Big news
Friends, I’m so excited to tell you that I sold my book proposal, and I’m officially writing my first book! It’s tentatively titled Apocalypse: Rediscovering Our Past and Surviving Our Future, and it’s about, um, all of human history. No big deal! More to the point, it reframes the human story as being a series of crises and cataclysms, rather than the narrative of inevitable progress and improvement most of us are taught. Those apocalypses are, above all, moments of transformation and resilience, the end of one world and the beginning of another, which one day will end in turn. Learning to think about our past as contingent, uncertain, unpredictable, and never, ever perfect is, I think, a vital first step to realizing how fragile our present and future are—and, therefore, how much power we have to built the world we want out of the ruins of all the worlds that came before.
The book stretches all the way from the extinction of other human species to the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing colonization of the Americas, and will end, of course, with a consideration of what we are living through now and what is still to come. When I started writing the proposal back in 2018, I knew it would be relevant, but not quite this relevant. Part of me wishes I were a faster thinker and writer, and that I were announcing the publication of Apocalypse into this viscerally apocalyptic moment. A bigger part of me knows that I will write an infinitely better book for having experienced what we are all going through now.
I’m deep in researching and writing about Neanderthals and Denisovans and the rest of our vanished cousins, and I have to say, 40,000 years ago is a pretty good place to be spending a lot imaginative time at the moment. I’m sure I’ll be writing quite a bit about the book writing process itself here, as well as developing some of my apocalypse ideas. You’ll be the first to know about pre-orders, publication dates, and all the rest. In the meantime, you can read the Publisher’s Weekly announcement here.