There was a really good twist half way through which I didn’t see coming and which caused me to want to keep reading this all the more – I ended up reading most of this book in one sitting.

Plus, Oryx and Crake, while somewhat less celebrated, is just as good, a frighteningly plausible world destroyed by our relentless pursuit for happiness in a bottle. Despite the mist’s cocoon and the untroubled sea and our quiet voices, my insides were shifting like molten lava, and my stomach heaved with that same repeated reality: I had been separated from my children, and the best I could hope for was that it was only by a mere ocean. Fear and chaos reign, as Evan Whitesky, father of two, looks to the past, to tradition, to try to rebuild his community’s future.

Like all the best apocalyptic fiction, this is actually a book about human connection—the fact that it’s also a cool, queer rock and roll novel is just a bonus.

And because the style is so fun and banter-ish, it can be hard to tell whether each howler is a real mistake, an intentional oversimplification for entertainment purposes, or simply a joke. This past year, a ton of people have been asking me to review Peter Zeihan’s The End of the World is Just the Beginning . It’s written in a breezy, conversational style somewhat reminiscent of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens — Zeihan throws out a stream of big, dramatic, simple assertions about how the world works, one after another (though he does it with more levity than Harari). There are interesting characters and subplots, but none are allowed to develop over and above the narrator’s presence.

The collective behind it embodies the very politics necessary to win a just transition that is worthy of the name: Indigenous-led, internationalist, rooted in solidarity, and crackling with moral clarity. Falsities and insights abound, though if you are wary of the beauty of men's thighs and all that entails, this might not be for you. It begins, of course, with a brilliant scientist and a sentient computer program, Archos, which kills its creator and decides that its purpose for being is to save the planet from the human race. It’s very high quality compared to most other books in the LitRPG (and sometimes cultivation) genre. It all starts in a lab, in which a virus meant to create super soldiers actually creates a plague of monsters—93 years later, the humans left huddle in colonies, hiding from the hunters outside the walls.

We often think of the apocalypse as something that happens to everybody at the same time—but what about those in remote locales that remain untouched at the beginning?

He goes back in time to the start and remembers every little detail of everything and everyone alive. The Strawberry Post is unfortunately not responsible for the amount of ads currently running on this site and apologises for any inconvenience this causes visitors. The focus seemed to be on a few set pieces instead of the characters and their actions felt pretty random. With her children stolen from her and their safe passage across the Atlantic dissolving into a disaster of Titanic proportions, Beth sets out on a brutal, treacherous journey to rescue the two most important people in her life. A lot of the value in global trade is moving to "soft" goods (SW, entertainment) and "medium" goods (sophisticated machinery).

The book’s on-the-ground reporting from out-of-the-way places across India and Pakistan is outstanding. I enjoy the author's other books, but this one would have worked much better as a straight cultivation story instead of a resurrection story.

That sort of technological substitution is commonplace , but Zeihan often talks as if the current way we do things is the only way we ever could. It’s been long enough, though, for there to be a second generation of hungries: children who are preternaturally smart, absurdly strong, and capable (maybe) of human empathy. The End of This World makes clear that, in addition to being a crisis of political, economic, and ecological dimensions, Global North-spurred climate change also represents a relational crisis, one in which the bonds between communities — and between humans and other living organisms, including land — have been forcefully and intentionally severed. A zombie novel for people who don’t read zombie novels and a literary novel for people who don’t read literary novels. It is sometimes awesome and sometimes boring; jury’s still out on whether it really works as a novel, but it absolutely gets points for influence.