Hi I’m writing a series called Until This Last.
The title Unto This Last is taken from an essay and book on economy by John Ruskin, first published between August and December 1860. The book greatly influenced the nonviolent activist Mohandas Ghandi.
The first book was published in 2017 by Double Dragon Publishing available on Amazon. https://theburningyears.squarespace.com
I recommend you read it — well researched and believable!
I am watching this pandemic unfold and working on Book 3 in the series with my editor. I first wrote the quote below from this book over a year ago. As a science fiction writer I’m always hypothesizing about the future — even I have to say this passage caught me off guard when I read it today.
Gabriel has moved North, as he discussed he would with Sophia a few months ago, to Alaska and to a community established there on land located just above the Beiring Straights. It is an old community and had come into being after another highly artificially bio-engineered, communicable influenza virus had spread like wildfire around the world in 2045. This virus was like the Spanish flu that affected 500 million people across the world. However unlike that flu which resulted in the death of 50 to 100 million (three to five percent of the world’s population) this pandemic wiped out close to six billion people (80 percent of the world’s population) many of whom had already been severely weakened by famine, one of the more drastic effects of climate change on human populations. Indeed, many of Gabriel’s cohorts, including his group of friends, thought that in the end, this fast spreading virus had been the only thing that had saved the planet from complete anthropocene annihilation and also saved human civilization.
In fact after the 2045 pandemic, carbon emissions fell by almost 100 percent and it was this involuntary cut that had slowed down the rate of climate change to 4 degrees Celsius. A final blow however had come as huge volcanic eruptions occurred under the North Atlantic in 2075, releasing trapped methane in one giant rush that then pushed a global temperature rise that had just started to stabilize at 4 degrees Celsius, to close to 5 degrees Celsius in just a few months.
I hope to publish the whole series of four books in a couple of years as a complete set with a publisher of choice — either double dragon or some other publisher.
I am afraid to say that much of what I am writing is coming true. There will be many more pandemics, States will close their borders and worst of all repressive, totalitarian governments will come to be as a result of the fragility of our world.
In my books I examine closely what I believe to be true, we have taken a wrong turn as a civilization, and until we put that right we’re definitely on the path to extinction. I think we are a kind of free-will thought experiment within a cosmic framework which has gone horribly wrong.
I do put forward hope in the series but it comes at huge expense of many, mostly the poor, uneducated and indigent. I cross all thought boundaries — ancient history including possible ET civilizations which gave rise to Sumer in our distant past, demystifying religious mythology, examining the ethics of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, examining the rise of plutocracy and totalitarian governments, the paranormal as it relates to quantum physics, quantum physics and how it proves there is a complicated cosmic structure and intelligence behind the reality we experience through our own observations, consciousness and what it means to be human within the entirety of this complex cosmic structure.
All of these ideas have been explored within the framework of a series of novels that have a believable plot and relatable characters. It’s been a tremendous writing challenge and it’s taken me six years so far. I have one more book in mind which will allow me to world build a bit more many years into our future and examine how I think we’ll evolve.
