees, for example, see not too much of a difference in their usual lifestyle from this latest turn in events, ironically making them the societies most suited for survival in such a world. (This is opposed to all the clueless middle-class Americans in the novel, for example, who in a panic make for the wilds of northern Canada, in the blind hope that the winter weather will freeze the zombies into non-action; although that turns out to be true, poor planning unfortunately results in the deaths of tens of millions of people anyway, from hypothermia and starvation and plain ol' mass-murder.)

 And this is ultimately what I mean by this book being such a politically astute one; because as...
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 Miranda Reads
 1,588 reviews 153k followers
 December 10, 2020


 New week, New BookTube Video - all about the best (and worst) literary apocalypses to live through!
 The Written Review



 Humanity survived Zombie apacolypse.

 Like after any great tragedy, the government wants a record.

 Max Brooks is their oral historian.

 Only, when he hands his documents, the bureaucracy whittles it down to the bare facts.

 Humans, over every nation, dragged their bone weary bodies through this war.

 They are now faced with the numbing task of rebuilding society.

 They deserve to have their stories told. So, he publishes the true account of World War Z.

 Told in a series of vignettes, we listen in on interviews as Brooks travels both the country and the world. And one thing is certain, life with zombies is a chilling tale.
 The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts
 The vignettes are absolutely riveting. There's a bit of the regular zombie murder mayhem but the story focuses on the human side of things. How the survivors, survived.

 There's the blind man who fought off a hoard with no more than a blunt staff. Some people lost their minds - succumbing to tree belief that they have joined the dead. There's the unintentionally cannibalistic family - and so much more.
 Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has.
 Audiobook comments :
 --Read by Max Brooks, Alan Alda, John Turturro, Rob Reiner, Mark Hamill, Alfred Molina, Simon Pegg, Henry Rollins and Martin Scorsese
 --Highly recommended you listen to this novel - it's a quality production.
 --Every voice is country-specific and the actors read very convincingly. It feels like I'm next to Max as he interviews the survivors.

 YouTube | Blog | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Snapchat @miranda_reads
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 Mario the lone bookwolf
 733 reviews 3,398 followers
 January 2, 2023
 A perfect vivisection

 Of the social, economic, environmental, and political consequences of zombie outbreaks
 One day, it might be a helpful or even lifesaving work one hopefully has as a paperback and not on an ebook reader. The seriousness and attention to detail Brooks put in his work are part of the satire, because it really feels as if a real reporter is investigating a story.

 Each one reacts differently
 As in the ironic Zombie survival guide, Brooks uses all possible aspects of a zombie apocalypse, from its beginning until how it could end, including each human's individual reaction to it to describe the happenings.

 Less action, more characters
 Switching between the interviews, the book gives a new and more personal view on this very prominent topic, avoiding stereotypes and overused tropes, and is instead telling it from the points of view of very different people that wouldn´t normally be used to write the standard book or movie script.

 Could be used in other genres too
 The idea of using interviews as the main element for telling a story is a rare style element, but full of potential for more frequent use in fiction, although it might get very tricky to integrate it in a way that doesn´t interrupt the flow. But a Fantasy or Sci-Fi novel told from those perspectives would be a nice variation of the scheme.

 Not as superficial as the Zombie survival guide
 While the zombie survival guide was more a pure fun read, Brooks pimps his writing this time with innuendos, criticism, and social commentary.

 It´s maybe also a satire of journalism itself
 But I haven´t enough expertise to be competent in that. So maybe Brooks even imitated and satirized the tone of autobiographical monologues and endless introspections that are often unintentional satires already, when reporters are losing rhetorical control.

 Tropes show how literature is conceived and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
 https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
 horror
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 Penny
 215 reviews 1,354 followers
 November 10, 2012
 I know what you're thinking. "Five stars for this book? Why???"

 If you've been following my reviews then you know I tend to stress over how many stars to give a book, and I'm not one to hand out five-star ratings willy-nilly. I'm usually quite cautious when it comes to handing out that all-important fifth star. I'm stingy. That being said, every once in a while a book, that may or may not be amazing, comes along and wows me.

 And now you're (probably) thinking: "But Penny, it's a book about zombies. Zombies! Disgusting rotting corpses that stumble around, looking to sink their teeth into any living thing. How--how could that sort of thing wow you? Are you, like, smoking crack???"

 First things first: No--I'm not smoking crack. Everyone knows crack is cheap--I much prefer the real thing*. Now that I've cleared that up, lets move on, shall we?

 So. World War Z. I really enjoyed it, which was a surprise because I didn't think I would. This book is not something I would've picked up on my own. Had it not been for a couple of really nice Barnes & Noble employees who practically shoved this book in my hands while gushing about its supreme awesomeness, I definitely wouldn't have purchased it. But since they didn't have the book I was looking for (Storm Front by Jim Butcher), and since I'd already been bitten by the zombie bug over a year ago (The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan) I took a chance and purchased this book.

 Despite the fact that Max Brooks used to write for SNL, and also happens to be Mel Brooks son, this book isn't funny, nor is it meant to be. Max Brooks tells this story through a series of interviews given by survivors of The Great Panic, or World War Z (the Z stands for Zombie, in case you didn't, you know, put two and two together...).

 The interviewees come from different parts of the world and they tell their accounts of what happened to them, what they thought when they first heard of what was first referred to as "African Rabies"; what happened when the Great Panic started in their part of the world. A lot of these stories are sad and/or terrifying, but mostly I found them incredibly intriguing.

 Before I go on I need to add that I totally geek-out over documentaries, and this book--were it in movie form--would be a documentary. I'm one that appreciates the method Max Brooks uses to tell this story.

 To me the beginning of this book has more to do with the way things are done in this world--politics wise--than anything else. Of course, as the book goes on and more and more governments are collapsing due to the fact that zombies are basically taking over the world, we get a good look at human nature during times of crisis. I found the whole thing fascinating..

 Hardcore zombie lovers need to know that this isn't a book that follows one set of characters, though some interviews have been broken up, and so a few characters are featured in this book more than once. Rather it is one story told by several different people. There is continuity in the order in which the stories are told to us, and sometimes one survivor's account answers a question that was raised by another survivor.

 All that said, there is quite a bit of zombie slaying action. Lots of blood and guts and gore. We get to learn how best to stop a zombie--and let me assure you, there are many ways. We also learn about newest in improvised zombie killing weaponry and effective warfare techniques to decimate a raging-out-of-control zombie population.

 But seriously, I loved reading it, everything in this whole entire book. Me. A church-going mother of three. Although, yeah, I'm not your typical church-going mother of three. But still...

 P.S. I'd have finished this book a long time ago had it not been for my husband, who kept stealing this book away from me so he could read it too. He's really liking it, btw.

 UPDATE 11/10/12: About a year ago I bought the audiobook from Audible only to discover, after purchasing, that it was the abridged version. I soon found out that was all they had to offer which was quite disappointing because some of my favorite eyewitness accounts from the book were not included. I've since heard from the World War Z's Facebook page that they are going to make an unabridged version. I am unaware of when it will be available for purchase. That said, I did end up liking the (abridged) audiobook well enough. The performances are pretty top notch.


 *To those who have zero sense of humor, it must be said: I'm kidding, I don't do any drugs, and you need to chill.
 reviewed-books zombies-aliens-vampires-dinos
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 Rebecca DeLaTorre
 12 reviews 15 followers
 July 8, 2008
 I just can't get on this bandwagon. The pseudo-government reports the book is written in handicap it in many ways. First, there are no protagonists to grow with, no story arc, no climax, etc. You know what's going to happen from day one--there was a world crisis involving zombies and at least some people live to tell the tale. The sure knowledge of the outcome deflates any tension and book feels flacid. The pseudo-scientific jargon is a poor imitation (my sister, a nurse, tossed aside Brooks' other Zombie manfesto in disgust within the first few pages and this one fairs no better)and there are far too many emotional pauses and descriptive introductions for what amounts to an addendum to a government study of events. The thing that put me over the edge with this book is the inconsistency--one chapter has a boy with bloody knuckles sliding his hands about in zombie goo and remaining uninfected and in the next chapter there is an expression of gratitutde that no one exposed to detrius from a headshot has open wounds to be infected through. What editor let that get by? On top of that, racial, national stereotypes abound and are crude and unappealing. Brooks is obviously a big fan of Israel, as they are the heroes of the day, even going so far as to selflessly save Palestinian refugees (yeah, right)and remnants of South Africa's apartheid system are given a reprieve due to their pragmatism. Russians are wacky comrades, Chinamen are inscrutable and Americans are cowboys weakened by education and consumerism. Ugh.

 I won't recommend this book to anyone, even a die hard zombie fan, lest World War Z ruin the genre for them forever.
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 Jeffrey Keeten
 Author 2 books 247k followers
 February 19, 2019
 ”The book of war, the one we’ve been writing since one ape slapped another was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.”

 With most apocalyptic situations, I think the hardest part to deal with is that there are no wrong decisions or right decisions. There are simply too many variables to consider if your ultimate goal is to survive. The most meticulously planned strategies can still result in failure. You make the best decisions you can and then hope for a bit of luck. Should we barricade ourselves hoping to be saved, or go North hoping the zombies will eventually become popsicles when winter hits? Are we safer in the underground tunnels of Paris or on a cruise ship or living in the woods by ourselves? Whatever decision you make, you must think long game and short game. The short game, the immediate concerns, involve food, water, and shelter. The short and long game both come into play when trying to figure out how to avoid becoming zombie chow.

 Once you survive the first wave of contagion, then what?

 This book is written as an investigative report, collecting all the experiences of survivors from around the world. Different cultures reacted differently to the apocalypse. Some were more successful than others. The learning curve, unfortunately, has to be short with apocalyptic situations, especially if the hope is to actually salvage civilisation. The lights go out, and many of the comforts we’ve become accustomed to are gone instantly, and the possessions that have come to define us, such as electronic devices, suddenly become useless.

 If the whole idea of a zombie apocalypse is too wild a concept for you to grasp, you might be relieved that for the most part the zombies are really just part of the background. What Max Brooks is really dealing with goes well beyond the concept of zombies and focuses more on how people survived the collapse of civilisation. He could have used microbes or conventional war or a devastating meteorite hitting the earth or any of the other fascinating concepts that people have come up with as ways to end the world. It reads like books of a similar nature that collect the stories of people who survived World War Two. The scope is huge and impressive. Brooks addresses aspects about a zombie apocalypse that I have never thought about before.

 Quislings ”Yeah, you know, the people that went nutballs and started acting like zombies.” Ok, I’ve read a handful of zombie books, not enough to make myself an expert, but certainly enough to have some background on the lore of a zombie apocalypse. WTH? Now Brooks didn’t just make this term up. It is a term from WW2. ”A quisling is a person who collaborates with an enemy occupying force. The word originates from the Norwegian war-time leader Vidkun Quisling, who headed a domestic Nazi collaborationist regime during the Second World War.”

 The minds of survivors, I’m sure, snapped in all kinds of strange and wonderful and terrifying ways, but unfortunately pretending to be a zombie was a quick way to find yourself...well...dead. First, any reasonably sane human who notices you lurching toward them, performing your very best mimicry of the undead, will smash your brain. Second, you don’t blend with the zombies. They know you are alive. You become a zombie delight!

 People also just went to sleep perfectly healthy and didn’t wake up. This was called ADS, short for Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome or Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome. ”It killed as many people in those early stalemate months as hunger, disease, interhuman violence, or the living dead.” I’ve heard of things like this happening to people who experience long term stress situations. The body just reaches a point where the brain decides to just shut down the power to the spacecraft and let the mind drift away.

 RIP

 People will put up with a lot as long as there is hope that someday their situation will improve. Babies die when they are not held. People die when things become hopeless.

 Brooks also told stories about zombies underwater. WTH? Yeah, people reanimated as the living dead on ships and eventually managed to fall off the ship in the water. It wasn’t unusual for zombies to just walk out of the water onto beaches or grab divers or attack fishermen in boats. Somehow they are more scary underwater than on land. It gives me the shivers just thinking about it. I’m having a Jaws flashback.

 During and after WWZ, people had to relearn things that our grandparents and great grandparents knew.

 A chimney sweep. ”I help keep my neighbors warm.” he said proudly.

 A cobbler. ”You see those shoes. I made them.”

 A shepherd. ”That sweater, that’s my sheep’s wool.”

 A gardener/farmer. ” Like that corn? My garden.”

 ”That was the upshot of a more localized system. It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a clear, concrete contribution to victory, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I was part of that. I needed that feeling. It kept me sane for the other part of my job.”

 The other part of his job?...killing zombies. Several of the survivors talked about how important it was not to think of them as people or of who they were or of who they might have become. They couldn’t see them as people or what they were doing was genocide.

 This is by far the most serious zombie book I’ve ever read. The stories are compelling. This is a panoramic view of a society in crises. The observations are thoughtful. The writing is convincing. By the end I had the feeling I’d just read a history book, not a speculative zombie apocalyptic book.

 The book is unfilmable, but the movie industry knew a catchy title when they saw one. They certainly borrowed aspects from the book, but really the movie should be considered a completely different entity. The zombies in Brooks book are the George Romero lurching, yucky living dead. In the movie, they are super charged, fast moving, aggressive, nasty creatures. The virus in the movie is fast acting. Someone bitten is transformed within seconds. In the book, the virus takes much longer to take effect.

 Did it bother me that the director Marc Forster took such liberties?

 Not one bite bit.

 I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I was thoroughly entertained. I certainly intend to watch the movie again. So read the book to discover new depths to an overly exploited genre, and watch the movie to experience a whirlwind of fear and dread. Just a suggestion, have someone else hold the popcorn.

 If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
 I also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
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 Kat Kennedy
 475 reviews 16k followers
 May 18, 2010
 At this current moment in time my husband and I do not actually have a working will. We are the legal definition of intestate. We have not yet made any preparations for our death and we only have life insurance/house insurance because his mother organized the whole damn thing (come to mention it she is also the reason we have electricity, water and a phone line - the internet though was all us because we'd die without it.)

 So believe me when I say that we don't organize... anything. Except our zombie kit. That's right. We have a zombie kit. Should zombies suddenly strike while I type out this review we would be able to take our son and get in our car and drive away without a backward glance. Everything we need is in the boot of the car. If we're holed up inside the house we have our second zombie kit to live off of and use to defend ourselves. We have several plans in place as to where to go, what to do if we're separated at time of crisis, who we're taking with us, how we'll stay in contact etc.

 Some may call his paranoia. Some may call this stupidity. Do you know what I call these naysayers?

 Zombie food.

 It is this obsessive and weird need to ensure survival during a zombie apocalypse, despite every rational reason to believe that all our efforts are for naught, that has made me the prime candidate and target group of this book.

 It is not the norm of the zombie genre. In general a zombie movie tends to be about a small group of individuals against the undead hordes looking to floss with intestines.

 This book is not about a small group of individuals - it is about a large collection of humanity. This book is how HUMANITY would survive and deal with a zombie infestation. It is a collection of small, broken narratives from people all over the world, across many social, economic and political classes.

 Some of them were amazing, others horrifying. Some were inspirational, others so depressing or introspective that I wondered if there was any hope.

 I would argue that many of the "voices" from certain nationalities were not really very accurate and didn't really match the cultural region they came from - but I'm lazy. Either you "get" the voice of the narratives or you don't.

 This book was a fascinating, thoughtful read in a field that I'm personally obsessed with. I could easily understand how those who've never stayed up until three in the morning, drunk off their heads with a group of people yelling that if they head into the city then they're zombie meat (Zombie meat I say! You ridiculous idiots!) probably will find this book a hard read.

 It's also a difficult read in the sense that you are continually sucked into one story, only to have it end abruptly and shift to another. I kept getting frustrated and wanting to scream, "No! Go back! I want to know what else happened!" but alas. It's like little snap shots from all over the world, except when it comes to several of the snapshots, I'd really rather see the whole picture.

 Other than that, I loved it. I had a hoot reading it. It gave me plenty of fodder with which to have many drunken debates with my husband, brothers and friends.

 Much to their disgust...

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 karen
 3,968 reviews 170k followers
 September 14, 2018
 this book is about zombies the same way the bible is about god. they are mostly background actors who are the reason other characters do what they do and occasionally they will rarrrr in and kill a bunch of people because they cant help it, but mostly they are an invisible presence, always to be feared but never given a voice.

 this whole book takes place after the zombies have already destroyed most of the world and is a collection of the testimonials of hundreds (?) of different characters detailing their experiences with the zombie outbreak, and how they have survived. because of this, there arent really any action scenes, or any immediate terror. this book is more about politics and global concerns and human nature and dissatisfaction with the way the government handles natural disasters and (im gonna say it, im gonna say it) the zeitgeist (woohoo) than it is about man-eating corpses. it takes into account so many different aspects of post-zombie experience that i never would have considered like what will the actors do now? and what happens if a zombie gets on board your boat? and how will this affect the rest of the food chain? very multi-faceted, if not what i was expecting.

 also interesting: the role of castles in a zombie holocaust, and the underground tunnels in paris: unsafe. so for people like alfonso, who do not enter a room without first considering their escape routes should zombies attack, this could give some interesting perspectives about what may have been overlooked, and provide some good food for thought. brains are for thought. brains are zombie food. you do the math.

 uh-oh - book avalanche... maybe more later...

 come to my blog!
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 Ahmad Sharabiani
 9,568 reviews 55.6k followers
 April 28, 2022
 World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks

 World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a 2006 zombie apocalyptic horror novel written by American author Max Brooks. The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet.

 He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

 Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

 Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, "By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?"

 تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز سی و یکم ماه آگوست سال2016میلادی

 عنوان: جنگ جهانی (زد) تاریخ شفاهی جنگ زامبی‌ها؛ نویسنده مکس بروکس؛ مترجم: حسین شهرابی؛ تهران: کتابسرای تندیس، سال‏‫1393؛ در432ص؛ شابک9786001821219؛ چاپ دوم سال1395؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده21م‬

 جنگ جهانی ز (زد) عنوان یک رمان وحشت آخرالزمانی و زامبی است، که توسط نویسنده آمریکایی «مکس بروکس» نوشته شده است؛ دهسال است که بشر بر زامبیها پیروز شده، و سرانجام توانسته صلح را، به دنیا برگرداند؛ نماینده ی سازمان ملل، مشغول تهیه گزارشی از علت شیوع بیماری زامبیها، چرایی شکست دولتهای دنیا از آن، و در نهایت چگونگی پیروزی انسان است؛ در این سفر نخست به «چین» میرود، که «بیمار صفر» در آن پیدا شد، و سپس هم کم کم به همه ی دنیا از «کره شمالی» گرفته، که مردمانش غیب شده اند، تا «روسیه»، که اکنون به امپراتوری مقدس «روسیه»، مبدل شده، از «کوبا» که به ابرقدرتی سرمایه دار تبدیل شده، تا «آمریکا» که به سوسیالیسم روی آورده است؛ در این کتاب داستان مادرانی را خواهید خواند، که فرزندانشان را از ترس زامبیها میکشند، و نیز داستان فضانوردانی که از مدار زمین، یورش زامبیها را زیر نظر دارند؛

 نقل از متن: (هشدارها: «چونگ چینگ» بزرگ، «فدراسیون متحد چین»: این ناحیه، در اوجِ شکوهِ پیشاجنگش، جمعیتی بالغ بر سی و پنج میلیون نفر را، در خود جا داده بود؛ امروز بعید است به پنجاه هزار نفر هم برسند؛ سرمایه های بازسازی، هنوز پایشان به این بخش از کشور باز نشده، و دولت ترجیح داده، بر سواحل تمرکز کند، که تراکمِ جمعیتیشان بالاتر است؛ هیچ شبکه ی نیروگاهی، و برق رسانی در کار نیست، و بجز رودخانه ی «یانگ تسه» هم هیچ آبی جاری نیست؛ اما در خیابانها زباله و خاک و خاشاک به چشم نمیخورَد، و «شورای امنیتیِ» محلی هم اجازه ی وقوعِ هیچ شیوعی را پس از جنگ نداده است؛ رئیس شورا «کوانگ جینگ شو» نام دارد؛ پزشک عمومی است، و به رغم سنِ بالا، و جراحتهای جنگیش، هنوز به تک تک بیمارانش سر میزند

 اولین ظهوری که از بیماری دیدم در دهکده ای دورافتاده بود، که رسماً هیچ اسمی نداشت؛ ساکنانش میگفتند: «داچانگِ نو»، اما این اسم فقط به خاطرِ نوستالژی بود، تا هر چیز دیگری؛ خانه های پیشینشان در «داچانگ قدیم»، از روزگارِ «سه امپراتوری»، سرپا باقیمانده بود، و میگفتند مزارع و خانه ها، و حتا درختهایش سده ها عمر دارند؛ وقتی سدّ «سه دره» تکمیل شد، و آب مخازن سد، کم کم بالا آمد، بخش اعظم «داچانگ» را، آجر به آجر، برداشتند و دوباره در زمین بالاتری ساختند؛ اما این «داچانگ نو» دیگر شهر نبود، و به «موزه ی تاریخ ملی» مبدل شده بود؛ حتماً طعن و طنزِ تلخی برای آن زارعهای بینوا بوده، که دیدند شهرشان نجات پیدا کرده، اما الان دیگر مجبورند بلیت بخرند، تا از آن دیدن کنند؛ شاید به همین دلیل بود که بعضی از آنها ترجیح دادند اسمِ آبادیِ تازه سازشان را «داچانگ نو» بگذارند، بلکه پیوندی با میراث کهنشان برقرار بماند؛ حتا اگر فقط به اسم باشد؛ من اصلاً خبر نداشتم که جایی به اسم «داچانگ نو» وجود دارد؛ پس امیدوارم ��فهمید که چرا وقتی به من تلفن زدند، و صحبتِ آنجا را کردند، چقدر تعجب کردم

 در بیمارستان خبری نبود؛ حتا به رغمِ افزایشِ آمارِ تصادفهای ناشی از مستی، شب بی سروصدایی بود؛ استفاده از موتورسیکلت کم کم رایج میشد؛ بین خودمان زیاد میگفتیم که آن «هارلی - دِیویدسون»های شما بیشتر چینی به کشتن داد، تا کلِ سربازهای امریکایی توی جنگ «کره»؛ به همین خاطر قدردانِ آن شیفت خلوت بودم؛ خسته بودم و کمر و پاهایم درد میکردند؛ میخواستم بروم بیرون سیگار بکشم، و طلوع را تماشا کنم، که شنیدم اسمم را پیج میکنند؛ مسئول پذیرش آن شب تازه کار بود، و متوجهِ لهجه ی فردِ پشت خط نشد، یک تصادفی شده بود، یا مریضی ای...؛ وضعِ اضطراری است -این بخش معلوم بود-، و آیا ممکن بود ما بدون اتلاف وقت کمک بفرستیم؟ چه میتوانستم بگویم؟ پزشکهای جوان، این بچه هایی که خیال میکنند طبابت یعنی چاق و چله کردنِ حسابهای بانکی...؛ اینها حاضر نبودند بروند، و بی جیره و مواجب، به چند تایی نونگمینِ بدبخت بیچاره کمک کنند؛ به نظرم من هنوز ته دلم از آن انقلابیهای پیر هستم؛ «وظیفه ی ما آن است که خود را در قبالِ خلق مسئول بدانیم» این کلمه ها برای من معنا داشت...؛ این کلمه ها یادم بود وقتی وانتِ دییرِ کهنه ام توی جاده خاکی ای بالا و پایین میپرید، که دولت قول داده بود آسفالت کند، اما هیچوقت سراغش هم نیامد؛ دردسر زیادی کشیدم تا محل را پیدا کنم؛ رسماً آن محل وجود نداشت، و به همین دلیل روی نقشه هم نیاورده بودند.؛ چند بار راه را گم کردم، و مجبور شدم از محلیها پرس و جو کنم، که البته خیال میکردند منظورم همان شهر - موزه است؛ وقتی به مجموعه ی ��وچک خانه های سرِ تپه رسیدم، واقعاً کاسه ی صبرم لبریز شده بود؛ یادم هست که با خودم گفتم کاش واقعاً قضیه حاد باشد، وگرنه...؛ بعد وقتی چهره ی آدمهای آنجا را دیدم، از حرفم پشیمان شدم.)؛ پایان نقل

 تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 19/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 07/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
 21th-century fantasy fiction
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 MischaS_
 785 reviews 1,332 followers
 August 20, 2019
 So, I've seen the movie several times when it was on TV, and I have to say that I even watched a scene or two a couple of dozen times on Youtube. Yes, the action and visuals are fantastic. (Okay, except the one where the guy tears his own tooth, yuck!)
 But after reading the comments where people were angry at the movie, saying that it does not hold a candle to the book, I knew I had to read it.
 And yes, I do agree that the only things the movie took from the book were the zombies and Israel building a wall. Oh, and the title.

 Right away, I was very surprised by the format of this book; it was not all what I was expecting. And the more I think about it; I believe it would be better if I picked up an audiobook instead of a book. Yeah, shocking, I never thought I would say such a thing.
 Every interview is done with a different person, so, soon I stopped paying attention to their names, so when they again appeared later in the book I had a hard time connecting them with their previous chapters.

 Also, like one third into the book, I got stuck after several boring chapters where I seriously considered DNFing this book, but then I pushed through, and yes, it was worth it.

 I loved that we got to see how so many different parts of the world battled with the zombies. The different approaches, what do to the countries, did they go all savage? Did they bomb their own people? Did they just lose all control? That was fantastic to watch.

 And surprisingly, this book made me even laugh! I just loved the boy who almost missed the zombies because he was focused on his computer. I did not expect that.

 That's the one thing you can always depend on; as we're fighting on war, we're always preparing for the next one.

 I did not very much grasp how they were suddenly able to fight the zombies when they previously failed with much better equipment but alright. But I have to say that zombie cleaning is funny to imagine. Especially of those underwater, I bet it will be fun if a zombie managed to get stuck in the Mariana Trench.

 However, the scene I was sort of hoped for was post-war when some scientists have a zombie in a lab for studying, that would be fantastic! I honestly would love to see some experiments on these creatures. The book stated that it seemed that the state of the zombies deteriorated, but I wonder what would happen if they maybe starved for years. So many possibilities!

 What sort of surprised me is that I expected that when the humans would go so close to extinction that the environment would get better, no factories running, no one is dumping anything in the water etc. but it was otherwise and it sort of made sense! There had to be so many fires; it's terrifying to imagine. But I wonder about the impact of all those nukes used!

 And that's another thing I wish was different, the last part was sort of jumping from character to character, for short conclusions but I would love to see more about the brand new world. Honestly, I think I would be able to read a book dedicated to each country! Especially Russia, Iceland and Israel would be interesting. Also, I wish we really knew what happened in North Korea.

 I also wonder about Patient Zero, because when the doctor in China informed his friend, they knew what was going on, the military seemed ready for what was happening there. That does not seem like the first case

 Overall, the book is 3,5/5🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️ for me; I think I will get the audiobook to see if I'll like that format better.
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 seak
 429 reviews 475 followers
 November 15, 2021
 Hey, I have a booktube channel (youtube for book reviews) and I do video reviews for books like this one, epic fantasy, science fiction, media related to them, and more. Please subscribe here!

 Update: See end of review for movie review.

 I've broken my cardinal rule for reading books just before the movie comes out. This rule I've alluded to is the following - I don't read the book directly before the movie (at least 1 year before or it must be read after or just wait on the movies). The reason for this is that I want to enjoy the story through both mediums and if you read the book just before the movie, you've set yourself up to be a critic - analyzing everything and complaining about every detail that's inevitably left out, but which is more often than not necessary for the medium.

 If you read the book at least a year before, at least with my shoddy memory, the movie becomes a happy time of fond remembrances. Oh yeah, I remember that part, so cool! Yay! Happy! In this instance, I hear the movie doesn't quite follow the book exactly and what else can that mean than that it's a typical zombie movie. I don't think I've ruined much here.

 You know, it could have been partly because of all the hype, but I didn't love this book. I didn't hate it either, which makes these the hardest reviews to write, but I think I have a few ideas why World War Z just didn't work all that well for me.

 I'm studying for the bar at the moment, so you get an extremely well-organized review (at least with headings aplenty) since that's how my brain is thinking at the moment. :)

 The Plot

 Doesn't really exist. Yeah, there's a loose series of events that defines the book, or the Zombie War, but it's told through interviews with different survivors from different countries. And they're short too, I even checked this with the book (paper-form). Each interview amounts to a page or two, maybe 5 max. Each tends to discuss a certain important event, which ends up getting referred to by characters later in the book and often mentioned by the one directly following.

 It's extremely clever and lets you see how well developed this whole idea is.

 It's extremely clever

 Max Brooks has literally thought of everything when it comes to a war against zombies. I thought the same in my reading of The Zombie Survival Guide , and it goes just as well here. EVERYTHING!

 He goes into why tanks are all but useless against hordes of zombies - because you have to take out their heads! Anything else, and they'll still shamble and probably even become more dangerous when you trip over them on the ground. The airforce is just as useless because it's so much money and effort for such a little amount of good. Better spent on a bunch of soldiers with tons of amo. He even goes into better strategies for fighting this war, why the zombies are such a good enemy - because they don't need to be bred, fed, or led as I'll let the book explain.

 Very clever and not even pretentious about it. Just captivating. And this isn't the only thing I liked although we're getting into the middle ground because I didn't love the audio either.

 The Audio

 One of the things that got me excited to listen to this on audio was that it's read by a full cast. That means they're trying REALLY hard and that tends to be a good thing, especially if you don't like one or two of the voices, it's okay, it's only temporary. With just one narrator, that can really kill a book. I mentioned that this is told through many different people in different countries and they have actors like Rob Reiner and John Turturro. Even Max Brooks himself plays the part of the interviewer.


 (John Turturro from The Big Lebowski )

 Very cool...until the point of distraction. There are so many different countries represented that the accents started to distract heavily from the story. I found myself pondering why the German guy had such a heavy accent on his "R's" and yet could perfectly pronounce "TH" every time. And this was just the one guy. One of the benefits of a single narrator is that even when they do an accent, it's easier to understand because English is their primary language.

 The audio's great for the most part, outside of that little niggle about the accents, but one thing I absolutely HATE about it is...it's abridged!

 Abridged

 I would probably never forgive myself if I listened to this abridged audio version and never actually read the entire book if I actually thought that mattered. Maybe others are better sleuths than myself, but I can't find a reading of World War Z that's not abridged. At the same, after having read the book, the abridged version seems to do enough justice to the entirety of the novel, what with how it is organized, that it just cuts out a few of the interviews.

 Normally this is heresy, but I can live with it for this one time only.

 What I didn't like

 I think the thing that just makes this an okay to good book for me is that while it's style and organization is unique and highly clever, it also takes away from my ability to care. Without just following one person or a group of people, there's no attachment to any specific person.

 The Movie

 (Brad Pitt will make everything better.)

 After writing the above, I actually do think the movie will make it all better. It seems like it will be following one single person and that's what this reader needs. Movie's set for a June 2013 release. Here's the trailer too.

 In the end (in the sense of my final feelings not any post-apocalyptic sense)

 Let's just say, if we ever do get into a Zombie War, you better have a copy of World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide on you. Someone's already gone through the effort of thinking up EVERY situation that can occur, what's effective, what's not and put it down in words. No sense reinventing the wheel.

 While an entertaining idea and clever execution, these were the exact things that made World War Z a book I could never love. It's worth a read if only to see how in-depth you have not thought about zombies.

 3 out of 5 Stars (Recommended with Reservations)

 The movie, an update
 I just wanted to make a quick note about the movie. I'm happy to say I called it correctly. I enjoyed the movie much more than the book even though you can really only say the movie is a loose adaptation (if you can even say that). I thought it was much better to visit all those countries through the single character of the UN agent as opposed to interviews of random characters. I felt for him trying to protect his family, I rooted for him when he was in danger, and it had the same effect of exploring the reaction of different cultures (to a much smaller degree of course). And it actually scared me, which for a zombie book, was completely lacking in WWZ.
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 Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽
 1,878 reviews 22.6k followers
 February 22, 2020
 The deadly epidemic started in China. This time it’s ... zombies.

 4.5 stars, rounding up because sheer brilliance.

 I'm not, generally speaking, a fan of horror fiction in general or zombie tales in particular, but World War Z popped up on my radar so many times that I finally decided to give it a go. (I checked it out from the library; I wasn't going to stick my neck that far out for this book that I'd pay actual money for it.)

 Anyway. World War Z takes the quasi-historical documentary approach to the zombie apocalypse, as a set of loosely-connected interviews gradually builds a picture of humanity's reaction to the zombie infection that quickly spreads around the world. Max Brooks examines the many ways this kind of a disaster would affect us: socially, militarily, psychologically, and more. The lies that government leaders tell their citizens. The lies that people tell themselves. The determination and heroism of some characters that infuses this otherwise depressing story with hope.

 It's definitely not your standard zombie-flavored horror story. The horror is as much in the way some people react to the catastrophe (e.g., profiteering) as in the moaning, grasping and biting (a 100% death sentence if you get bit) of the zombie hordes.

 Recommended if you're interested in a more analytical approach to the genre. I thought it was fascinating. VERY different from the movie that it inspired.
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 Alex Duncan
 40 reviews 7 followers
 July 10, 2013
 This book is not a novel. You learn very little about the characters (even the narrator) and cannot follow them from story to story. There's no common thread, no arc, etc. It's a hodgepodge. For many of you, this is all you need to know about this book.

 If you're looking for a great zombie NOVEL, my favorite is Cryonic: A Zombie Novel

 I suppose there are parallels between the book and the movie in the sense that both are disjointed. It's too big a story to tell and to be done properly Brooks should have written a door stopper of a novel.

 That said, he did piece together an interesting scenario: a world where humans have fought back against the zombies and won. This aspect is shown at the end of the film, as they elude to the inevitable sequel, and it's actually the most interesting part of the book, that is:

 - how did they fight and how'd they win
 - what challenges did they face
 - in what ways were they no match for the zombies

 That third bullet is an aspect I have the most difficulty with as there's so much of "bombs didn't work on the zombies" type of statements from those the narrators interviewed. Call me crazy, but if you drop a big 'ole bomb on a zombie hord there aren't going to be many "walking" dead around after that.

 I suppose this book's format will appeal to some people, as many seem to be OK with what he's done, but it's such a huge disappointment when you were expecting a novel and don't get one.

 The book actually has a decent start with the story of patient zero and the images of zombies grabbing ankles from beneath the depths of a flooded city, but it goes downhill quickly from there.

 It's really a chore to read because the stories are so short that they don't allow you to connect with the characters. I have a feeling if Brooks hadn't had so much success with his Zombie Survival Guide that publishers would have turned their nose up at the structure of this book and made him rewrite it.

 At the same time, Brooks and his publisher have made quit a bit of coin on this one so who can blame them?

 Some stories provide enough detail to suck you in and get good (that is just before the end on you abruptly), but others are what I call Brooks' bastards because he gives them so little attention you wonder why they are in there at all.

 There's also one story that despite being long is incredibly boring about a stolen Chinese submarine that takes up enough pages to account for several other stories. Definitely an err in judgment there.

 With no one to root for and no characters to follow, you'll find yourself not caring whether you open the book back up or not. To me, this is the ultimate sin any book can commit. To call this the best zombie book ever written, etc. etc. is so far off the mark I can't even tell you.

 If any of what I'm saying is speaking to you I wouldn't spend your money on the book as it will surely disappoint.












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 Joel
 551 reviews 1,575 followers
 April 6, 2012
 ME JUST SIMPLE ZOMBIE BUT NO UNDERSTAND WHY LIVING SO PREJUDICED AGAINST DEAD TOLERATE SUCH HATEFUL BOOK BOOK PRESENT TOTAL ONE-SIDED CASE OF FAKE WAR MAN VERSUS ZOMBIES PORTRAYS ZOMBIES AS MINDLESS AND HAS NO COMPASSION FOR FEELINGS HOPES DREAMS DESIRES OF RECENTLY ALIVE LIKE SMELL THE PRETTY FLOWERS ON GRAVE AND WHERE DID LEG GO USED TO HAVE TWO AND WHAT DOES BRAIN TASTE LIKE SO SUE ME AM CURIOUS ANYWAY BOOK GOES AROUND WORLD SHOWING MAN FIGHT ZOMBIES AND ALL TIMES MAN EITHER KILL ZOMBIE WITH RELISH OR ZOMBIE EAT MAN WITH RELISH HA HA SMALL JOKE BUT SERIOUSLY SEEM RACIST THAT AUTHOR NO THINK MAN AND ZOMBIE CAN LIVE PEACE LIKE WHY NOT GIVE ZOMBIE JUST SMALL TASTE OF HUMAN AND ALL GO ABOUT BUSINESS BUT NO MUST BE KILL KILL KILL HUMAN SO SENSITIVE BITE HEAD ONE TIME AND THINK WANT EAT NOTHING BUT BRAINS NEWSFLASH BRAINS NOT ALL THAT TASTY CONCLUSION WHY OK TO MAKE WAR WITH ZOMBIES ZOMBIES NOT EXACTLY NAZIS EXCEPT ONE TIME
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 John Wiswell
 Author 44 books 373 followers
 January 9, 2010
 There are reasons to be wary of this book. The title is a little silly, and Max Brooks's Zombie Survival Guide was tongue in cheek. Hell, he's the son of legendary comedy director Mel Brooks. And zombies are creatures that gained popularity thanks to film, which is contrary to the nature of most good creatures. Vampires, ghosts, wizards, witches, dragons, orcs, goblins, angels, werewolves and even Frankenstein's undead abomination came from literature first, and entered film later. Film seldom contributes originality to prose. Fortunately Max Brooks pulled off a minor miracle in adapting the largely theatrical terror into the written word, by use of the literary apocalypse convention and oral stories. Our familiarity with the outlines of a zombie outbreak (or any plague outbreak) from so many films helps fill in the gaps between his various storytellers' accounts.

 Brooks has a remarkable sense of voice, and places the various interviewees well, such that they sound all the more distinct in contrast to the preceeding and following speaker. We get a lot of interesting subjects, from the country doctor in China who treated the first "bite," to a hitman hired to protect a millionaire mogul, to a blind man who somehow managed to survive in the most infested parts of Japan - Hiroshima. Thus we also get a total sense of the rise and fall of the outbreak, with each arc illustrated by brilliant personal narratives of "true" stories from those periods that give us a sense of not just the plot, but how culture changed in this fictional earth. The narrative is unified by the interviewer who visits them and directs parts of their story, but only enough so that we can both enjoy the overarching plot and the survivors' stories.

 Like the best science fiction the outlandish premise allows us to get a fresh view of real human issues. Brooks approaches such issues on multiple levels, from simple human interests like base selfishness and how we act in desperation, to political crises, such as early on in the book when the Israelis and Palestinians blame each other for the plague, and even claim it is a hoax perpetrated by their enemies. Many of the characters are inspired by people from real life, like Howard Dean, Karl Rove and Nelson Mandela - but rather than coming off as cheesy, they lend an air of authenticity to the tale. There is just enough real tension, both base and topical, to lend it the right aura for a great exercise in modern fantasy/sci fi - it's easily one of the best fantasy/sci fi books set in the modern world I've read in quite some time.

 The quality of Brooks's book was totally unexpected. This was supposed to be a spin-off from an impulse-buy. But by the time you finish World War Z I think you'll hope along with me that this, his first work of fiction, won't be his last.
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 mark monday
 1,620 reviews 4,957 followers
 June 23, 2012
 On the menu tonight: WORLD WAR Z

 Amuse Bouche
 Our rich Tartare à la Homo Sapien will astonish you with its hauntingly familiar flavors, its bright and vivid colors, and the truly gamey taste of terror, tears, and trauma. Fresh kill will never appear so carefully arranged and presented: prepare yourself for a buffet that appeases both the palate and the intellect.

 Appetizer
 A surprisingly hearty summer soup: tantalizing hints of summer flavors frozen solid, then slowly re-animated to surprise the unwary diner. You will literally gasp in amazement as the flavors you thought had come and passed during the colder months rise again to challenge your taste buds! The stew contains a veritable global village of ingredients: you will taste the inscrutable flavors of the mysterious Orient, the refined and subtle tastes of English manor and European castle, the bold and ruthless tang of Mother Russia, and at its core, the zesty essence of woodsy North Americana will serve to keep this dish firmly anchored in the classic Western tradition. This bold starter will act as a bullet straight into your palate’s head!

 Entrée
 One could perhaps assume that a multi-course, zombified meal will be centered around a choice cut of rare beef steak; our menu will sorely disappoint such traditional diners. Instead we offer as the centerpiece of our prix fixe meal an array of delights that appease not the base emotional senses, but the higher appetites of the intellect! Never fear, diner, your hunger will be truly satiated – but only if you are able to cast aside your yearnings for an old fashioned cheeseburger and partake in a less sensual but perhaps more fulfilling menu. To that end, we offer a buffet of international flavors: taste the crusty unleavened bread of walled Israel, savor the rainbow flavors of a South African duo of rib and grain, relish the fatty riches of Canadian poutine (we understand that Americans will often flee north simply to indulge in this dish!), enjoy a classic sampling of melancholy Japanese swordfish... the world is yours to consume, in a carefully planned and constructed rejoinder that laughs in the face of undead chaos, and shouts: I Am the Decider!

 Dessert
 For our last dish, we offer you this stunning plate: a downed, half-mad pilot, communicating with phantoms as she hurtles through dense bog and over abandoned freeway, bravely resisting the hungry hands and teeth of the undead!

 Wine Pairing
 We are proud to offer a new vintage “Max Brooks”, heretofore enjoyed only by ironic survivalists, now available to the world at large.
 after-the-fall horror-modern rain-man-reviews
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 carol.
 1,504 reviews 7,566 followers
 November 1, 2012
 Thoughtful and thought-provoking. Not at all the typical zombie book, and not at all what I expected. Published in 2006, the issues and underlying plot points are as pertinent today as then. What would happen in a real zombie apocalypse? Given current politics, economics, cultural trends, and geography, I'd be willing to bet it happens closely to Brooks' vision.

 World War Z is structured along the lines of a documentary, a collection of remembrances about the world-wide zombie war. Divided by chronological order, one can get the feel of the evolution from chapter headings: "Warnings," "Blame," "The Great Panic," "Turning the Tide" "Home Front USA," "Around the World and Above," "Total War," and "Good-byes."

 "Warnings" begins with a doctor in China responding to a remote village to a request for help. His tale lures the reader in, giving an intimate view of the initial confusion, the fear, the drastic response by the state, and the systemic holes that lead to ultimate break down. From there, the interviewer talks to a human smuggler in Tibet, drug war agents in Greece, a black-market surgeon in Brazil, a laborer from South Africa, a member of Israeli intelligence, and a repatrioted Palestinian. It's a brilliant idea for a narrative about a global issue, because each culture group frames the problem in terms of its own narrow focus (how could it not?), giving the reader insight into how confronting any issue takes place in a morass of history--but also how similar we are at the individual level. And, unfortunately, the degree to which personal selfishness, both altruistic (saving loved ones) and greedy, pave the way for worsening disaster.

 Further interviews include the ordinary survivor (who was anything but), soldiers, an astronaut, and various government officials including the vice-president and a diplomat. It makes for an extremely interesting analysis, because it covers both the personal, private story and the larger, world arc.

 Ultimately, it was a sobering and satisfying commentary on humanity and the current state of the world. While that sounds potentially dull and analytical, structuring the story around a zombie war is frosting on the vegan cupcake. While it possibly could have been as strong of a narrative if Brooks was imagining a virulent and lethal virus, zombies gave it a flash factor that draws dystopia fans in. Besides, reanimated dead do create challenges of their own that would be unique in warfare. One general talks about how traditional warfare centers around people that are "bred, led and fed." Zombies require none of those things--their ranks grow with death, they require no leaders, so it is not possible to remove key strategists in a campaign, and they don't require any sort of supplies or rest, so there is no possibility of destroying a supply line. Underwater environments prove to be the long-term zombie reservoir, presenting unique challenges to world-wide eradication.

 Minor quibbles include a lack of some of the science behind the outbreak, as well as that of the lone survivors. And, while it is a thought-provoking story over all, it's not exactly a gripping one that kept me up at night. That's actually okay, as it proved more satisfying in the long run. Just temper your expectations.

 In some ways, this was the complete antithesis of Zone One , (review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... ) which examines the zombie post-apocalypse through the individual and humanity's slide downward. This looks at zombie wars through multiple viewpoints on a world-wide scale, and it's ultimate message is hope with cost.

 I highly recommend to zombie or science-dabbling fans. Four flesh-eaten stars.

 http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/0...
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 Blaine
 712 reviews 573 followers
 July 15, 2020
 Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature.
 ...
 Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.

 I first read this book at least ten years ago, back when Mr. Brooks’ choice to use the science and language of epidemiology was simply considered a clever way to write a zombie novel. So, how does this story feel now that we’re living through an actual pandemic? It’s even more impressive. Mr. Brooks spent considerable effort making his story realistic, and life has shown how right he was. A pandemic that begins in China and engulfs the world, helped by a Chinese government suppressing the truth. The willful blindness of the public (aided by a broken media system) to grasp the true magnitude of the outbreak. Cynical charlatans selling bogus cures. The failure of the international community to work together to stop the outbreak, and politicians sadly more focused on the economy than the public health. There are so many things in this book that might have felt farfetched before but look eerily prescient now.

 The oral history method of storytelling is used to great effect here. The interviewees come from all walks of life; this is not just a ‘heroes and generals’ type of story. These first-person vignettes are often narrow in focus, moving, and even harrowing, and each character has a distinctive voice and manner of speaking. But by regularly shifting to a new narrator—across all seven continents, in cities and under them, on and under the oceans, even in outer space—we eventually get the full, grand scope of the story: the initial outbreak, safe zones, refugees, ecological problems, the loss of and eventual rebuilding of hope and civilization.

 World War Z is a completely original, wonderfully imaginative, and chillingly realistic novel. It’s a good read that has become a must read.

 P.S. If you can find the unabridged audiobook (it was originally released with only an abridged one), it’s very good and has a great cast.
 2020 trade-paperback
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 Lyn
 1,847 reviews 16.3k followers
 February 20, 2019
 A very pleasant surprise.

 TBT, not a huge fan of the zombie sub-genre: never watched an episode of the Walking Dead, never really bought into it as a fantasy vehicle.

 So – I picked this up with not so much trepidation as an allowance that I probably would not love it. I didn’t LOVE it, but liked it a lot more than I expected I would.

 Here’s the thing:

 It’s not JUST about an I Am Legend scenario where the world turns into monsters. Well – it sort of IS about that – but it’s also about a lot more. Author Max Brooks (son of Mel “It’s good to be the KING!” Brooks) serves this up with a steaming hot portion of socio-economic views, cultural observations and more than a generous side order of HAVEATYOU! post-apocalyptic fudge.

 You probably already can guess the premise, so no spoilers – there is a global pandemic where damn near everyone gets turned into zombies. We’re talking Aliens Bill Paxton “GAME OVER MAN!” world-wide catastrophe. MOST of humanity is wiped out.

 But Brooks’ narrative, told from the shifting perspectives of the survivors in a kind of post-war journalistic oral history novel (patterned after Studs Turkel’s 1984 The Good War ), is appealing for it’s plucky spirit and charismatic delivery. Not just blood and guts, we get to know first hand about this event from start to finish and all the details in between. It’s the human element of this that works so well, the near remembrances of the survivors told from their perspectives.

 I loved that Brooks develops a working vocabulary for the post-war survivors. The human soldiers call their zombie opponents “Zach” and he makes the astute observation that they no longer needed consultants and executive directors – humanity needed carpenters and gunsmiths. I was also drawn to one of the survivor’s recollection that his group loved to go into battle to the ear splitting tunes of Iron Maiden’s The Trooper.

 So if you were like me and avoided this because it was just another zombie book – go ahead and give it a try, it’s actually pretty good.

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 Fabian
 935 reviews 1,527 followers
 October 22, 2020
 Having just read the most literary of all zombie novels makes one thing quite clear: haute lit & this particular horror genre simply don't mix. But that doesn't make the effort any less outstanding, unique, or outrageous. "WWZ" takes a scatterplot approach to begin to tell what's happened to the world after the zombie apocalypse has transpired. All accounts are so definitive, so individual as to seem 100% authentic. We get accounts all the way from the very heights of the social echelons (Veep, Army generals...) to the rantings of average civilians (like a woman with a 5 year-old's sensibility, for instance).

 There is a type of reader out there for this type of narrative. They will adore the militaristic accounts-- though, admittedly, not my cup of tea. But the additions to zombie lore are awesome! From quislings (i.e. live zombie impersonators) to zombie-detecting dogs.
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 Matthew
 1,219 reviews 8,687 followers
 September 9, 2016
 I read this book a few years ago - the Zombie Survival Guide was super-hyped so I wanted to check this followup out as soon as it came out. I love the documentary format. Brooks did so well in telling it in such a way that it really did feel like non-fiction.

 One of my favorite parts of the zombie genre is not necessarily the horror and gore, but how the survivors deal with the threat and rebuilding. The before, during, and after stories in this book are raw and real. Because of this, this zombie tale will likely appeal to more than just horror fans.

 Concerning the movie: I enjoyed the movie, but it is barely like the book. They are each enjoyable in their own right.

 Max Brooks: Probably the most entertaining fact about this book is that it is written by Mel Brooks' son (but don't expect any comedy!)
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 Kemper
 1,388 reviews 6,652 followers
 October 13, 2020
 *Updated after rereading. 10/12/20*

 This still holds up remarkably well even if I'm not the zombie enthusiast I used to be. I did the Audible version this time and the all-star cast does a fantastic job. The weird thing is that the jumping off point for the American political aspect had that 2006 W. Bush era mindset which seemed kind of dark and cynical at the time, but now seems incredibly naïve and quaint these days. The stuff about how various governments around the world either react swiftly or fail completely in a time of crisis really hits home these days.

 *Original review.*
 While his previous book was a tongue-in-cheek zombie survival guide, Brooks turns deadly serious here. Written as a series of survivors' stories in a UN report following a world wide war with the undead, Brooks crafted a classic horror novel that reads like history. Inventive, scary and a must read for anyone who ever enjoyed a George Romero zombie movie.
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 Emily (Books with Emily Fox)
 525 reviews 56.7k followers
 May 17, 2017
 Well this didn't go as I expected...
 I love post-apocalyptic books. When I learned after watching the movie that there was a book I couldn't wait to read it! Turns out I was bored and had to skim through the last part...
 Love the story but hated the format with the "interviews".
 2-star-y-am-i-doing-this-to-myself dnf post-apocalyptic
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 Paul Bryant
 2,162 reviews 9,039 followers
 June 4, 2013
 update...update...

 To everything there is a time - a time to reap and a time to plant, a time to listen to Schoenberg and a time to listen to Lez Zeppelin, the all-girl tribute band, a time to read Marcel Proust and a time to read about zombie apocalypses. That time, for me, passed some years ago. I shouldn't've picked up this novel but I was seduced by shedloads of great reviews on this very site.

 Although my copy has a front-cover blurb by Simon Pegg, it's his very own great little zom-romcom Shaun of the Dead, plus George Romero's splendid zombie trilogy which Shaun beautifully parodies, plus other movies like 28 Days Later and I Am Legend, and a thousand other post-apocalypse novels and B-movies, and plus NOW the fab series THE WALKING DEAD which I only just discovered, wow, I love it - it's all of these things which cumulatively undermine the not inconsiderable energy and sociopolitical insight of Max Brooks' own version of The War Against the People You Really Hoped You'd Never See Again. Every scene in this book we've seen or read several times before, and alas, mostly by less truthful writers. This is really an excellent novel, but for younger readers who haven't already slogged, as I have, through a lifetime of pulp.

 Brooks's imagination is tough and unflinching, but you have to concede that zombie apocalypses bring out the macho in pretty much everybody. This really is a war book, chock full of pumped-up acronym-heavy military jargon. World War Z is mainly fought with TESTOSTERONE!!!

 This book wanted to be for zombies what THE WIRE is for Baltimore, and for that I give it a crisp military salute and a bag of red tops. I think my 15 year old self would have rated this one four fat ones but that guy didn't have the best taste really.

 **

 That said, myself and daughter Georgia will be lurching, shambling and jerking our bodies towards the cinema when the Brad Pitt zombuster film-of-the-book is released soon. Me and Georgia love that stuff. Gwan, destroy the world again... and again...
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 TL
 1,765 reviews 35 followers
 April 27, 2020
 2020 re-read:
 Still a comfort read for me, despite everything going on right now. Reason why it took me so long this was I lost my job a couple days after I started this and wasn't in the right frame of mind for it, plus less driving so cutting down on commute.

 I would like to see Netflix adapt this as a series, I think they'd do a good job.

 *Make sure you go for the unabridged version of the audiobook of this, well worth it*

 I even got mom to listen to a few parts with me when we had to go out and about. She would ask me questions after certain parts :).

 Not alot to say really, just that this is still one of my favorite books <3

 I remember seeing the movie of this and thinking "Youins screwed this up big time." I've heard the story of how this particular plot was decided on and rolled my eyes but I still gave it a chance. I was mostly bored during it.

 IMHO, I hope the sequel doesn't ever get made if its gonna be anything like the first one. Worst book adaptation (for me) alongside the *coughPercyJacksoncough* films.

 This was a balm after crazy busy or frustrating work nights (and there were QUITE a few)... few of these are still my top favorites and I still applaud the cast of voices. They make what could be dry retellings more compelling and fascinating.

 Can't say much more than I've already said.. if you decide to go for this.. have fun:)
 ---


 1st time June (paperback), second time (audiobook) October 2013.. Third read : near end of September to October 9th 2015

 4th read: June 2017
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 For a list of the audiobook cast:
 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World...
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 Not a bad way to kick off October hmm? I had planned to take my time with this but flee through it haha. The diverse cast of the audiobook adds to the enjoyment alot... half the fun for me was guessing who the sort of familiar voices belonged to (got a few right ).
 A couple I was impressed by their accent change, Simon Pegg I didn't recognize at all the first time till I listened to the cast list at the end.. Good job Simon :)

 There's not a plot persay really, its a bunch of survior accounts with a couple intersecting that follows the war from beginning to end.

 Some of the parts were overlong and a bit dry/rambling but it didn't deter my enjoyment of the novel.

 It's a book where you'll love it, or find it 'meh' probably... not a quick read but worth your time:)

 I remember having fun tracking down the unabridged version of the audiobook at the time. I didn't know at first only an abridged one was out (those make no sense to me ).. I think I found mine either just after I saw the movie or before. Would highly recommend the full version!

 Happy reading, I probably dig this out again in a couple years:)
 (Excuse any spelling errors right now haha, on my phone)
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 Jason
 137 reviews 2,270 followers
 July 17, 2013
 ZOMG!

 The first time I ever saw that chat acronym my brain immediately registered zombie . Is that weird? I mean, I figured out pretty quickly that the acronym is nothing more than a joke, a mere play on words (so to speak) made at the expense of lazy n00bs whose left fingers slip off the shift key in an attempt to type, “OMG!” But somehow that initial association has stuck with me, as even now when I see someone type it (and usually it’s Ceridwen, Queen of Internet Memes, doing it ironically), I think of the undead. Or when I’m walking alone at night and hear a scraping shuffle and a familiar guttural moan, and some cold, rotting fingers fall lazily onto my left shoulder, my immediate reaction is never anything short of an instinctually exclaimed, “ZOMG!”

 Shudder.

 So yeah, this rating is no accidental slip of the Apple trackpad; World War Z really is 4-star material. Instead of presenting a been-there-done-that narrative wherein a group of protagonists fall prey to a zombie epidemic, whose lives change with shifting priorities, whose outlook becomes fundamentally survivalist, and who ultimately learn to cope with their situation and depend on themselves and each other to combat the swarms of undead infesting their world, Max Brooks takes a different tack. Here, we get Bolaño-style interviews with key political and military figures from across the globe who are involved in the conflict, along with individual accounts of those who have survived the epidemic. It is a cross-sectional human-interest look at what occurred at the onset of the epidemic, who failed to heed the warning signs and why, who was responsible for its spread and how, and what the world did—both on a grand scale as well as in Joe the Plumber’s backyard—to tackle it.

 And tackle it they do. Essentially a “current events” book, this is not meant to project the possibilities of a distant future. It is the here and now of a planetary disaster with painstaking attention paid to the details of not only the epidemic’s spread, but also to the practical logistics encountered on the path to its defeat. The stories are short, but effective. And like Bolaño’s interviews, there is a uniformity in their voice (even with interviewees hailing from different countries), which could be seen as a failure on Brooks’s part, but it nonetheless worked for me. Brooks has a lot to say in this novel, from opinions on American foreign policy to a belief in the indefatigable spirit of humanity, and— ZOMG! —he says it well.
 2013 for-kindle reviewed
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 Brownbetty
 342 reviews 162 followers
 August 11, 2010
 This book is like ordering ice-cream and receiving a punch in the mouth.

 I've been wanting to read this book for a while, since it seemed right up my alley; I love a good apocafic, and zombies are always fun. I made it to page 69 before putting it down with great force--I would have thrown it, except it was a library book.

 This book is, as advertised, about the global zombie apocalypse as told by the survivors. You don't stay with a narrative voice very long; each one speaks to the 'interviewer', telling their experience of the global plague, and then moves on. It's not worth becoming fond of any of them, and frankly, not very likely either; personalities only go about as far as classing a person as “stupid,” "naive", or “evil,” with the occasional “if only we'd listened to that farsighted man!”

 The personality that comes through the strongest is the writer, not the in-story journalist who has supposedly compiled the stories, but in fact max brooks . I don't know the man, but from the 69 pages of his writing I already dislike him.

 The overall tone I get from this book is 'smug.' I twitched in the introduction when the journalist describes his motivation writing the book; his boss who pays him rejects his first draft which contains the interviews which contain the “human factor”, dismissing them as “too intimate … too many feelings.” Obviously, this boss is a robot-hearted beaurocrat!

 Or maybe the journalist is an idiot . He was told to write up a report containing “cold, hard data,” and “clear facts and figures,” and he handed in an oral history? What did he think was going to happen?

 I could handle it if the framing device was “idiot-journalist is idiot,” but it's not just him. It quickly becomes apparent that the actual subtitle of this book is “How the people and institutions I despise will doom us all in the upcoming zombie apocalypse.” Nearly every account falls into “Oh, I was so foolish and innocent then!” or “I remain a selfish bastard, and refuse to feel guilty for my actions.” It's like a whole book of stories ending with “And then the entire bus gave me a standing ovation, and the bus driver told me I was his adopted brother.”

 AUGH. Look, 69 pages produced that much aggravation. Imagine if I'd finished it.
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 Amanda
 282 reviews 315 followers
 January 27, 2013
 I have biblio-cooties.

 There. I said it and I accept it. Because the majority of my friends really, really loved this book. And I fear they will reject me now that they know that it did little to nothing for me. I shall have to sit alone in the library, other readers keeping a wide berth for fear of contagion, but I cannot tell a lie and I stand by my pronouncement: Hi, my name is Amanda and I did not enjoy World War Z .

 In the past, I have ripped into books I disliked with a gleeful, almost maniacal abandon, and so there are some who may suspect that I will do so here. But this is an entirely different case, for World War Z 's fault is not that it's a bad book. It's well-written, it's got an intriguing conceit (the tale of the zombie apocalypse told in journalistic hindsight from the perspective of those who survived), and some imaginative scenarios (sure, we've all thought about zombies on land, but what about zombies underwater ?).

 In fact there's no fault at all here other than the fact that, as far as undead ghouls go, I'm Team Vampire. I've never really found anything that frightening about zombies, other than a certain "Eww" factor that compels me to think about how I need to stock up on hand sanitizer and wet wipes in a zombiefied world because they're leaving nasty bits and pieces everywhere . To me, there is nothing more frightening than intellect coupled with either undeniable evil or with moral apathy. Since zombies are basically husks driven by a biological imperative instead of conscious thought, they're not my monster of choice. The only zombie flicks I've enjoyed have been Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland . Humor + zombies = a win. Horror + zombies = not so much.

 So I knew going in that this was likely a swing and a miss, but it had received such rave reviews that I couldn't resist. I thought the journalistic style might appeal to me, but few of the voices were clearly differentiated enough for me to connect with any one character. There were 3 or 4 stories that really engaged me, but not enough to enjoy the overall experience. What was really frightening, however, is that Brooks does an excellent job of showing how ill-equipped we are globally to deal with any type of rapidly-spreading contagion. He also captures the fear and panic that comes out of facing an unknown. Particularly in first world countries, we are so complacent with "knowing all the answers" and controlling everything that the mental toll of facing a problem we can not solve would be just as damaging as the physical threat. Brooks does an excellent job of realistically portraying this.

 So, I'll say it again: not a bad book. Just not for me. Now I'll go sit in my corner and wait for someone else to catch biblio-cooties. It shouldn't be long. I just have to wait for someone to write a 1 star review of an Orson Scott Card or Janet Evanovich book and my transgressions will be forgotten.

 Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder
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 Stacia (the 2010 club)
 1,045 reviews 3,935 followers
 June 26, 2013
 Doing something in reverse bit me in the butt this time. I started the book but didn't get very far in before seeing the movie.

 What I thought the movie was going to be :


 What I actually got :

 Damn, those zombies were fast.

 Yes, I am only doing all of this to amuse myself, for the rest of you probably see my self-perceived cleverness as silly. But World War Z the book was a series of interviews, so of course my mind goes right to Brad Pitt's other role having to do with interviews...what was I to do???

 Anyway, let's get back to the point. If you are expecting the book and movie to match up, you'll be completely frustrated.

 WWZ the movie : action packed, time on the run, most of it told in one person's PoV.

 WWZ the book : the complete opposite of that. No joke.

 Anyhoooo (help me, I'm turning into my mother), after I got back from the movie (which was quite entertaining, btw) and picked up the book again, I was all WHAT THE EFF? Is this the same thing?

 So I put it down for a couple of days. You know, to clear my head and all that.

 Then I picked it up again. And read it for real. And it wasn't bad.

 I really wish I'd read it first now because the warped not-alike movie was more entertaining, and it hampered my ability to get into the book the same way that I might have before. But what can you do?

 Oh yeah. Right. Don't watch the movie first. That's what you can do.

 Or do watch the movie first, if you have no desire to read a book in which much of it is about the retelling of events, interview style. If you'd rather just start out your time with people on the run from zombies, I'd gather that the movie is a safer bet.

 Was this supposed to be a book review? Because I don't think I said much about the book, did I? I thought the book was okay but can't really say why. It was all over the place. The jumping around between viewpoints isn't my favorite style of story-telling, especially when you can't get a feel for who is telling the story/giving the recollection.

 I felt sort of detached because of the writing style. I'm sure that it works for a lot of people, but it didn't completely work for me. This was good enough that I was able to get through it, but there's nothing compelling enough to make me want to re-read it or even recommend it.

 Movie Grade : B (even with failing to stick to the book)
 Book Grade : C (even though it was more unique than the movie)


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13 reviews88 followers     June 5, 2008   This book was initially recommended to me by several people in the office and since I love zombies and apocalyptic themes, well, I was pretty excited. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations and I struggled to finish it. (I'm going to write this review under the assumption that the reader has some inkling about the story and how it's constructed.)There are two issues that killed it for me. Firstly, most of the characters had the same--or similar--voice. Of course this is partly to do with the fact that the voices all originate from the mind of one individual, the author. Also, the more journalistic/interview approach to constructing the narrative limits how much color the author can impart on any given character. Q and A is inherently dry, no matter how exciting the events described are intended to be. This is a minor gripe, though, and one that can be lived with. A more serious complaint, however, is that this book can be seen as completely lacking any and all dramatic tension that a person (or, me) expects from a survival horror-themed story. The primary draw--the zombie war and how humanity survived--is such a compelling hook, but it's told...by the people who survived. As in, past tense, as in we are left with their impressions of things that happened to them. Basically, then, the story devolves into an excercise in basic exposition: "And then this happened, and then that happened." And so the author is free to weave his story without any pesky things like character development, story arcs, plotting, and personal details that are shown and not told. It seems to me like an extraordinarily easy (maybe even lazy) way to tell a story.  One other minor point: For me, accounts of survival when the victims are real have meaning that allows them to transcend the limitations described above. WW2 Holocaust survivors' accounts, for example, can take your breath away. The difference is, of course, that they were real events that happened to real people.  Since all the classic storytelling elements are dispensed with, we're basically left with the author's views on our current world, particularly and naturally, the wars and our culture(s). However, it's my view that there are dozens of books written about these subjects already; books that haven't needed to sex the discussion up with a horde of shambling undead.  So, in summary, if I'm going to read an apocalyptic recounting of the end of civilization as we know it, I want to read about people in real time, struggling to survive, not being told how people surivived after it was over.  (I realize, though, that it's all a matter of taste, as I know half a dozen people whose views I respect that absolutely loved this book.) :D                   Author  12 books1,262 followers     March 24, 2008   (My full review of this book is longer than Goodreads' word-count limitations; find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)Anytime I hear of some funny, gimmicky book suddenly becoming popular among the hipster set, I always squint my eyes and brace myself for the worst; because usually when it comes to such books, the worst is all you can expect to find, an endless series of fluffy pop-culture pieces designed specifically for crafty point-of-purchase display at your favorite corporate superstore, and then a year later to be forgotten by society altogether. And so it's been in the last six months as I've heard more and more about this book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which supposedly is a hilarious "actual" oral history about an apocalyptic war with the undead that supposedly almost wiped out the human race as we know it; even worse, that it had been inspired by an actual gimmicky point-of-purchase humor book, the dreadful Zombie Survival Guide from a few years ago which had been published specifically and only to make a quick buck off the "overly specific survival guide" craze of the early 2000s. And even worse than all this, the author of both is Max Brooks, as in the son of comedy legend Mel Brooks; and if the son of a comedy legend is trawling the literary gutters of gimmicky point-of-purchase humor books, the chances usually are likely that they have nothing of particular interest to say. So what a surprise, then, to read the book myself this month, and realize that it's not a gimmicky throwaway humor book at all, but rather a serious and astute look at the next 50 years of global politics, using a zombie outbreak as a metaphorical stand-in for any of the pervasive challenges facing us as an international culture these days (terrorism, global warming, disease, natural disasters), showing with the precision of a policy analyst just how profoundly the old way of doing things is set to fail in the near future when some of these challenges finally become crises. It is in fact an astoundingly intelligent book, as "real" as any essay by Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell, basically imagining the debacle of New Orleans multiplied by a million, then imagining what would happen if the Bushists were to react to such a thing in the same way; and even more astounding, Brooks posits that maybe the real key to these future challenges lies with the citizens of third-world countries, in that they are open to greater and faster adaptability than any fat, lazy, middle-class American or European ever could be. Oh yeah, and it's got face-eating zombies too. Did I mention the face-eating zombies? Because that's the thing to always remember, that this comes from an author who has spent nearly his entire life in the world of comedy and gimmicky projects, not only from family connections but also his own job as a staff writer at Saturday Night Live from 2001 to '03; that no matter how smart World War Z gets (and it gets awfully smart at points), it is still ultimately a fake oral history of an apocalyptic zombie war that supposedly takes place just five or ten years from now, starting as these messes often do as a series of isolated outbreaks in remote third-world villages. And in fact this is where Brooks first starts getting his political digs in, right from the first page of the manuscript itself, by using the initial spread of the zombie virus to comment on the way such past epidemics like HIV have been dealt with by the corrupt old white males who used to be in charge of things; basically, by ignoring the issue as long as it wasn't affecting fellow white males, then only paying attention after it's become an unstoppable epidemic. In Brooks' world, just like the real one of pre-9/11 intelligence-gathering, we see that a few government smarties from around the world really were able to catch the implications of this mysterious new virus while it was still theoretically controllable; just that their memos and papers went ignored for political reasons by those actually in charge, as well as getting lost in the vast bureaucratic shuffle that the Cold War has created in the Western military-industrial complex. That's probably the most pleasurable part of the first half, to tell you the truth, and by "pleasurable" I mean "witty and humorous in a bleak, horrifying, schauenfreude kind of way" -- of watching the virus become more and more of a threat, of watching entire cities start to go under because of the zombie epidemic, then watching Brooks paint an extremely thinly-veiled portrait of how the Bush administration would deal with such a situation, and by extension any government ruled by a small cabal of backwards, power-hungry religious fundamentalists. And in this, then, World War Z suddenly shifts from a critique about AIDS to a critique about Iraq, showing how in both situations (the Middle East and zombies, that is) the real priority of the people currently in charge is to justify all the trillions of dollars spent at traditional weapon manufacturing companies under the old Cold-War system (companies, by the way, where all the people in charge have lucrative executive jobs when they're not being the people in charge), leading to such ridiculous situations as a full-on tank and aircraft charge mostly for the benefit of the lapdog press outlets who are there covering the "first grand assault." In Iraq, unfortunately, we found that a billion dollars in tanks still can't stop a teenage girl with a bomb strapped to her chest; and metaphorically that might be the most chilling scene in the entirety of World War Z as well, the press-friendly "zombie response" set up by the Bush-led government in New York's Yonkers neighborhood, done not for good strategic reasons but rather to show off the billions of dollars in weapons the government had recently acquired, leading to a virtual slaughter of all the soldiers and journalists there by the chaotic zombie hoard that eventually arrives. This, then, gets us into the first futuristic posit of Brooks in the novel to not have actually happened in real life yet -- the "Great Panic," that is, when the vast majority of humans suddenly lose faith in whatever government was formerly running their section of the world, and where mass anarchy and chaos leads to the accidental and human-on-human deaths of several hundreds of millions of more people. And again, by detailing a fictional tragedy like a global zombie epidemic, and the complete failure of a Bush-type administration to adequately respond to it, Brooks is eerily predicting here such real situations like last week's complete meltdown of Bear Stearns (the fifth largest investment bank in the entire United States), leading many to start wondering for the first time what exactly would happen if the US dollar itself was to experience the same kind of whirlwind collapse, a collapse that happens so fast (in a single business day in the case of Bear Stearns) that no one in the endless red tape of the government itself has time to actually respond to it? Brooks' answer here is roughly the same one Cormac McCarthy proposed in last year's Pulitzer-winning The Road; chaos, bloodshed, violence, inhumanity, an everyone-for-themselves mentality from the very people we trusted to lead us in such times of crisis. Make no mistake, this is a damning and devastating critique of the corrupt conservatives currently in charge of things; a book that uses the detritus of popular culture to masquerade as a funny and gross book about zombies, but like the best fantastical literature in history is in fact a prescient look at our current society. It's unbelievable, in fact, how entertaining and engrossing this novel is throughout its middle, given how this is usually the part of any book that is the slowest and least interesting; here Brooks uses the naturally slow middle of his own story to make the majority of his political points, and to get into a really wonky side of global politics that is sure to satisfy all you hardcore policy junkies (as well as military fetishists). Because that's the final thing important to understand about World War Z, is that it's a novel with a truly global scope; Brooks here takes on not only what such a zombie epidemic would do to our familiar US of A, but also how such an epidemic would spread in the village-centric rural areas of southeast Asia, the infrastructure-poor wastelands of Russia and more, and especially how each society fights the epidemic in slightly different ways, some with more success than others. For example, Brooks posits that in such places as India, population density is just too high to do much of any good; in his fictional world history, such countries are basically decimated by such a catastrophe, with there basically being few humans even left in India by the time everything is over. Other countries, though, used to picking up as a nation and fleeing for other lands, survive the zombie outbreaks quite well; those who are already used to being refugees, for example, see not too much of a difference in their usual lifestyle from this latest turn in events, ironically making them the societies most suited for survival in such a world. (This is opposed to all the clueless middle-class Americans in the novel, for example, who in a panic make for the wilds of northern Canada, in the blind hope that the winter weather will freeze the zombies into non-action; although that turns out to be true, poor planning unfortunately results in the deaths of tens of millions of people anyway, from hypothermia and starvation and plain ol' mass-murder.) And this is ultimately what I mean by this book being such a politically astute one; because as...                   1,588 reviews153k followers     December 10, 2020    
New week,   New BookTube Video   - all about the best (and worst) literary apocalypses to live through!  The Written Review    Humanity survived Zombie apacolypse.    Like after any great tragedy, the government wants a record.   Max Brooks is their oral historian.    Only, when he hands his documents, the bureaucracy  whittles it down to the bare facts.  Humans, over every nation,  dragged their bone weary bodies through this war.   They are now faced with the numbing task of rebuilding society.  They deserve to have their stories told.  So, he publishes the true account of World War Z. Told in a series of vignettes, we listen in on interviews as Brooks travels both the country and the world. And one thing is certain, life with zombies is a chilling tale.    
 The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts
The vignettes are absolutely riveting. There's a bit of the regular zombie murder mayhem but the story focuses on the human side of things. How the survivors, survived.  There's the blind man who fought off a hoard with no more than a blunt staff. Some people lost their minds - succumbing to tree belief  that they have joined the dead. There's the unintentionally cannibalistic family - and so much more.  
 Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has.
 Audiobook comments:--Read by Max Brooks, Alan Alda, John Turturro, Rob Reiner, Mark Hamill, Alfred Molina, Simon Pegg, Henry Rollins and Martin Scorsese--Highly recommended you listen to this novel - it's a quality production. --Every voice is country-specific and the actors read very convincingly. It feels like I'm next to Max as he interviews the survivors. YouTube | Blog | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Snapchat @miranda_reads     audiobook               733 reviews3,398 followers     January 2, 2023   A perfect vivisectionOf the social, economic, environmental, and political consequences of zombie outbreaksOne day, it might be a helpful or even lifesaving work one hopefully has as a paperback and not on an ebook reader. The seriousness and attention to detail Brooks put in his work are part of the satire, because it really feels as if a real reporter is investigating a story. Each one reacts differentlyAs in the ironic Zombie survival guide, Brooks uses all possible aspects of a zombie apocalypse, from its beginning until how it could end, including each human's individual reaction to it to describe the happenings. Less action, more charactersSwitching between the interviews, the book gives a new and more personal view on this very prominent topic, avoiding stereotypes and overused tropes, and is instead telling it from the points of view of very different people that wouldn´t normally be used to write the standard book or movie script. Could be used in other genres tooThe idea of using interviews as the main element for telling a story is a rare style element, but full of potential for more frequent use in fiction, although it might get very tricky to integrate it in a way that doesn´t interrupt the flow. But a Fantasy or Sci-Fi novel told from those perspectives would be a nice variation of the scheme.  Not as superficial as the Zombie survival guideWhile the zombie survival guide was more a pure fun read, Brooks pimps his writing this time with innuendos, criticism, and social commentary. It´s maybe also a satire of journalism itselfBut I haven´t enough expertise to be competent in that. So maybe Brooks even imitated and satirized the tone of autobiographical monologues and endless introspections that are often unintentional satires already, when reporters are losing rhetorical control. Tropes show how literature is conceived and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:  https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...      horror               215 reviews1,354 followers     November 10, 2012   I know what you're thinking. "Five stars for this book? Why???" If you've been following my reviews then you know I tend to stress over how many stars to give a book, and I'm not one to hand out five-star ratings willy-nilly. I'm usually quite cautious when it comes to handing out that all-important fifth star. I'm stingy. That being said, every once in a while a book, that may or may not be amazing, comes along and wows me.  And now you're (probably) thinking: "But Penny, it's a book about zombies. Zombies! Disgusting rotting corpses that stumble around, looking to sink their teeth into any living thing. How--how could that sort of thing wow you? Are you, like, smoking crack???"  First things first: No--I'm not smoking crack. Everyone knows crack is cheap--I much prefer the real thing*. Now that I've cleared that up, lets move on, shall we?  So. World War Z. I really enjoyed it, which was a surprise because I didn't think I would. This book is not something I would've picked up on my own. Had it not been for a couple of really nice Barnes &amp; Noble employees who practically shoved this book in my hands while gushing about its supreme awesomeness, I definitely wouldn't have purchased it. But since they didn't have the book I was looking for (Storm Front by Jim Butcher), and since I'd already been bitten by the zombie bug over a year ago (The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan) I took a chance and purchased this book. Despite the fact that Max Brooks used to write for SNL, and also happens to be Mel Brooks son, this book isn't funny, nor is it meant to be. Max Brooks tells this story through a series of interviews given by survivors of The Great Panic, or World War Z (the Z stands for Zombie, in case you didn't, you know, put two and two together...). The interviewees come from different parts of the world and they tell their accounts of what happened to them, what they thought when they first heard of what was first referred to as "African Rabies"; what happened when the Great Panic started in their part of the world. A lot of these stories are sad and/or terrifying, but mostly I found them incredibly intriguing.  Before I go on I need to add that I totally geek-out over documentaries, and this book--were it in movie form--would be a documentary. I'm one that appreciates the method Max Brooks uses to tell this story.  To me the beginning of this book has more to do with the way things are done in this world--politics wise--than anything else. Of course, as the book goes on and more and more governments are collapsing due to the fact that zombies are basically taking over the world, we get a good look at human nature during times of crisis. I found the whole thing fascinating..  Hardcore zombie lovers need to know that this isn't a book that follows one set of characters, though some interviews have been broken up, and so a few characters are featured in this book more than once. Rather it is one story told by several different people. There is continuity in the order in which the stories are told to us, and sometimes one survivor's account answers a question that was raised by another survivor. All that said, there is quite a bit of zombie slaying action. Lots of blood and guts and gore. We get to learn how best to stop a zombie--and let me assure you, there are many ways. We also learn about newest in improvised zombie killing weaponry and effective warfare techniques to decimate a raging-out-of-control zombie population.  But seriously, I loved reading it, everything in this whole entire book. Me. A church-going mother of three. Although, yeah, I'm not your typical church-going mother of three. But still...  P.S. I'd have finished this book a long time ago had it not been for my husband, who kept stealing this book away from me so he could read it too. He's really liking it, btw.   UPDATE 11/10/12: About a year ago I bought the audiobook from Audible only to discover, after purchasing, that it was the abridged version. I soon found out that was all they had to offer which was quite disappointing because some of my favorite eyewitness accounts from the book were not included. I've since heard from the World War Z's Facebook page that they are going to make an unabridged version. I am unaware of when it will be available for purchase. That said, I did end up liking the (abridged) audiobook well enough. The performances are pretty top notch.  *To those who have zero sense of humor, it must be said: I'm kidding, I don't do any drugs, and you need to chill.     reviewed-books zombies-aliens-vampires-dinos               12 reviews15 followers     July 8, 2008    I just can't get on this bandwagon. The pseudo-government reports the book is written in handicap it in many ways. First, there are no protagonists to grow with, no story arc, no climax, etc. You know what's going to happen from day one--there was a world crisis involving zombies and at least some people live to tell the tale. The sure knowledge of the outcome deflates any tension and book feels flacid. The pseudo-scientific jargon is a poor imitation (my sister, a nurse, tossed aside Brooks' other Zombie manfesto in disgust within the first few pages and this one fairs no better)and there are far too many emotional pauses and descriptive introductions for what amounts to an addendum to a government study of events. The thing that put me over the edge with this book is the inconsistency--one chapter has a boy with bloody knuckles sliding his hands about in zombie goo and remaining uninfected and in the next chapter there is an expression of gratitutde that no one exposed to detrius from a headshot has open wounds to be infected through. What editor let that get by? On top of that, racial, national stereotypes abound and are crude and unappealing. Brooks is obviously a big fan of Israel, as they are the heroes of the day, even going so far as to selflessly save Palestinian refugees (yeah, right)and remnants of South Africa's apartheid system are given a reprieve due to their pragmatism. Russians are wacky comrades, Chinamen are inscrutable and Americans are cowboys weakened by education and consumerism. Ugh.I won't recommend this book to anyone, even a die hard zombie fan, lest World War Z ruin the genre for them forever.                   Author  2 books247k followers     February 19, 2019    ”The book of war, the one we’ve been writing since one ape slapped another was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.” With most apocalyptic situations, I think the hardest part to deal with is that there are no wrong decisions or right decisions. There are simply too many variables to consider if your ultimate goal is to survive. The most meticulously planned strategies can still result in failure. You make the best decisions you can and then hope for a bit of luck. Should we barricade ourselves hoping to be saved, or go North hoping the zombies will eventually become popsicles when winter hits? Are we safer in the underground tunnels of Paris or on a cruise ship or living in the woods by ourselves? Whatever decision you make, you must think long game and short game. The short game, the immediate concerns, involve food, water, and shelter. The short and long game both come into play when trying to figure out how to avoid becoming zombie chow.  Once you survive the first wave of contagion, then what? This book is written as an investigative report, collecting all the experiences of survivors from around the world. Different cultures reacted differently to the apocalypse. Some were more successful than others. The learning curve, unfortunately, has to be short with apocalyptic situations, especially if the hope is to actually salvage civilisation. The lights go out, and many of the comforts we’ve become accustomed to are gone instantly, and the possessions that have come to define us, such as electronic devices, suddenly become useless.  If the whole idea of a zombie apocalypse is too wild a concept for you to grasp, you might be relieved that for the most part the zombies are really just part of the background. What Max Brooks is really dealing with goes well beyond the concept of zombies and focuses more on how people survived the collapse of civilisation. He could have used microbes or conventional war or a devastating meteorite hitting the earth or any of the other fascinating concepts that people have come up with as ways to end the world. It reads like books of a similar nature that collect the stories of people who survived World War Two. The scope is huge and impressive. Brooks addresses aspects about a zombie apocalypse that I have never thought about before.   Quislings ”Yeah, you know, the people that went nutballs and started acting like zombies.” Ok, I’ve read a handful of zombie books, not enough to make myself an expert, but certainly enough to have some background on the lore of a zombie apocalypse. WTH? Now Brooks didn’t just make this term up. It is a term from WW2. ”A quisling is a person who collaborates with an enemy occupying force. The word originates from the Norwegian war-time leader Vidkun Quisling, who headed a domestic Nazi collaborationist regime during the Second World War.”  The minds of survivors, I’m sure, snapped in all kinds of strange and wonderful and terrifying ways, but unfortunately pretending to be a zombie was a quick way to find yourself...well...dead. First, any reasonably sane human who notices you lurching toward them, performing your very best mimicry of the undead, will smash your brain. Second, you don’t blend with the zombies. They know you are alive. You become a zombie delight! People also just went to sleep perfectly healthy and didn’t wake up. This was called ADS, short for Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome or Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome. ”It killed as many people in those early stalemate months as hunger, disease, interhuman violence, or the living dead.” I’ve heard of things like this happening to people who experience long term stress situations. The body just reaches a point where the brain decides to just shut down the power to the spacecraft and let the mind drift away.   RIP  People will put up with a lot as long as there is hope that someday their situation will improve. Babies die when they are not held. People die when things become hopeless.  Brooks also told stories about zombies underwater. WTH? Yeah, people reanimated as the living dead on ships and eventually managed to fall off the ship in the water. It wasn’t unusual for zombies to just walk out of the water onto beaches or grab divers or attack fishermen in boats. Somehow they are more scary underwater than on land. It gives me the shivers just thinking about it. I’m having a Jaws flashback.  During and after WWZ, people had to relearn things that our grandparents and great grandparents knew.  A chimney sweep. ”I help keep my neighbors warm.” he said proudly.  A cobbler. ”You see those shoes. I made them.”  A shepherd. ”That sweater, that’s my sheep’s wool.”  A gardener/farmer. ” Like that corn? My garden.”   ”That was the upshot of a more localized system. It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a clear, concrete contribution to victory, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I was part of that. I needed that feeling. It kept me sane for the other part of my job.”  The other part of his job?...killing zombies. Several of the survivors talked about how important it was not to think of them as people or of who they were or of who they might have become. They couldn’t see them as people or what they were doing was genocide.  This is by far the most serious zombie book I’ve ever read. The stories are compelling. This is a panoramic view of a society in crises. The observations are thoughtful. The writing is convincing. By the end I had the feeling I’d just read a history book, not a speculative zombie apocalyptic book.  The book is unfilmable, but the movie industry knew a catchy title when they saw one. They certainly borrowed aspects from the book, but really the movie should be considered a completely different entity. The zombies in Brooks book are the George Romero lurching, yucky living dead. In the movie, they are super charged, fast moving, aggressive, nasty creatures. The virus in the movie is fast acting. Someone bitten is transformed within seconds. In the book, the virus takes much longer to take effect.  Did it bother me that the director Marc Forster took such liberties?  Not one  bite bit. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I was thoroughly entertained. I certainly intend to watch the movie again. So read the book to discover new depths to an overly exploited genre, and watch the movie to experience a whirlwind of fear and dread. Just a suggestion, have someone else hold the popcorn.  If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten      book-to-film post-apocalyptic               475 reviews16k followers     May 18, 2010   At this current moment in time my husband and I do not actually have a working will. We are the legal definition of intestate. We have not yet made any preparations for our death and we only have life insurance/house insurance because his mother organized the whole damn thing (come to mention it she is also the reason we have electricity, water and a phone line - the internet though was all us because we'd die without it.)So believe me when I say that we don't organize... anything. Except our zombie kit. That's right. We have a zombie kit. Should zombies suddenly strike while I type out this review we would be able to take our son and get in our car and drive away without a backward glance. Everything we need is in the boot of the car. If we're holed up inside the house we have our second zombie kit to live off of and use to defend ourselves. We have several plans in place as to where to go, what to do if we're separated at time of crisis, who we're taking with us, how we'll stay in contact etc. Some may call his paranoia. Some may call this stupidity. Do you know what I call these naysayers?  Zombie food. It is this obsessive and weird need to ensure survival during a zombie apocalypse, despite every rational reason to believe that all our efforts are for naught, that has made me the prime candidate and target group of this book.  It is not the norm of the zombie genre. In general a zombie movie tends to be about a small group of individuals against the undead hordes looking to floss with intestines.  This book is not about a small group of individuals - it is about a large collection of humanity. This book is how HUMANITY would survive and deal with a zombie infestation. It is a collection of small, broken narratives from people all over the world, across many social, economic and political classes.  Some of them were amazing, others horrifying. Some were inspirational, others so depressing or introspective that I wondered if there was any hope. I would argue that many of the "voices" from certain nationalities were not really very accurate and didn't really match the cultural region they came from - but I'm lazy. Either you "get" the voice of the narratives or you don't. This book was a fascinating, thoughtful read in a field that I'm personally obsessed with. I could easily understand how those who've never stayed up until three in the morning, drunk off their heads with a group of people yelling that if they head into the city then they're zombie meat (Zombie meat I say! You ridiculous idiots!) probably will find this book a hard read. It's also a difficult read in the sense that you are continually sucked into one story, only to have it end abruptly and shift to another. I kept getting frustrated and wanting to scream, "No! Go back! I want to know what else happened!" but alas. It's like little snap shots from all over the world, except when it comes to several of the snapshots, I'd really rather see the whole picture. Other than that, I loved it. I had a hoot reading it. It gave me plenty of fodder with which to have many drunken debates with my husband, brothers and friends. Much to their disgust...     contemporary-fiction kat-s-book-reviews               3,968 reviews170k followers     September 14, 2018   this book is about zombies the same way the bible is about god. they are mostly background actors who are the reason other characters do what they do and occasionally they will rarrrr in and kill a bunch of people because they cant help it, but mostly they are an invisible presence, always to be feared but never given a voice. this whole book takes place after the zombies have already destroyed most of the world and is a collection of the testimonials of hundreds (?) of different characters detailing their experiences with the zombie outbreak, and how they have survived. because of this, there arent really any action scenes, or any immediate terror. this book is more about politics and global concerns and human nature and dissatisfaction with the way the government handles natural disasters and (im gonna say it, im gonna say it) the zeitgeist (woohoo) than it is about man-eating corpses. it takes into account so many different aspects of post-zombie experience that i never would have considered like what will the actors do now? and what happens if a zombie gets on board your boat? and how will this affect the rest of the food chain? very multi-faceted, if not what i was expecting.  also interesting: the role of castles in a zombie holocaust, and the underground tunnels in paris: unsafe. so for people like alfonso, who do not enter a room without first considering their escape routes should zombies attack, this could give some interesting perspectives about what may have been overlooked, and provide some good food for thought. brains are for thought. brains are zombie food. you do the math. uh-oh - book avalanche... maybe more later...  come to my blog!      zombies-r-bitey               9,568 reviews55.6k followers     April 28, 2022    World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a 2006 zombie apocalyptic horror novel written by American author Max Brooks. The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet.  He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.  Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.  Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, "By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?"  تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز سی و یکم ماه آگوست سال2016میلادی عنوان: جنگ جهانی (زد) تاریخ شفاهی جنگ زامبی‌ها؛ نویسنده مکس بروکس؛ مترجم: حسین شهرابی؛ تهران: کتابسرای تندیس، سال‏‫1393؛ در432ص؛ شابک9786001821219؛ چاپ دوم سال1395؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده21م‬ جنگ جهانی ز (زد) عنوان یک رمان وحشت آخرالزمانی و زامبی است، که توسط نویسنده آمریکایی «مکس بروکس» نوشته شده است؛ دهسال است که بشر بر زامبیها پیروز شده، و سرانجام توانسته صلح را، به دنیا برگرداند؛ نماینده ی سازمان ملل، مشغول تهیه گزارشی از علت شیوع بیماری زامبیها، چرایی شکست دولتهای دنیا از آن، و در نهایت چگونگی پیروزی انسان است؛ در این سفر نخست به «چین» میرود، که «بیمار صفر» در آن پیدا شد، و سپس هم کم کم به همه ی دنیا از «کره شمالی» گرفته، که مردمانش غیب شده اند، تا «روسیه»، که اکنون به امپراتوری مقدس «روسیه»، مبدل شده، از «کوبا» که به ابرقدرتی سرمایه دار تبدیل شده، تا «آمریکا» که به سوسیالیسم روی آورده است؛ در این کتاب داستان مادرانی را خواهید خواند، که فرزندانشان را از ترس زامبیها میکشند، و نیز داستان فضانوردانی که از مدار زمین، یورش زامبیها را زیر نظر دارند؛ نقل از متن: (هشدارها: «چونگ چینگ» بزرگ، «فدراسیون متحد چین»: این ناحیه، در اوجِ شکوهِ پیشاجنگش، جمعیتی بالغ بر سی و پنج میلیون نفر را، در خود جا داده بود؛ امروز بعید است به پنجاه هزار نفر هم برسند؛ سرمایه های بازسازی، هنوز پایشان به این بخش از کشور باز نشده، و دولت ترجیح داده، بر سواحل تمرکز کند، که تراکمِ جمعیتیشان بالاتر است؛ هیچ شبکه ی نیروگاهی، و برق رسانی در کار نیست، و بجز رودخانه ی «یانگ تسه» هم هیچ آبی جاری نیست؛ اما در خیابانها زباله و خاک و خاشاک به چشم نمیخورَد، و «شورای امنیتیِ» محلی هم اجازه ی وقوعِ هیچ شیوعی را پس از جنگ نداده است؛ رئیس شورا «کوانگ جینگ شو» نام دارد؛ پزشک عمومی است، و به رغم سنِ بالا، و جراحتهای جنگیش، هنوز به تک تک بیمارانش سر میزند اولین ظهوری که از بیماری دیدم در دهکده ای دورافتاده بود، که رسماً هیچ اسمی نداشت؛ ساکنانش میگفتند: «داچانگِ نو»، اما این اسم فقط به خاطرِ نوستالژی بود، تا هر چیز دیگری؛ خانه های پیشینشان در «داچانگ قدیم»، از روزگارِ «سه امپراتوری»، سرپا باقیمانده بود، و میگفتند مزارع و خانه ها، و حتا درختهایش سده ها عمر دارند؛ وقتی سدّ «سه دره» تکمیل شد، و آب مخازن سد، کم کم بالا آمد، بخش اعظم «داچانگ» را، آجر به آجر، برداشتند و دوباره در زمین بالاتری ساختند؛ اما این «داچانگ نو» دیگر شهر نبود، و به «موزه ی تاریخ ملی» مبدل شده بود؛ حتماً طعن و طنزِ تلخی برای آن زارعهای بینوا بوده، که دیدند شهرشان نجات پیدا کرده، اما الان دیگر مجبورند بلیت بخرند، تا از آن دیدن کنند؛ شاید به همین دلیل بود که بعضی از آنها ترجیح دادند اسمِ آبادیِ تازه سازشان را «داچانگ نو» بگذارند، بلکه پیوندی با میراث کهنشان برقرار بماند؛ حتا اگر فقط به اسم باشد؛ من اصلاً خبر نداشتم که جایی به اسم «داچانگ نو» وجود دارد؛ پس امیدوارم ��فهمید که چرا وقتی به من تلفن زدند، و صحبتِ آنجا را کردند، چقدر تعجب کردم در بیمارستان خبری نبود؛ حتا به رغمِ افزایشِ آمارِ تصادفهای ناشی از مستی، شب بی سروصدایی بود؛ استفاده از موتورسیکلت کم کم رایج میشد؛ بین خودمان زیاد میگفتیم که آن «هارلی - دِیویدسون»های شما بیشتر چینی به کشتن داد، تا کلِ سربازهای امریکایی توی جنگ «کره»؛ به همین خاطر قدردانِ آن شیفت خلوت بودم؛ خسته بودم و کمر و پاهایم درد میکردند؛ میخواستم بروم بیرون سیگار بکشم، و طلوع را تماشا کنم، که شنیدم اسمم را پیج میکنند؛ مسئول پذیرش آن شب تازه کار بود، و متوجهِ لهجه ی فردِ پشت خط نشد، یک تصادفی شده بود، یا مریضی ای...؛ وضعِ اضطراری است -این بخش معلوم بود-، و آیا ممکن بود ما بدون اتلاف وقت کمک بفرستیم؟ چه میتوانستم بگویم؟ پزشکهای جوان، این بچه هایی که خیال میکنند طبابت یعنی چاق و چله کردنِ حسابهای بانکی...؛ اینها حاضر نبودند بروند، و بی جیره و مواجب، به چند تایی نونگمینِ بدبخت بیچاره کمک کنند؛ به نظرم من هنوز ته دلم از آن انقلابیهای پیر هستم؛ «وظیفه ی ما آن است که خود را در قبالِ خلق مسئول بدانیم» این کلمه ها برای من معنا داشت...؛ این کلمه ها یادم بود وقتی وانتِ دییرِ کهنه ام توی جاده خاکی ای بالا و پایین میپرید، که دولت قول داده بود آسفالت کند، اما هیچوقت سراغش هم نیامد؛ دردسر زیادی کشیدم تا محل را پیدا کنم؛ رسماً آن محل وجود نداشت، و به همین دلیل روی نقشه هم نیاورده بودند.؛ چند بار راه را گم کردم، و مجبور شدم از محلیها پرس و جو کنم، که البته خیال میکردند منظورم همان شهر - موزه است؛ وقتی به مجموعه ی ��وچک خانه های سرِ تپه رسیدم، واقعاً کاسه ی صبرم لبریز شده بود؛ یادم هست که با خودم گفتم کاش واقعاً قضیه حاد باشد، وگرنه...؛ بعد وقتی چهره ی آدمهای آنجا را دیدم، از حرفم پشیمان شدم.)؛ پایان نقل تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 19/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 07/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی     21th-century fantasy fiction               785 reviews1,332 followers     August 20, 2019   So, I've seen the movie several times when it was on TV, and I have to say that I even watched a scene or two a couple of dozen times on Youtube. Yes, the action and visuals are fantastic. (Okay, except the one where the guy tears his own tooth, yuck!)But after reading the comments where people were angry at the movie, saying that it does not hold a candle to the book, I knew I had to read it. And yes, I do agree that the only things the movie took from the book were the zombies and Israel building a wall. Oh, and the title.Right away, I was very surprised by the format of this book; it was not all what I was expecting. And the more I think about it; I believe it would be better if I picked up an audiobook instead of a book. Yeah, shocking, I never thought I would say such a thing. Every interview is done with a different person, so, soon I stopped paying attention to their names, so when they again appeared later in the book I had a hard time connecting them with their previous chapters.  Also, like one third into the book, I got stuck after several boring chapters where I seriously considered DNFing this book, but then I pushed through, and yes, it was worth it.  I loved that we got to see how so many different parts of the world battled with the zombies. The different approaches, what do to the countries, did they go all savage? Did they bomb their own people? Did they just lose all control? That was fantastic to watch. And surprisingly, this book made me even laugh! I just loved the boy who almost missed the zombies because he was focused on his computer. I did not expect that.  That's the one thing you can always depend on; as we're fighting on war, we're always preparing for the next one.  I did not very much grasp how they were suddenly able to fight the zombies when they previously failed with much better equipment but alright. But I have to say that zombie cleaning is funny to imagine. Especially of those underwater, I bet it will be fun if a zombie managed to get stuck in the Mariana Trench.  However, the scene I was sort of hoped for was post-war when some scientists have a zombie in a lab for studying, that would be fantastic! I honestly would love to see some experiments on these creatures. The book stated that it seemed that the state of the zombies deteriorated, but I wonder what would happen if they maybe starved for years. So many possibilities!  What sort of surprised me is that I expected that when the humans would go so close to extinction that the environment would get better, no factories running, no one is dumping anything in the water etc. but it was otherwise and it sort of made sense! There had to be so many fires; it's terrifying to imagine. But I wonder about the impact of all those nukes used! And that's another thing I wish was different, the last part was sort of jumping from character to character, for short conclusions but I would love to see more about the brand new world. Honestly, I think I would be able to read a book dedicated to each country! Especially Russia, Iceland and Israel would be interesting. Also, I wish we really knew what happened in North Korea.  I also wonder about Patient Zero, because when the doctor in China informed his friend, they knew what was going on, the military seemed ready for what was happening there. That does not seem like the first case Overall, the book is 3,5/5🧟‍♂️🧟‍♀️ for me; I think I will get the audiobook to see if I'll like that format better.     english movie-series-seen-first pb               429 reviews475 followers     November 15, 2021   Hey, I have a booktube channel (youtube for book reviews) and I do video reviews for books like this one, epic fantasy, science fiction, media related to them, and more.  Please subscribe here!  Update: See end of review for movie review. I've broken my cardinal rule for reading books just before the movie comes out. This rule I've alluded to is the following - I don't read the book directly before the movie (at least 1 year before or it must be read after or just wait on the movies). The reason for this is that I want to enjoy the story through both mediums and if you read the book just before the movie, you've set yourself up to be a critic - analyzing everything and complaining about every detail that's inevitably left out, but which is more often than not necessary for the medium. If you read the book at least a year before, at least with my shoddy memory, the movie becomes a happy time of fond remembrances. Oh yeah, I remember that part, so cool! Yay! Happy! In this instance, I hear the movie doesn't quite follow the book exactly and what else can that mean than that it's a typical zombie movie. I don't think I've ruined much here. You know, it could have been partly because of all the hype, but I didn't love this book. I didn't hate it either, which makes these the hardest reviews to write, but I think I have a few ideas why World War Z just didn't work all that well for me. I'm studying for the bar at the moment, so you get an extremely well-organized review (at least with headings aplenty) since that's how my brain is thinking at the moment. :)  The Plot  Doesn't really exist. Yeah, there's a loose series of events that defines the book, or the Zombie War, but it's told through interviews with different survivors from different countries. And they're short too, I even checked this with the book (paper-form). Each interview amounts to a page or two, maybe 5 max. Each tends to discuss a certain important event, which ends up getting referred to by characters later in the book and often mentioned by the one directly following. It's extremely clever and lets you see how well developed this whole idea is.  It's extremely clever  Max Brooks has literally thought of everything when it comes to a war against zombies. I thought the same in my reading of The Zombie Survival Guide, and it goes just as well here. EVERYTHING! He goes into why tanks are all but useless against hordes of zombies - because you have to take out their heads! Anything else, and they'll still shamble and probably even become more dangerous when you trip over them on the ground. The airforce is just as useless because it's so much money and effort for such a little amount of good. Better spent on a bunch of soldiers with tons of amo. He even goes into better strategies for fighting this war, why the zombies are such a good enemy - because they don't need to be bred, fed, or led as I'll let the book explain.  Very clever and not even pretentious about it. Just captivating. And this isn't the only thing I liked although we're getting into the middle ground because I didn't love the audio either.  The Audio  One of the things that got me excited to listen to this on audio was that it's read by a full cast. That means they're trying REALLY hard and that tends to be a good thing, especially if you don't like one or two of the voices, it's okay, it's only temporary. With just one narrator, that can really kill a book. I mentioned that this is told through many different people in different countries and they have actors like Rob Reiner and John Turturro. Even Max Brooks himself plays the part of the interviewer.   (John Turturro from The Big Lebowski) Very cool...until the point of distraction. There are so many different countries represented that the accents started to distract heavily from the story. I found myself pondering why the German guy had such a heavy accent on his "R's" and yet could perfectly pronounce "TH" every time. And this was just the one guy. One of the benefits of a single narrator is that even when they do an accent, it's easier to understand because English is their primary language.  The audio's great for the most part, outside of that little niggle about the accents, but one thing I absolutely HATE about it is...it's abridged!  Abridged  I would probably never forgive myself if I listened to this abridged audio version and never actually read the entire book if I actually thought that mattered. Maybe others are better sleuths than myself, but I can't find a reading of World War Z that's not abridged. At the same, after having read the book, the abridged version seems to do enough justice to the entirety of the novel, what with how it is organized, that it just cuts out a few of the interviews. Normally this is heresy, but I can live with it for this one time only.  What I didn't like  I think the thing that just makes this an okay to good book for me is that while it's style and organization is unique and highly clever, it also takes away from my ability to care. Without just following one person or a group of people, there's no attachment to any specific person.   The Movie  (Brad Pitt will make everything better.) After writing the above, I actually do think the movie will make it all better. It seems like it will be following one single person and that's what this reader needs. Movie's set for a June 2013 release. Here's the trailer too.   In the end (in the sense of my final feelings not any post-apocalyptic sense)  Let's just say, if we ever do get into a Zombie War, you better have a copy of World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide on you. Someone's already gone through the effort of thinking up EVERY situation that can occur, what's effective, what's not and put it down in words. No sense reinventing the wheel. While an entertaining idea and clever execution, these were the exact things that made World War Z a book I could never love. It's worth a read if only to see how in-depth you have not thought about zombies. 3 out of 5 Stars (Recommended with Reservations)  The movie, an update I just wanted to make a quick note about the movie. I'm happy to say I called it correctly. I enjoyed the movie much more than the book even though you can really only say the movie is a loose adaptation (if you can even say that). I thought it was much better to visit all those countries through the single character of the UN agent as opposed to interviews of random characters. I felt for him trying to protect his family, I rooted for him when he was in danger, and it had the same effect of exploring the reaction of different cultures (to a much smaller degree of course). And it actually scared me, which for a zombie book, was completely lacking in WWZ.     2013 audio braaains               1,878 reviews22.6k followers     February 22, 2020   The deadly epidemic started in China. This time it’s ... zombies.4.5 stars, rounding up because sheer brilliance. I'm not, generally speaking, a fan of horror fiction in general or zombie tales in particular, but World War Z popped up on my radar so many times that I finally decided to give it a go. (I checked it out from the library; I wasn't going to stick my neck that far out for this book that I'd pay actual money for it.) Anyway. World War Z takes the quasi-historical documentary approach to the zombie apocalypse, as a set of loosely-connected interviews gradually builds a picture of humanity's reaction to the zombie infection that quickly spreads around the world. Max Brooks examines the many ways this kind of a disaster would affect us: socially, militarily, psychologically, and more. The lies that government leaders tell their citizens. The lies that people tell themselves. The determination and heroism of some characters that infuses this otherwise depressing story with hope. It's definitely not your standard zombie-flavored horror story. The horror is as much in the way some people react to the catastrophe (e.g., profiteering) as in the moaning, grasping and biting (a 100% death sentence if you get bit) of the zombie hordes. Recommended if you're interested in a more analytical approach to the genre. I thought it was fascinating. VERY different from the movie that it inspired.     brainsss library-has science-fiction               40 reviews7 followers     July 10, 2013    This book is not a novel. You learn very little about the characters (even the narrator) and cannot follow them from story to story. There's no common thread, no arc, etc. It's a hodgepodge. For many of you, this is all you need to know about this book.If you're looking for a great zombie NOVEL, my favorite is Cryonic: A Zombie Novel  I suppose there are parallels between the book and the movie in the sense that both are disjointed. It's too big a story to tell and to be done properly Brooks should have written a door stopper of a novel. That said, he did piece together an interesting scenario: a world where humans have fought back against the zombies and won. This aspect is shown at the end of the film, as they elude to the inevitable sequel, and it's actually the most interesting part of the book, that is: - how did they fight and how'd they win- what challenges did they face- in what ways were they no match for the zombies That third bullet is an aspect I have the most difficulty with as there's so much of "bombs didn't work on the zombies" type of statements from those the narrators interviewed. Call me crazy, but if you drop a big 'ole bomb on a zombie hord there aren't going to be many "walking" dead around after that. I suppose this book's format will appeal to some people, as many seem to be OK with what he's done, but it's such a huge disappointment when you were expecting a novel and don't get one.  The book actually has a decent start with the story of patient zero and the images of zombies grabbing ankles from beneath the depths of a flooded city, but it goes downhill quickly from there.  It's really a chore to read because the stories are so short that they don't allow you to connect with the characters. I have a feeling if Brooks hadn't had so much success with his Zombie Survival Guide that publishers would have turned their nose up at the structure of this book and made him rewrite it.  At the same time, Brooks and his publisher have made quit a bit of coin on this one so who can blame them? Some stories provide enough detail to suck you in and get good (that is just before the end on you abruptly), but others are what I call Brooks' bastards because he gives them so little attention you wonder why they are in there at all. There's also one story that despite being long is incredibly boring about a stolen Chinese submarine that takes up enough pages to account for several other stories. Definitely an err in judgment there. With no one to root for and no characters to follow, you'll find yourself not caring whether you open the book back up or not. To me, this is the ultimate sin any book can commit. To call this the best zombie book ever written, etc. etc. is so far off the mark I can't even tell you. If any of what I'm saying is speaking to you I wouldn't spend your money on the book as it will surely disappoint.    This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.                   551 reviews1,575 followers     April 6, 2012   ME JUST SIMPLE ZOMBIE BUT NO UNDERSTAND WHY LIVING SO PREJUDICED AGAINST DEAD TOLERATE SUCH HATEFUL BOOK BOOK PRESENT TOTAL ONE-SIDED CASE OF FAKE WAR MAN VERSUS ZOMBIES PORTRAYS ZOMBIES AS MINDLESS AND HAS NO COMPASSION FOR FEELINGS HOPES DREAMS DESIRES OF RECENTLY ALIVE LIKE SMELL THE PRETTY FLOWERS ON GRAVE AND WHERE DID LEG GO USED TO HAVE TWO AND WHAT DOES BRAIN TASTE LIKE SO SUE ME AM CURIOUS ANYWAY BOOK GOES AROUND WORLD SHOWING MAN FIGHT ZOMBIES AND ALL TIMES MAN EITHER KILL ZOMBIE WITH RELISH OR ZOMBIE EAT MAN WITH RELISH HA HA SMALL JOKE BUT SERIOUSLY SEEM RACIST THAT AUTHOR NO THINK MAN AND ZOMBIE CAN LIVE PEACE LIKE WHY NOT GIVE ZOMBIE JUST SMALL TASTE OF HUMAN AND ALL GO ABOUT BUSINESS BUT NO MUST BE KILL KILL KILL HUMAN SO SENSITIVE BITE HEAD ONE TIME AND THINK WANT EAT NOTHING BUT BRAINS NEWSFLASH BRAINS NOT ALL THAT TASTY CONCLUSION WHY OK TO MAKE WAR WITH ZOMBIES ZOMBIES NOT EXACTLY NAZIS EXCEPT ONE TIME     2009 audiobooks braaaains               Author  44 books373 followers     January 9, 2010   There are reasons to be wary of this book. The title is a little silly, and Max Brooks's Zombie Survival Guide was tongue in cheek. Hell, he's the son of legendary comedy director Mel Brooks. And zombies are creatures that gained popularity thanks to film, which is contrary to the nature of most good creatures. Vampires, ghosts, wizards, witches, dragons, orcs, goblins, angels, werewolves and even Frankenstein's undead abomination came from literature first, and entered film later. Film seldom contributes originality to prose. Fortunately Max Brooks pulled off a minor miracle in adapting the largely theatrical terror into the written word, by use of the literary apocalypse convention and oral stories. Our familiarity with the outlines of a zombie outbreak (or any plague outbreak) from so many films helps fill in the gaps between his various storytellers' accounts.Brooks has a remarkable sense of voice, and places the various interviewees well, such that they sound all the more distinct in contrast to the preceeding and following speaker. We get a lot of interesting subjects, from the country doctor in China who treated the first "bite," to a hitman hired to protect a millionaire mogul, to a blind man who somehow managed to survive in the most infested parts of Japan - Hiroshima. Thus we also get a total sense of the rise and fall of the outbreak, with each arc illustrated by brilliant personal narratives of "true" stories from those periods that give us a sense of not just the plot, but how culture changed in this fictional earth. The narrative is unified by the interviewer who visits them and directs parts of their story, but only enough so that we can both enjoy the overarching plot and the survivors' stories. Like the best science fiction the outlandish premise allows us to get a fresh view of real human issues. Brooks approaches such issues on multiple levels, from simple human interests like base selfishness and how we act in desperation, to political crises, such as early on in the book when the Israelis and Palestinians blame each other for the plague, and even claim it is a hoax perpetrated by their enemies. Many of the characters are inspired by people from real life, like Howard Dean, Karl Rove and Nelson Mandela - but rather than coming off as cheesy, they lend an air of authenticity to the tale. There is just enough real tension, both base and topical, to lend it the right aura for a great exercise in modern fantasy/sci fi - it's easily one of the best fantasy/sci fi books set in the modern world I've read in quite some time. The quality of Brooks's book was totally unexpected. This was supposed to be a spin-off from an impulse-buy. But by the time you finish World War Z I think you'll hope along with me that this, his first work of fiction, won't be his last.                   1,620 reviews4,957 followers     June 23, 2012   On the menu tonight: 
 WORLD WAR Z
 Amuse Bouche Our rich Tartare à la Homo Sapien will astonish you with its hauntingly familiar flavors, its bright and vivid colors, and the truly gamey taste of terror, tears, and trauma. Fresh kill will never appear so carefully arranged and presented: prepare yourself for a buffet that appeases both the palate and the intellect.Appetizer A surprisingly hearty summer soup: tantalizing hints of summer flavors frozen solid, then slowly re-animated to surprise the unwary diner. You will literally gasp in amazement as the flavors you thought had come and passed during the colder months rise again to challenge your taste buds! The stew contains a veritable global village of ingredients: you will taste the inscrutable flavors of the mysterious Orient, the refined and subtle tastes of English manor and European castle, the bold and ruthless tang of Mother Russia, and at its core, the zesty essence of woodsy North Americana will serve to keep this dish firmly anchored in the classic Western tradition. This bold starter will act as a bullet straight into your palate’s head! Entrée One could perhaps assume that a multi-course, zombified meal will be centered around a choice cut of rare beef steak; our menu will sorely disappoint such traditional diners. Instead we offer as the centerpiece of our prix fixe meal an array of delights that appease not the base emotional senses, but the higher appetites of the intellect! Never fear, diner, your hunger will be truly satiated – but only if you are able to cast aside your yearnings for an old fashioned cheeseburger and partake in a less sensual but perhaps more fulfilling menu. To that end, we offer a buffet of international flavors: taste the crusty unleavened bread of walled Israel, savor the rainbow flavors of a South African duo of rib and grain, relish the fatty riches of Canadian poutine (we understand that Americans will often flee north simply to indulge in this dish!), enjoy a classic sampling of melancholy Japanese swordfish... the world is yours to consume, in a carefully planned and constructed rejoinder that laughs in the face of undead chaos, and shouts: I Am the Decider!Dessert For our last dish, we offer you this stunning plate: a downed, half-mad pilot, communicating with phantoms as she hurtles through dense bog and over abandoned freeway, bravely resisting the hungry hands and teeth of the undead!Wine Pairing We are proud to offer a new vintage “Max Brooks”, heretofore enjoyed only by ironic survivalists, now available to the world at large.    after-the-fall horror-modern rain-man-reviews               1,504 reviews7,566 followers     November 1, 2012   Thoughtful and thought-provoking. Not at all the typical zombie book, and not at all what I expected. Published in 2006, the issues and underlying plot points are as pertinent today as then. What would happen in a real zombie apocalypse? Given current politics, economics, cultural trends, and geography, I'd be willing to bet it happens closely to Brooks' vision.World War Z  is structured along the lines of a documentary, a collection of remembrances about the world-wide zombie war. Divided by chronological order, one can get the feel of the evolution from chapter headings: "Warnings," "Blame," "The Great Panic," "Turning the Tide" "Home Front USA," "Around the World and Above," "Total War," and "Good-byes." "Warnings" begins with a doctor in China responding to a remote village to a request for help. His tale lures the reader in, giving an intimate view of the initial confusion, the fear, the drastic response by the state, and the systemic holes that lead to ultimate break down. From there, the interviewer talks to a human smuggler in Tibet, drug war agents in Greece, a black-market surgeon in Brazil, a laborer from South Africa, a member of Israeli intelligence, and a repatrioted Palestinian. It's a brilliant idea for a narrative about a global issue, because each culture group frames the problem in terms of its own narrow focus (how could it not?), giving the reader insight into how confronting any issue takes place in a morass of history--but also how similar we are at the individual level. And, unfortunately, the degree to which personal selfishness, both altruistic (saving loved ones) and greedy, pave the way for worsening disaster. Further interviews include the ordinary survivor (who was anything but), soldiers, an astronaut, and various government officials including the vice-president and a diplomat. It makes for an extremely interesting analysis, because it covers both the personal, private story and the larger, world arc. Ultimately, it was a sobering and satisfying commentary on humanity and the current state of the world. While that sounds potentially dull and analytical, structuring the story around a zombie war is frosting on the vegan cupcake. While it possibly could have been as strong of a narrative if Brooks was imagining a virulent and lethal virus, zombies gave it a flash factor that draws dystopia fans in. Besides, reanimated dead do create challenges of their own that would be unique in warfare. One general talks about how traditional warfare centers around people that are "bred, led and fed." Zombies require none of those things--their ranks grow with death, they require no leaders, so it is not possible to remove key strategists in a campaign, and they don't require any sort of supplies or rest, so there is no possibility of destroying a supply line. Underwater environments prove to be the long-term zombie reservoir, presenting unique challenges to world-wide eradication. Minor quibbles include a lack of some of the science behind the outbreak, as well as that of the lone survivors. And, while it is a thought-provoking story over all, it's not exactly a gripping one that kept me up at night. That's actually okay, as it proved more satisfying in the long run. Just temper your expectations. In some ways, this was the complete antithesis of Zone One, (review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) which examines the zombie post-apocalypse through the individual and humanity's slide downward. This looks at zombie wars through multiple viewpoints on a world-wide scale, and it's ultimate message is hope with cost.  I highly recommend to zombie or science-dabbling fans. Four flesh-eaten stars.  http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/0...      audio end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it zombies               712 reviews573 followers     July 15, 2020     Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature....Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do. I first read this book at least ten years ago, back when Mr. Brooks’ choice to use the science and language of epidemiology was simply considered a clever way to write a zombie novel. So, how does this story feel now that we’re living through an actual pandemic? It’s even more impressive. Mr. Brooks spent considerable effort making his story realistic, and life has shown how right he was. A pandemic that begins in China and engulfs the world, helped by a Chinese government suppressing the truth. The willful blindness of the public (aided by a broken media system) to grasp the true magnitude of the outbreak. Cynical charlatans selling bogus cures. The failure of the international community to work together to stop the outbreak, and politicians sadly more focused on the economy than the public health. There are so many things in this book that might have felt farfetched before but look eerily prescient now.The oral history method of storytelling is used to great effect here. The interviewees come from all walks of life; this is not just a ‘heroes and generals’ type of story. These first-person vignettes are often narrow in focus, moving, and even harrowing, and each character has a distinctive voice and manner of speaking. But by regularly shifting to a new narrator—across all seven continents, in cities and under them, on and under the oceans, even in outer space—we eventually get the full, grand scope of the story: the initial outbreak, safe zones, refugees, ecological problems, the loss of and eventual rebuilding of hope and civilization.  World War Z is a completely original, wonderfully imaginative, and chillingly realistic novel. It’s a good read that has become a must read. P.S. If you can find the unabridged audiobook (it was originally released with only an abridged one), it’s very good and has a great cast.      2020 trade-paperback               1,847 reviews16.3k followers     February 20, 2019   A very pleasant surprise.TBT, not a huge fan of the zombie sub-genre: never watched an episode of the Walking Dead, never really bought into it as a fantasy vehicle. So – I picked this up with not so much trepidation as an allowance that I probably would not love it. I didn’t LOVE it, but liked it a lot more than I expected I would. Here’s the thing: It’s not JUST about an I Am Legend scenario where the world turns into monsters. Well – it sort of IS about that – but it’s also about a lot more. Author Max Brooks (son of Mel “It’s good to be the KING!” Brooks) serves this up with a steaming hot portion of socio-economic views, cultural observations and more than a generous side order of HAVEATYOU! post-apocalyptic fudge. You probably already can guess the premise, so no spoilers – there is a global pandemic where damn near everyone gets turned into zombies. We’re talking Aliens Bill Paxton “GAME OVER MAN!” world-wide catastrophe. MOST of humanity is wiped out. But Brooks’ narrative, told from the shifting perspectives of the survivors in a kind of post-war journalistic oral history novel (patterned after Studs Turkel’s 1984 The Good War), is appealing for it’s plucky spirit and charismatic delivery. Not just blood and guts, we get to know first hand about this event from start to finish and all the details in between. It’s the human element of this that works so well, the near remembrances of the survivors told from their perspectives. I loved that Brooks develops a working vocabulary for the post-war survivors. The human soldiers call their zombie opponents “Zach” and he makes the astute observation that they no longer needed consultants and executive directors – humanity needed carpenters and gunsmiths. I was also drawn to one of the survivor’s recollection that his group loved to go into battle to the ear splitting tunes of Iron Maiden’s The Trooper. So if you were like me and avoided this because it was just another zombie book – go ahead and give it a try, it’s actually pretty good.                     935 reviews1,527 followers     October 22, 2020   Having just read the most literary of all zombie novels makes one thing quite clear: haute lit &amp; this particular horror genre simply don't mix. But that doesn't make the effort any less outstanding, unique, or outrageous. "WWZ" takes a scatterplot approach to begin to tell what's happened to the world after the zombie apocalypse has transpired. All accounts are so definitive, so individual as to seem 100% authentic. We get accounts all the way from the very heights of the social echelons (Veep, Army generals...) to the rantings of average civilians (like a woman with a 5 year-old's sensibility, for instance).There is a type of reader out there for this type of narrative. They will adore the militaristic accounts-- though, admittedly, not my cup of tea. But the additions to zombie lore are awesome! From quislings (i.e. live zombie impersonators) to zombie-detecting dogs.                   1,219 reviews8,687 followers     September 9, 2016   I read this book a few years ago - the Zombie Survival Guide was super-hyped so I wanted to check this followup out as soon as it came out. I love the documentary format. Brooks did so well in telling it in such a way that it really did feel like non-fiction.One of my favorite parts of the zombie genre is not necessarily the horror and gore, but how the survivors deal with the threat and rebuilding. The before, during, and after stories in this book are raw and real. Because of this, this zombie tale will likely appeal to more than just horror fans. Concerning the movie: I enjoyed the movie, but it is barely like the book. They are each enjoyable in their own right.  Max Brooks: Probably the most entertaining fact about this book is that it is written by Mel Brooks' son (but don't expect any comedy!)     borrowed favorites post-apocalyptic-dystopian               1,388 reviews6,652 followers     October 13, 2020   *Updated after rereading. 10/12/20*This still holds up remarkably well even if I'm not the zombie enthusiast I used to be. I did the Audible version this time and the all-star cast does a fantastic job. The weird thing is that the jumping off point for the American political aspect had that 2006 W. Bush era mindset which seemed kind of dark and cynical at the time, but now seems incredibly naïve and quaint these days. The stuff about how various governments around the world either react swiftly or fail completely in a time of crisis really hits home these days. *Original review.*While his previous book was a tongue-in-cheek zombie survival guide, Brooks turns deadly serious here. Written as a series of survivors' stories in a UN report following a world wide war with the undead, Brooks crafted a classic horror novel that reads like history. Inventive, scary and a must read for anyone who ever enjoyed a George Romero zombie movie.     2020-reread apocalypse-now favorites               525 reviews56.7k followers     May 17, 2017   Well this didn't go as I expected...I love post-apocalyptic books. When I learned after watching the movie that there was a book I couldn't wait to read it! Turns out I was bored and had to skim through the last part...Love the story but hated the format with the "interviews".    2-star-y-am-i-doing-this-to-myself dnf post-apocalyptic               2,162 reviews9,039 followers     June 4, 2013   update...update...To everything there is a time - a time to reap and a time to plant, a time to listen to Schoenberg and a time to listen to Lez Zeppelin, the all-girl tribute band, a time to read Marcel Proust and a time to read about zombie apocalypses. That time, for me, passed some years ago. I shouldn't've picked up this novel but I was seduced by shedloads of great reviews on this very site.  Although my copy has a front-cover blurb by Simon Pegg, it's his very own great little zom-romcom Shaun of the Dead, plus George Romero's splendid zombie trilogy which Shaun beautifully parodies, plus other movies like 28 Days Later and I Am Legend, and a thousand other post-apocalypse novels and B-movies, and plus NOW the fab series THE WALKING DEAD which I only just discovered, wow, I love it - it's all of these things which cumulatively undermine the not inconsiderable energy and sociopolitical insight of Max Brooks' own version of The War Against the People You Really Hoped You'd Never See Again. Every scene in this book we've seen or read several times before, and alas, mostly by less truthful writers. This is really an excellent novel, but for younger readers who haven't already slogged, as I have, through a lifetime of pulp.  Brooks's imagination is tough and unflinching, but you have to concede that zombie apocalypses bring out the macho in pretty much everybody. This really is a war book, chock full of pumped-up acronym-heavy military jargon. World War Z is mainly fought with TESTOSTERONE!!! This book wanted to be for zombies what THE WIRE is for Baltimore, and for that I give it a crisp military salute and a bag of red tops. I think my 15 year old self would have rated this one four fat ones but that guy didn't have the best taste really.  ** That said, myself and daughter Georgia will be lurching, shambling and jerking our bodies towards the cinema when the Brad Pitt zombuster film-of-the-book is released soon. Me and Georgia love that stuff. Gwan, destroy the world again... and again...     novels verysleazyfun               1,765 reviews35 followers     April 27, 2020   2020 re-read:Still a comfort read for me, despite everything going on right now. Reason why it took me so long this was I lost my job a couple days after I started this and wasn't in the right frame of mind for it, plus less driving so cutting down on commute.I would like to see Netflix adapt this as a series, I think they'd do a good job. *Make sure you go for the unabridged version of the audiobook of this, well worth it* I even got mom to listen to a few parts with me when we had to go out and about. She would ask me questions after certain parts :). Not alot to say really, just that this is still one of my favorite books &lt;3 I remember seeing the movie of this and thinking "Youins screwed this up big time." I've heard the story of how this particular plot was decided on and rolled my eyes but I still gave it a chance. I was mostly bored during it. IMHO, I hope the sequel doesn't ever get made if its gonna be anything like the first one. Worst book adaptation (for me) alongside the *coughPercyJacksoncough* films. This was a balm after crazy busy or frustrating work nights (and there were QUITE a few)... few of these are still my top favorites and I still applaud the cast of voices. They make what could be dry retellings more compelling and fascinating.  Can't say much more than I've already said.. if you decide to go for this.. have fun:)--- 1st time June (paperback), second time (audiobook) October 2013.. Third read : near end of September to October 9th 2015 4th read: June 2017--- For a list of the audiobook cast: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World... --- Not a bad way to kick off October hmm? I had planned to take my time with this but flee through it haha. The diverse cast of the audiobook adds to the enjoyment alot... half the fun for me was guessing who the sort of familiar voices belonged to (got a few right ).A couple I was impressed by their accent change, Simon Pegg I didn't recognize at all the first time till I listened to the cast list at the end.. Good job Simon :) There's not a plot persay really, its a bunch of survior accounts with a couple intersecting that follows the war from beginning to end.  Some of the parts were overlong and a bit dry/rambling but it didn't deter my enjoyment of the novel.  It's a book where you'll love it, or find it 'meh' probably... not a quick read but worth your time:) I remember having fun tracking down the unabridged version of the audiobook at the time. I didn't know at first only an abridged one was out (those make no sense to me ).. I think I found mine either just after I saw the movie or before. Would highly recommend the full version! Happy reading, I probably dig this out again in a couple years:)(Excuse any spelling errors right now haha, on my phone)     favorites               137 reviews2,270 followers     July 17, 2013    ZOMG! The first time I ever saw that chat acronym my brain immediately registered zombie. Is that weird? I mean, I figured out pretty quickly that the acronym is nothing more than a joke, a mere play on words (so to speak) made at the expense of lazy n00bs whose left fingers slip off the shift key in an attempt to type, “OMG!” But somehow that initial association has stuck with me, as even now when I see someone type it (and usually it’s Ceridwen, Queen of Internet Memes, doing it ironically), I think of the undead. Or when I’m walking alone at night and hear a scraping shuffle and a familiar guttural moan, and some cold, rotting fingers fall lazily onto my left shoulder, my immediate reaction is never anything short of an instinctually exclaimed, “ZOMG!” Shudder. So yeah, this rating is no accidental slip of the Apple trackpad; World War Z really is 4-star material. Instead of presenting a been-there-done-that narrative wherein a group of protagonists fall prey to a zombie epidemic, whose lives change with shifting priorities, whose outlook becomes fundamentally survivalist, and who ultimately learn to cope with their situation and depend on themselves and each other to combat the swarms of undead infesting their world, Max Brooks takes a different tack. Here, we get Bolaño-style interviews with key political and military figures from across the globe who are involved in the conflict, along with individual accounts of those who have survived the epidemic. It is a cross-sectional human-interest look at what occurred at the onset of the epidemic, who failed to heed the warning signs and why, who was responsible for its spread and how, and what the world did—both on a grand scale as well as in Joe the Plumber’s backyard—to tackle it. And tackle it they do. Essentially a “current events” book, this is not meant to project the possibilities of a distant future. It is the here and now of a planetary disaster with painstaking attention paid to the details of not only the epidemic’s spread, but also to the practical logistics encountered on the path to its defeat. The stories are short, but effective. And like Bolaño’s interviews, there is a uniformity in their voice (even with interviewees hailing from different countries), which could be seen as a failure on Brooks’s part, but it nonetheless worked for me. Brooks has a lot to say in this novel, from opinions on American foreign policy to a belief in the indefatigable spirit of humanity, and—ZOMG!—he says it well.     2013 for-kindle reviewed               342 reviews162 followers     August 11, 2010   This book is like ordering ice-cream and receiving a punch in the mouth.I've been wanting to read this book for a while, since it seemed right up my alley; I love a good apocafic, and zombies are always fun. I made it to page 69 before putting it down with great force--I would have thrown it, except it was a library book. This book is, as advertised, about the global zombie apocalypse as told by the survivors. You don't stay with a narrative voice very long; each one speaks to the 'interviewer', telling their experience of the global plague, and then moves on. It's not worth becoming fond of any of them, and frankly, not very likely either; personalities only go about as far as classing a person as “stupid,” "naive", or “evil,” with the occasional “if only we'd listened to that farsighted man!”  The personality that comes through the strongest is the writer, not the in-story journalist who has supposedly compiled the stories, but in fact max brooks. I don't know the man, but from the 69 pages of his writing I already dislike him.  The overall tone I get from this book is 'smug.' I twitched in the introduction when the journalist describes his motivation writing the book; his boss who pays him rejects his first draft which contains the interviews which contain the “human factor”, dismissing them as “too intimate … too many feelings.” Obviously, this boss is a robot-hearted beaurocrat! Or maybe the journalist is an idiot. He was told to write up a report containing “cold, hard data,” and “clear facts and figures,” and he handed in an oral history? What did he think was going to happen? I could handle it if the framing device was “idiot-journalist is idiot,” but it's not just him. It quickly becomes apparent that the actual subtitle of this book is “How the people and institutions I despise will doom us all in the upcoming zombie apocalypse.” Nearly every account falls into “Oh, I was so foolish and innocent then!” or “I remain a selfish bastard, and refuse to feel guilty for my actions.” It's like a whole book of stories ending with “And then the entire bus gave me a standing ovation, and the bus driver told me I was his adopted brother.” AUGH. Look, 69 pages produced that much aggravation. Imagine if I'd finished it.                   282 reviews315 followers     January 27, 2013   I have biblio-cooties.There. I said it and I accept it. Because the majority of my friends really, really loved this book. And I fear they will reject me now that they know that it did little to nothing for me. I shall have to sit alone in the library, other readers keeping a wide berth for fear of contagion, but I cannot tell a lie and I stand by my pronouncement: Hi, my name is Amanda and I did not enjoy World War Z.  In the past, I have ripped into books I disliked with a gleeful, almost maniacal abandon, and so there are some who may suspect that I will do so here. But this is an entirely different case, for World War Z's fault is not that it's a bad book. It's well-written, it's got an intriguing conceit (the tale of the zombie apocalypse told in journalistic hindsight from the perspective of those who survived), and some imaginative scenarios (sure, we've all thought about zombies on land, but what about zombies underwater?).  In fact there's no fault at all here other than the fact that, as far as undead ghouls go, I'm Team Vampire. I've never really found anything that frightening about zombies, other than a certain "Eww" factor that compels me to think about how I need to stock up on hand sanitizer and wet wipes in a zombiefied world because they're leaving nasty bits and pieces everywhere. To me, there is nothing more frightening than intellect coupled with either undeniable evil or with moral apathy. Since zombies are basically husks driven by a biological imperative instead of conscious thought, they're not my monster of choice. The only zombie flicks I've enjoyed have been Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland. Humor + zombies = a win. Horror + zombies = not so much. So I knew going in that this was likely a swing and a miss, but it had received such rave reviews that I couldn't resist. I thought the journalistic style might appeal to me, but few of the voices were clearly differentiated enough for me to connect with any one character. There were 3 or 4 stories that really engaged me, but not enough to enjoy the overall experience. What was really frightening, however, is that Brooks does an excellent job of showing how ill-equipped we are globally to deal with any type of rapidly-spreading contagion. He also captures the fear and panic that comes out of facing an unknown. Particularly in first world countries, we are so complacent with "knowing all the answers" and controlling everything that the mental toll of facing a problem we can not solve would be just as damaging as the physical threat. Brooks does an excellent job of realistically portraying this. So, I'll say it again: not a bad book. Just not for me. Now I'll go sit in my corner and wait for someone else to catch biblio-cooties. It shouldn't be long. I just have to wait for someone to write a 1 star review of an Orson Scott Card or Janet Evanovich book and my transgressions will be forgotten.  Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder      blog meh               1,045 reviews3,935 followers     June 26, 2013   Doing something in reverse bit me in the butt this time. I started the book but didn't get very far in before seeing the movie. What I thought the movie was going to be :    What I actually got :   Damn, those zombies were fast.  Yes, I am only doing all of this to amuse myself, for the rest of you probably see my self-perceived cleverness as silly. But World War Z the book was a series of interviews, so of course my mind goes right to Brad Pitt's other role having to do with interviews...what was I to do??? Anyway, let's get back to the point. If you are expecting the book and movie to match up, you'll be completely frustrated.  WWZ the movie : action packed, time on the run, most of it told in one person's PoV.  WWZ the book : the complete opposite of that. No joke. Anyhoooo (help me, I'm turning into my mother), after I got back from the movie (which was quite entertaining, btw) and picked up the book again, I was all WHAT THE EFF? Is this the same thing?  So I put it down for a couple of days. You know, to clear my head and all that.  Then I picked it up again. And read it for real. And it wasn't bad.  I really wish I'd read it first now because the warped not-alike movie was more entertaining, and it hampered my ability to get into the book the same way that I might have before. But what can you do?  Oh yeah. Right. Don't watch the movie first. That's what you can do.  Or do watch the movie first, if you have no desire to read a book in which much of it is about the retelling of events, interview style. If you'd rather just start out your time with people on the run from zombies, I'd gather that the movie is a safer bet. Was this supposed to be a book review? Because I don't think I said much about the book, did I? I thought the book was okay but can't really say why. It was all over the place. The jumping around between viewpoints isn't my favorite style of story-telling, especially when you can't get a feel for who is telling the story/giving the recollection.  I felt sort of detached because of the writing style. I'm sure that it works for a lot of people, but it didn't completely work for me. This was good enough that I was able to get through it, but there's nothing compelling enough to make me want to re-read it or even recommend it. Movie Grade : B (even with failing to stick to the book)Book Grade : C (even though it was more unique than the movie)     action-and-adventure adult dystopia-or-apocalyptic
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8908.World_War_Z