My one liner: An easy, if sometimes disturbing, often hilarious read

“May you live in interesting times” is a well-known Chinese curse.

Well, the apocalypse stories take that to the logical extreme, as there would
be very little that would be uninteresting about a post-apocalyptic world. 
This is a lovely little collection of (very) short stories that take human
beings out of their comfort zone into situations which they cannot have
experienced before. 

Some explore human existence in the context of a broken society.  In
“Trust”, R.C. Lewis explores the instinct for survival that leads to herd
behaviour, which can have disastrous (yet morally justified consequences).

On the other hand, “The Last Day of Fall” by Matt Sinclair is a mini Lord of
the Flies.  A community that initially comes together in the face of
apocalyptic disaster.  But there are some rotten apples in the basket…

Then hilariously, a short play / TB script “Disconnect” by Mindy McGinnis,
which joins God and the staff in heaven two seconds post-apocalypse.  God
has inadvertently triggered Judgment Day by setting up his iPhone calendar
wrongly. With queues of millions forming at the gates of heaven, God gives up,
flops on the couch and starts playing with his old Gameboy, leaving his son, and  a host of well-known angels to sort out the mess.

And the memorable grand finale by Judy Croome, “The Last Sacrifice”. 
Apocalypse in an ancient era.  A (Mayan??) king and demi-god performs
increasingly desperate sacrifices to appease the gods.

But to no avail.

The Slideshow Review for this book is here.

There is no Wikipedia link for this book.  The Google Books link is here.

(The image above is licensed by shakespearesmonkey under a Creative Commons License. The image below is licensed by Lea LSF under a Creative Commons License.)

Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake (2003)

My one liner: Man Booker Prize Shortlist. Sci-fi and survival in a post apocalyptic world. But the apocalypse came from a somewhat unexpected source.
 
Where does our increasingly commoditised world take us, dominated as it is by large corporate entities ? Does the corporate effectively become the state, selecting its “employees” from childhood based on their predicted future capacity to add scientific know-how to the corporation ? As all “knowledge” is now captured, recorded and available on the internet, does regular society become increasingly dumbed-down, with those who opt-in fed on a diet of inane entertainment and leisure, and genetically modified food, while living in faceless corporate compounds ? 
 
It is hard to escape the conclusion that Margaret Atwood thinks so, and it is a vision she returns to in the sequel to this novel, The Year of the Flood (2009), whilst also echoing the society of the Handmaid’s Tale which she wrote in 1985.  Humans are valued only for the corporate value that they generate, and
there is a clear material hierarchy between corporates themselves.  The vision echoes a Marxian view of a society which is in the immediate pre-revolutionary stage, as capital dominates absolutely and labour, indeed 99% of humanity, is commoditised.  And  as in Marx, such a society is inherently unstable, and carries the seeds of its  own inevitable destruction.  In this case the destruction is  apocalyptic.

 We see the world through the eyes of Jimmy, an apocalypse survivor, whose post-apocalypse name is “Snowman”.  He is also a figurehead leader of tribe he has named the Children of Crake.  The Children of Crake is a naive and unsophisticated group of survivors of (as yet) unknown provenance who look to him for their material and spiritual guidance, and whom he in turn manipulates, by getting them to provide him with basic foodstuffs and materials. Snowman lives mostly in a tree, because the landscape is populated with wild and dangerous genetically modified animals – for example Woolvogs, a deadly cross between wolves and dogs, and Pigoons, balloon shaped humanoid sentient pigs bred to host human transplant parts – all roaming free after humanity was pretty much wiped out.

 The story flips back and forth between pre and post “final destruction”, as we learn more about Snowman’s (aka Jimmy’s) previous existence. His mother who left home (and hence the corporate compound) because she refused to assimilate herself into the  commoditised world.  She was thus a revolutionary and a security risk, and eventually killed by the corporate security service, the CorpsSeCorps. His “corporate citizen”father’s new wife, the compliant Ramona. Jimmy’s relationship with Crake, his childhood friend, far more intellectually gifted than Jimmy, and eventually landing a place to study genetic research at the Watson Crick Institute, whilst Jimmy goes and studies humanities at the Martha Graham Academy.  Inevitably Crake’s ability takes him to a secretive and lucrative role in the field of genomics.  And finally there is the woman Oryx.  Loved by both Jimmy and Crake.  Lover of both Jimmy and Crake.  The tie that binds them and the force that splits them.  And the subject of Snowman’s woeful reminiscences.

Snowman eventually ventures out of the tree, driven by the need to find food. And as his scavenging treck unfolds, we slowly learn the devastating truth about how and  by whom the destruction of society was actually caused.  Compelling, to use the reviewer’s cliché. 

We get the feeling that Atwood is a pessimist about the capacity of a society dominated by the pursuit of self-interested profit to reach a long-term equilibrium that is both stable and morally good. And given the current debates around extreme income inequalities in our current financial-crisis ridden world, there is much food for thought here as to where that world is heading.  Surely though, history has taught us that there are in-built circuit
breaks that prevent society from lurching into extreme states of self-destruction ?

Here is the wikipedia link to the book

Ian Morris: Why the West Rules...For Now (2010)

My one-liner: Quite simply the best popular history book you will ever read.  Astounding survey of historical forces that have shaped today’s world.

At the top of the front cover of this book, there is the following quote from Niall Ferguson: “The nearest thing to a unified field theory of history we are ever likely to see”.  That is not far off the mark, and it would be impossible to do justice to the breathtaking breadth covered by this work in a short review.

There is much current debate the so-called catch-up of developing / emerging countries after several centuries of Western economic dominance.  The West’s relative decline, exacerbated by the financial crisis, is personified by the projected overtaking of the USA’s GDP by China some time in the next 10-40 years, depending on which research you read. And in the world of finance and investment, this translates into debates around upcoming fast economic growth in emerging markets being a driver for superior investment returns.  After a reading of Ian Morris’ book, that analysis seems less applicable as an appropriate framing for relative rise and decline.  Because it forces the reader to think in much longer time frames. And to ask himself some different questions.

The book is an astounding synthesis of biology, geography, geology and socio-economic history, that surveys the ascent of humanity from pre-historic times until today.  The style is both story and analysis.   From Monty Python’s Life of Brian to Voltaire’s Pangloss (“All is for the best in all possible worlds”) to Alexander Pope (of Newton: “Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid by night, God said Let Newton be ! And all was Light !) to Albert Einstein (“I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth – rocks”), there is enough literary, poetic, scientific and cultural commentary to keep any self-styled polymath reader happy. 

Some central themes of the thesis. 

The frame of reference is the evolution, over the last 16 millenia, of Morris’ Social Development Index.  You can quibble, if you want, with the construction and the components (energy capture, organisation / urbanisation, war-making, and information technology), but what it serves to do is impose a consistent development measure across all time periods for the relative development of the West and East. 

Throughout pre-history and history the index has swung in favour of either East or West for many centuries at a time. Geography (“maps”) and human progress (“chaps”) variously define which region takes the lead.  Progress, is in Morris’ self-confessedly pithy theorem, “made by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things.” The analysis thus looks to dismiss the notion that there is somehow a hard-wired ethnic or geographical lock-in of development capability for any one region. 

The first sustained decline in social development in both West and East, began around 100CE and there was another one around 1000CE, as both regions hit what Morris refers to as a “hard ceiling”.  Both periods were characterised, in Morris’ analysis by the prevalence, using the biblical analogy, of the “Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse”, namely climate change, famine, state failure, migration, and disease.  The West spent most of the period from 1400 to 1800 CE catching up with the East, ending a 1200-year year reign of Eastern supremacy, and crucially, resulting in both regions breaking through the previous 1000CE hard ceiling. The last two hundred years ? We know the story. An unprecedented, acceleration in development for both regions, but a clear advantage to the West (the opening of the Atlantic trade route, the industrial revolution, European military power etc, etc), with its roots in an ex-ante highly probable chain of history stretching back to the twelfth century .

The surprising end to the book is less about whether China will now regain its superiority, although the projection is that it will, around 2103 at the latest, and we all kind of know that. With a further massive acceleration (from an index score of 900 to 4000) for both regions as new technologies and globalisation unlock development.  This “Singularity” is borrowed from futurist Ray Kurzweil. It is “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep…that technology appears to be expanding at infinite speed.”

The more ominous question is whether the world will instead enter a period of “Nightfall” (last flirted with in the Younger Dryas ice age period around 10,800BC), using the title of the novel by Isaac Asimov.  Not only will the world hit another hard ceiling, but, like any crash after a big bubble, the next crash of humanity will be utterly destructive. Are the “Five Horsemen” amongst us again, as climate change threatens and the free transfer of technology increases the chance that devastating and dangerous technology can end up in the wrong hands ? Morris concludes that there will be no halfway house, no “silver medal”.  Only one of Singularity or Nightfall will prevail.

Here is the wikipedia link for the book.