The Human Comedy After the Apocalypse

If you have been waiting for a sequel to Dan Brown’s Inferno. Here it is (Unauthorized). World Health Organization Director Elizabeth Sinskey chairs a contentious meeting in Geneva. Many of the meeting attendees believe that Dr. Bertrand Zobrist’s attempt to solve the globe’s overpopulation problem is doomed to failure as are all other attempts to solve the myriad of enormous problems facing human civilization on Planet Earth. Environmental degradation, loss of bio diversity, climate change, and depletion of natural resources are all getting worse as the Earth heads towards disaster. The problem is that it is impossible to get the Earth's governments, institutions, and people to agree on and implement a concerted effort to solve any of these problems, and it is impossible to adequately plan and implement any complex solutions because of the huge number of unforeseeable consequences and implications of any action or set of actions. They agree that there is an inexorable march towards the collapse of human civilization, or in other words, the Apocalypse. So they come up with a contingency plan called the New Way for how to do it right the next time, after the Apocalypse, assuming there is a remnant of human population left to have another go.

Then the apocalypse ensues, which takes about 200 years to play out. During this time a group of Monks remain hidden, working on preserving the vast amount of human knowledge, as well as working on improvements to the New Way plan. They emerge to find groups of humans living as hunter gatherers. The Monks work with the remnant humans and attempt to implement the New Way for humans to live sustainably on the planet and for the species to evolve and prosper. Does it work? Is it possible? The book explores these questions following the Monks and remnants in their quest.

-- Douglas Olson