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Chuck Litka recommends this book. And he’s a tough grader, so when he gives something an “A”, I pay attention. Not to mention that this series is compared to works by Wodehouse, Austen, and the like. So, even though it is more well known than what I normally read, I decided to give it a try.

The story is told in the form of diary entries by the young woman named in the title. She has moved to a cramped garret at a place called Lapis Lazuli House, which she technically owns, but which is managed by her guardian Mr. Archibald Flat. The mutual detestation between them forms the core conflict of the book, but there are other little subplots, like Ms. Lion’s attempts to read Paradise Lost, her aunt’s plans for her social future, a local vicar with a gift for oratory, and so on.

And then there is The Roman. Probably my favorite aspect of the story is the mysterious ghost of a Roman soldier who is rumored to appear from time. He is not seen much, but we hear reports of him occasionally. Why is he there? What does he want? Does he even really exist? It’s these kind of little mysteries that make a book fun for me. Chuck has talked about this at some length in this post, which I highly encourage you to read. It was actually this post that motivated me to give the Emma M. Lion books a try; I love the use of “negative space” like this. The best parts of a story are the ones the readers have to work out for themselves.

Which reminds me, I should talk about the setting of the story a bit. It appears to be Victorian England, but there are certain fantastic or magical elements to it that make it not quite straight-up historical fiction. For example, the neighborhood Ms. Lion lives in has a peculiar reputation for objects simply vanishing and reappearing somewhere else later. Why? We know not. Again, the empty space that we fill with our imaginations.

This is catnip to me. I don’t want to know everything about a setting. I don’t want to know everybody’s origin story. I like to have some unexplained things to ponder.

But what really makes it fun is the writing. It’s not quite Wodehouse, but what is? It is clever, witty, and, with a few minor exceptions, plausible as writing from the 19th century. (The exceptions are things like, I think she would probably refer to the famous scientist as “Mr. Darwin” rather than just “Darwin.” And I can’t recall ever seeing Victorians use the word “gifted” to mean giving someone a gift.)

In summary, Chuck was entirely right about this book, and I am glad I read it. Any fan of classic English literature should read it. And even if your tastes run more towards the modern, it’s still enjoyable. It manages to keep the stately pace of an older novel while still having enough going on that readers accustomed to the speed of modern books won’t lose interest. It’s a gem.

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Make yourself comfortable. This will not be quick.

Sometimes you’ll see people wringing their hands about why kids don’t read anymore. This is funny, because, as Leonard Cohen might say, “everybody knows” why kids don’t read anymore. It is because they are watching videos on their phones. Is anyone going to do anything about that? No, of course not! The level of political willpower that would require would make even Thomas Hobbes tremble with fear. So everyone goes on hand-wringing and watching videos on their phones and chaque jour vers l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas.

But it was not always thus! Once upon a time, children read and delighted in reading. One of the most beloved children’s books of its time was this slender volume, a memoir by Sterling North about his 12th year of life, in 1918, in the state of Wisconsin. One day while playing in the woods, he and his friend startle a nest of raccoons, and recover one of the little masked creatures from their den. Sterling brings the cub home and names him “Rascal.”

What follows is a catalog of Sterling and Rascal’s adventures over the year, from Sterling discovering his little raccoon’s taste for strawberry soda to an amusing incident, unimaginable today, where he brings Rascal to school for show-and-tell.

Interwoven with this are other aspects of a childhood in early 20th-century America, such as Sterling’s ongoing project of building a canoe, town fairs, and similar slices of Americana. If it all sounds idyllic, well, there’s also a dark side which Sterling does not shy away from. Whether from his lingering grief over the death of his mother, which occurred when he was only seven years old, or his fear for his older brother Herschel, who is overseas fighting in World War I, the dangers of the world are in no way sugarcoated.

Yet for all that, it is indeed “a memoir of a better era.” How better of an era was it? The farmers of rural Wisconsin actually ate “second breakfast.” No kidding, down to that detail, it really is like reading an account of some vanished Tolkienesque shire, with the dark threats of mechanical death looming only as vague storm clouds on the horizon. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Now, this is a children’s book, so you can’t expect the prose to be too–

Somewhere it must all be recorded, as insects are captured in amber–that day on the river: transcribed in Brule’s water, written on the autumn air, safe at least in my memory.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s actually gorgeous. They used to write books for kids that didn’t condescend to them.

Also memorable are the other residents of Sterling’s town, like Garth Shadwick, the irascible but good-natured harness maker who makes a leash for Rascal. Mr. Shadwick sees his livelihood threatened by a new technology, which he describes thus:

“It’s these gol-danged automobiles, smelly, noisy, dirty things, scaring horses right off the road… ruin a man’s business.”

We’ve been trained to dismiss the destruction of whole professions by the rise of technology as a normal and even beneficial part of life. Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” at work. And it is that, of course, but well might we ask: “What is being destroyed? And what is being created?”

For example, when Sterling and Rascal listen to a record of “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding,” young Sterling asks his father if there are nightingales or other night-birds:

“‘Not nightingales,” he said, “but we do have whippoorwills, of course.”

‘I’ve never heard a whippoorwill.”

“Can that be possible? Why, when I was a boy…” 

And he was off on a pilgrimage into the past when Wisconsin was still half wilderness, when panthers sometimes looked in through the windows , and the whippoorwills called all night long.”

This is where the subtitle of the book really comes into focus. It has a melancholy tone, a wistfulness for an era before the nation was connected by highways and telephones, when it was still wild and natural.

And here is Sterling’s account of armistice day, a week after his 12th birthday:

On the morning of November 11, 1918, the real Armistice was signed in a railroad car in France. Although men were killed up to the final hour, the cease-fire came at last and a sudden silence fell over the batteries and trenches and graveyards of Europe. The world was now ‘safe for Democracy.’ Tyranny had been vanquished forever. ‘The war to end war’ had been won, and there would never be another conflict. Or so we believed in that far-off and innocent time…

During the afternoon, my elation slowly subsided, and I began oiling my muskrat traps for the season ahead. Rascal was always interested in whatever I was doing. But when he came to sniff and feel the traps, a terrible thought slowed my fingers. Putting my traps aside, I opened one of the catalogues sent to trappers by the St. Louis fur buyers. There, in full color, on the very first page was a handsome raccoon, his paw caught in a powerful trap.

How could anyone mutilate the sensitive, questing hands of an animal like Rascal? I picked up my raccoon and hugged him in a passion of remorse. 

I burned my fur catalogues in the furnace and hung my traps in the loft of the barn, never to use them again. 

Men had stopped killing other men in France that day; and on that day I signed a permanent peace treaty with the animals and the birds. It is perhaps the only peace treaty that was ever kept.

And you have to understand; this wasn’t just idle “virtue signaling” by Sterling. He actually made money from his muskrat trapping, so he was truly giving up something for his principles. A lost art, these days.

Maybe you think Sterling North is too much of a bleeding-heart environmentalist. Maybe you’d say the same thing about Tolkien. All I know is, the world they inhabited appears to have been full of earnest, hardworking, and resilient people. They were not angels—Sterling records multiple run-ins with bullies of all ages—but for the most part, they were people who appreciated what they had and helped their neighbors.

Reading this book, sharing in Sterling’s triumphs and tragedies, his gentle wit, his love for nature, and above all, his fond memories of his masked friend, makes you nostalgic for a time you never lived in. And more to the point, it makes you look around at the world of today and wonder what happened. True, we are materially vastly richer, our GDP infinitely higher. Quite literally, because GDP did not exist as a metric in 1918.

And yet, are we better off? Sure, you tell me over and over and over again, my friend, that all the statistics say so. Still…

Maybe I am just a cynical misanthrope, constantly longing for a mythical better time that doesn’t exist. Maybe everything is running smoothly. Maybe since at least the Enlightenment, humanity has been steadily progressing, with occasional interruptions but never true retrograde motion, towards a better future. Call this Theory A. “A” can stand for “Accepted by the majority of people,” which probably means it’s true. And again, our standard metrics support this view.

There is, however, another interpretation. Call it Theory Ω.

Theory Ω agrees that technology has certainly been improving over the last 400 years. So when the Theory A’ers make technological progress synonymous with happiness, they are assuredly correct. But if we posit that there is actually an inverse relationship between the quality of human spirit and technology, a different picture emerges. A picture of technology relentlessly eating the world.

Sterling North probably did not know how to build his brand through social media. He was not even proficient with the Microsoft Office suite. But he could make a canoe, scale a cliff, catch a fish, raise a raccoon, ride a bike, write a book, read a book, make a muskrat trap, build a fence, climb a tree, fight a bully, have his heart broken and recover from it. Don’t know if he could conn a ship or plan an invasion, but hey, he was only 11.

Compare this with the 11-year-old nephew of a friend of mine, who, I am told, cries when he receives minor scrapes, can barely read a paragraph, and spends all his free time watching something called skibidi videos.

Theory A has nothing to say about these facts whatsoever. But they are exactly in line with Theory Ω’s predictions.

Under Theory Ω, technology has been steadily improving the ease of life while simultaneously destroying the quality of human capital.

A proponent of Theory Ω might add that material wealth, GDP, ease and comfort are all forms of happiness defined using a Benthamite concept of utility. A certain controversial German philosopher had very unkind things to say about this mode of “English happiness,” believing that only through struggle and hardship could one truly achieve a meaningful form of joy.

In the end, everything has a cost which must be paid in order to get it. Our world of comfort, ease, and plenty must be paid for with a commensurate loss of resilience, nobility of spirit, and strength of character. Let me be quite clear: I am in no way as good a human being as Sterling North was. I am thoroughly a product of the techno-decadent fin de millénaire culture. Even when I went camping, which wasn’t often, I had my Game Boy.

But, to quote Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue: “A gentleman stood for something. It wasn’t what he was. It was what he knew he ought to be.” All my complaining, grousing, griping and rhetorical fruit-flinging comes to this: that people my age are unhappy because we know we ought to be something better than we are, but we were robbed of that chance. Robbed by the very labor-saving technology that was supposed to make the modern world such a wonderful place.

In this way, Sterling North’s memoir is more than just a picturesque tale of a beloved childhood pet, and more even than a heartwarming story of growing up and the necessary emotional pain that goes along with it. It is both a warning and symbol of hope; a warning of how much we can lose, and a symbol of what essential qualities of humanity we should fight to preserve.

I rant like this because, like Nietzsche, I believe that struggle builds character, and if you have to struggle to read my posts, it’s better for you in the long run. (A.I. assistant’s suggestions be damned.) But even if you think my ideas are misguided and wrong, I hope you will still give Rascal a try. It’s a beautiful story that has touched the hearts of generations and spans national and cultural divides: in the 1970s, it was the basis for a very popular animated series in Japan, the charming opening of which you can see here. (And here is a website dedicated to the history of Rascal in Japanese culture.)

I said at the outset of this post that it would take an unfathomable degree of political will to get people to put down the gol-danged cell phones and live their lives. But in my more optimistic moods, I wonder if all it takes is to recall the advice of the Duke of Urbino, when asked what was the essential quality of a great leader: “Essere umano,” he answered: “To be human.”

If so, it’s worth mentioning that Sterling North wrote another book, Raccoons are the Brightest People, wherein he says the following:

Those who play God in destroying any form of life are tampering with a master plan too intricate for any of us to understand. All that we can do is to aid that great plan and to keep part of our planet habitable.

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What do you think of when you think of Lynda Carter and music? I bet you either think of her performance as the lounge singer in Fallout 4, or else “All the world is counting on you / And the power you possess…”

But near the end of her time as the Princess of Paradise Island, she released her first album, Portrait, which I have listened to many times. (Unlike my friend Mark Paxson, I have never really gotten used to using Spotify, so I have no precise stats on how many times I’ve listened to it. But it’s a lot.)

Now, I might as well get this out of the way up front: I don’t consider this a great album. To explain my usual criteria: I like songs that have interesting lyrics, evoke strong moods, and tell a coherent story. Warren Zevon, Leonard Cohen, and Richard Thompson are my go-to artists for that sort of thing. For a specific example, see the last album that I wrote about at length, Zevon’s Transverse City. That was a heavy concept album, pulsing and growling with ominous themes of a dystopian cyberpunk future, narrated with acid wit.

You’ll find none of that on Portrait, which is pretty much one ephemeral, bubblegummily sweet and unmemorable pop love song after another. On the other hand, I think we can all agree the cover art is much easier on the eyes than the garish neon punk horror of Transverse City:

But, if the album is such a thoroughgoing exercise in banality, why am I writing a blog post about it? Well, to be honest with you, I’m trying to solve a mystery. Namely, since it’s so trite and unremarkable, how come I have listened to it so much?

There’s no denying that Ms. Carter’s voice is very pleasant. But there are plenty of female singers whose voices I enjoy: Sheena Easton, Feist, Bonnie Tyler—but I have never listened to an entire album by any of them. And for beauty of voice combined with intelligence of lyrics, give me Pamela Field or Julia Goss singing Gilbert & Sullivan over any of them. And yet…!

Why is this album the one I listen to, on repeat, of a rainy evening, while sipping my tea and looking out over the sea, waiting for my lost love to return? (Okay, I made that last part up. I sometimes confuse old episodes of Pokémon with my own memories.)

There is actually one original song on the album which I feel rises above the level of generic pop ballad: “Tumbledown Love,” which takes some care with the imagery and the atmosphere and, I think, flows back and forth between different moods. It’s sad, and it’s sweet… but I never knew it complete, because to be quite honest, I can’t manage to make out all the words.

Speaking of Billy Joel, probably my least-favorite track on this album is the cover “She’s Always a Woman.” I don’t like the original, and changing the refrain to “she’s only a woman like me” makes no sense at all. At least it is musically pleasant.

If “Tumbledown” is the best track and “Always a Woman” the worst, then we can safely say this album has a low variance. In fact, if you told me the title of one track at random other than the two previously mentioned, it would take me a minute to think of which song it was. They all sort of blend together. And not in the way that the songs on Transverse City all touch on a certain theme, but in a mushy, slurry way, consistent with the original meaning of the word “pablum.”

That sounds negative, but I don’t mean it as such. Like Reginald Bunthorne’s groupies, I say, “nonsense, yes, perhaps – but oh, what precious nonsense!” Trust me, I have heard songs that are truly insufferably saccharine. Even some of my favorite artists have been guilty of these. And when I come across such a song, I simply do not listen to it. I have not quite so thoroughly transformed into Ignatius J. Reilly that I purposely seek out art that I hate.

But, good news! I think I’ve figured out the appeal of this album for me. The answer was foreshadowed in the first paragraph, when I alluded to Lynda Carter’s appearance in Fallout as a lounge singer in an apocalyptic wasteland. I realize I listen to Portrait in the same frame of mind: coming in from the desolation of the wider world, I seek refuge in listening to the pleasantly forgettable strains of her songs. It is probably not a coincidence that I often pair listening to Portrait with distant artillery ambience videos. I find this strangely soothing; as if I’m in an officer’s bar, not actually at the front, but still aware that it’s out there.

Or something. I dunno; it’s a guess. Give it a try yourself and make up your own mind. There are certainly much worse things you could listen to.

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What’s your favorite genre of book? Some people like thrillers, some prefer romance. I know people who love a good cozy mystery and others who enjoy bleak horror. Some are sworn to a specific genre, like high fantasy or sci-fi, others would rather take in a good old slice-of-life narrative from that vast and varied garden of delights broadly dubbed “literary fiction.” Others may still take pleasure in the boy-wizards and sparkling vampire literature of their youth. Well—there is no judgment here.

What’s my favorite genre of book? How nice of you to ask! (You did ask, didn’t you? Of course you did!) Personally, while I have enjoyed books of many and sundry types, I would have to say that my favorite is the kind of book that has multiple layers of meaning to it which must peeled back slowly, like a really thick onion, until at last the different dimensions of the story leave me with a blurred sense of the line between fiction and reality itself.

Of course, it’s hard to fit all that on a sign in Barnes & Noble, so I generally find works of my favorite genre quite by accident. And so much the better; the unexpected nature of finding one makes it more fun.

I am glad to report that the book we discuss today is just such a tale! It is actually a book-within-a-book. It’s best if I start from the inside and work my way out, so we’ll begin by examining the inner book, which is a pulp sci-fi adventure set in a post-apocalyptic world infested by mutants, the result of a great nuclear war.

Into this dystopia steps Feric Jaggar, a man driven by a desire to save non-contaminated humanity from annihilation by the mutant hordes and the monstrous telepathic creatures controlling them, the “Dominators” or “Doms” for short; monstrous, deceptive beings from the evil empire of Zind.

Jaggar relentlessly works his way into the leadership of the human-controlled country of Heldon, most dramatically by winning the right to wield the “Steel Commander”, a fabled ancient weapon only worthy of the greatest of men according to legend. Like Mjölnir, in other words. He wins control of it during a fiery initiation rite into a motorcycle gang known as the Black Avengers. After his victory, Jaggar changes their name and sweeps to control of Heldon, winning the respect of all true humans and the fear of the mutants in the process.

Once in command of the human nation, he quickly raises an army and mounts a furious attack on the Empire of Zind, himself at the helm, fighting tremendous battles against innumerable hordes of monsters.

The battle scenes in this book are bound to be polarizing. Some may find them tedious and repetitive. Personally, I thought they were enjoyable in a campy sort of way. The prose is absurdly overwrought, and probably sets the record for most uses of the word “protoplasm” in a work of fiction. However, it’s also nothing that won’t feel familiar to a regular reader of Lovecraft. HPL rarely wrote extended battle scenes, but if he had, they would read like this.

Jaggar’s quest sends him hurtling from one cataclysmic battle to the next, each time proclaiming, in gloriously hyperbolic terms, how this one is really the great, finally struggle for the future of the universe. Okay, now that’s done with. Oh, but wait! Seriously, now, this one is the big one. Really, no kidding, this is for all the marbles…

It’s so over-the-top it’s almost funny, and indeed, on its own, it works as a fast-paced, violent sci-fi epic. If this appeals to you, I encourage you to stop reading this review right now and go pick up the book. You can come back after you’ve finished reading it. Get the Kindle version, because it automatically skips the introduction, which is an excellent thing. Much like listeners in the 1930s missed the intro to Orson Welles’ adaptation of War of the Worlds, and thought they were hearing a live news report of an alien invasion, this is one where it’s best to get the full context later.

From this point forward, I’m going to assume you have either read the book or are never going to, so from here on out spoilers will abound. Think carefully before proceeding.

To begin with, the book-within-the-book is titled “Lord of the Swastika.” Also, the cover above is the one for the Kindle edition. I opted to use it instead of the more colorful, but also more shocking, paperback edition or the appropriately pulpy first edition as seen on Wikipedia. (There are many different covers; this one is probably the best.)

You see, the framing device for this story is that it’s an alternate universe in which, after briefly dabbling in politics, Adolf Hitler emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, and made a career as a sci-fi pulp novelist and illustrator, with “Lord of the Swastika” being his most popular book.

I left out some important details in my plot summary above. The motorcycle gang Jaggar takes over is renamed the “Sons of the Swastika,” or “SS” for short. They wear black uniforms with red swastika armbands, hold torchlight parades, and chant “Hail Jaggar!” at every opportunity.

Also, except for the ending, the entire career of Jaggar is beat-for-beat a thinly-veiled retelling of Hitler’s actual biography, from his elimination of the old gang leader once he’s outlived his usefulness to invading the Zind empire to seize their oil fields.

Of course, in this alternative history, none of that actually happened, and Hitler was just another eccentric writer alongside Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Heinlein, and perhaps most pointedly, L. Ron Hubbard.

This is brought home in the afterword, by fictional critic “Homer Whipple,” who proceeds to deconstruct “Lord of the Swastika,” and in so doing reveals more facts about this alternate world, most significantly that, by 1959, the Soviet Union has conquered most of the planet except for the USA and Japan.

Whipple harshly critiques the novel’s poor writing and ridiculously simplistic characters, before turning to a Freudian analysis of the imagery the author chose, as well as adding a few words about what this suggests about the man’s psyche. This Hitler, he ultimately concludes, was a deeply disturbed individual, and it’s lucky that he only channeled his unhealthy desires and fixations into his fiction. Whipple figuratively shakes his head at the idea of such a psychologically abnormal man actually leading a political movement.

Okay, so… what exactly are we to make of all this? We’ve got our book-within-the-book, we’ve got the (apparently dystopian) “real” world, and a fictional literary critic telling us why the book we just read is not very good and in fact kind of disturbing. What does it all add up to?

Well, let’s back up yet another level in this weird metafictional matryoshka, and think about what the actual author, Norman Spinrad, was trying to do here.

To some degree of course, it’s a satire of Nazism. But that’s not really the main goal. After all, mocking Hitler in, say, 1936 took a lot of courage; mocking him in 1972 took rather less. No, Spinrad is after something else.

I think he had in mind two targets: the first is pulp science-fiction generally. With relative ease, he spins a perfectly serviceable sci-fi yarn that also happens to function as Nazi propaganda. Which has to be disquieting to any fan of sci-fi. Some of the messianic speeches Feric Jaggar gives feel not too far off from stuff Paul Atreides says in Dune . (Somewhere in there I’m sure there’s a line about Paul’s awakening race consciousness. I remember thinking it odd at the time.)

Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not saying Dune is veiled Nazi propaganda. If you go beyond the first book, that series is itself also clearly intended as a criticism of messianic political movements. At the same time, almost everyone who goes beyond the first Dune book agrees that the subsequent books are boring and weird, whereas the first (and most Nazi-ish, or at least fascistic) one is a rollicking adventure. Is this more than just a coincidence?

Well… not when we remember that history did not start in the 1930s. The deficiencies in our system of historical education have led several generations to forget this fact, but in reality, the Nazi movement, despite its overall reactionary character, was in certain respects unusually modern in its technique.

By that, I mean they liked to use what Peggy Noonan once called “political bullshit about narratives.” (Every time someone says “narrative” in a political context, I think of this quote.) The idea of a legendary hero on a quest to save the nation is obviously way older than Nazism. The Nazi propaganda department was extremely adept at casting Hitler into this role, but the role had been written in the minds of the population literally millennia before. Again, the Kwisatz Haderach vibes!

Basically, Nazi propaganda and popular sci-fi were both drawing from the same well of ancient folkloric patterns encoded deeply in human memory to craft their respective stories. So, don’t worry too much that liking old school sci-fi adventure means you are secretly a Nazi. Just be careful about joining any cult-like political movements. I have developed this one weird trick to make sure I don’t do that on accident, which is to never join anything. Cultists hate me!

Speaking of cults, this brings me to Spinrad’s second target, which is much more speculative on my part, but I think I’ve got a sound case.

I mentioned above that the fictionalized Hitler of this book would have been a contemporary of L. Ron Hubbard, who, in addition to founding the Church of Scientology, was a pulp sci-fi author, and achieved some notable success with his fiction.

Spinrad, who in other works criticized Scientology in much less veiled terms, seems here to be suggesting that a man who achieved cult success as an author of sci-fi might be able to start another, much more dangerous movement. Beware of eccentric sci-fi authors, The Iron Dream implies; you never know what else they might be capable of doing.

Of course, this subtle satirical intent was almost certainly lost on most readers, especially in the pre-internet days. As sometimes happens with satirical works, here the author may have succeeded too well in imitating his intended target, to the point where it actually serves the very goal it is supposed to be undermining. As in, some neo-Nazi groups actually endorsed The Iron Dream, despite Spinrad’s best efforts to prevent this misreading. Let this be a caution to all writers who try to get cute and insert subtle messages into their texts; sometimes the readers are just gonna read it how they want to read it.

Most people read a book once, get a vague idea of the gist, and then move on. It takes a special kind of nutcase to, for example, spend almost 2,000 words analyzing the hidden depths and meanings of a book from more than 50 years ago. But hey, that’s why we have to “let a hundred flowers bloom,” right?

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One of my favorite songs for background listening is Hildegard von Blingin”s bardcore rendition of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” with lyrics rewritten to fit the medieval period. It’s this sort of thing that helps history come alive. Just as Joel wrote the original song to explain to some kid that the 1950s and ’60s weren’t exactly a settled time, so this version reminds us that the Middle Ages were a tumultuous era that must have seemed absolutely insane to anyone alive during it.

The point is, every era in recorded history seems terrifyingly apocalyptic to those living though it. Indeed, the history of the world can practically be told as the story of people expecting its imminent annihilation. This brings me to the book with which we are concerned today, which is described as follows: “a cross-cultural and cross-temporal study of models of history considered as a class of story. The book tries to do for doomsday what The Hero with a Thousand Faces did for the myth of the hero.”

Reilly begins his survey with the cyclical interpretations of history: the pessimistic German reactionary Oswald Spengler and the comparatively sunny and hopeful Arnold J. Toynbee. From there, he hops down a number of esoteric rabbit holes, examining apocalyptic cults from Münster to Jonestown, various interpretations of the Book of Revelation, and the Aztec conception of the end of the world, all sprinkled with liberal references and comparisons to works of science fiction, both famous and obscure.

If it all sounds a little rambling, well, that’s because it is. Fortunately, Reilly is a cheerful and good-natured narrator, who never takes himself or his subject too seriously. His witty style makes his treatment of what could have been a bleak subject charming to read:

The embarrassing thing about the history in the Bible is that it is all too familiar. There are stupid kings, sneaky women, ungovernable cities, debt-ridden farmers, and a very lively sense that life is intractably irritating. Even God is sometimes unreasonable. He sends bears to eat obnoxious children and a plague to punish a census taking.

He has a way of cutting through the cruft and making the complex and arcane seem straightforward:

It does not take a lot to destroy a civilization. All you have to do is stop making long-term investments, neglect to repair physical plant, and generally stop thinking about the next generation. All these things happened in late antiquity. The terminal apocalypse in the Roman Empire did not provide a framework for millenarian revolt. How can you fight City Hall when it closed years ago?

And his descriptions of people are no less entertaining. For instance, re. Oswald Spengler:

He was the sort of person who could not walk around the corner to buy a paper without seeing signs of cultural decay.

Guys like that are so annoying, right? 😉

Reilly’s style makes the book a breeze to read, even as he is tackling the most weighty of subjects. Another advantage of his easygoing style is that it gives a sense of neutrality. Despite his tackling political philosophies, I can’t really say with certainty whether he leans left or right. And despite some fairly deep dives into esoteric Jewish and Christian theology, from his attitude, he could have been Christian, Jewish, something else, or atheist. (I know the answer now, from reading the “About the Author” section afterward, but there was nothing definite in the main text.)

The most interesting parts of the book come close to the end, as Reilly examines the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit scholar who developed the concept of the noösphere. What’s that, you ask? Well, that’s why we have Wikipedia:

[T]he noosphere emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the Earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This concept extends Teilhard’s Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Teilhard argued the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point – an apex of thought/consciousness – which he saw as the goal of history.

Reilly is quick to point out the remarkable similarity of this concept to the central idea of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, and given how prescient that book was regarding other developments… well, it gives one pause, to say the least. Even Reilly’s considerable sang-froid seems a little shaken when confronting the implications of this.

Still, Teilhard’s ideas are only one of innumerable conceptions about how the world will end. And as Reilly reminds us, there are many different ways to even define what “world-ending” means. As he notes, for the Aztecs, the world effectively did end in the 1500s, much as their own religious beliefs suggested it would. For them, it was the apocalypse. For the Spanish, it was the Golden Age. It’s all relative, man!

A final question to ponder before we wrap this up: as Reilly demonstrates, most cultures and religions have the idea that the world will end. When or how is a subject of some discussion, but they all seem to agree it will. Which makes sense, as the most widely-observed truism in the world is that this, too, shall pass away. And I’ll admit, this seems a bit sad.

On the other hand, though, I wonder if the idea of an ending is itself a kind of comfort. After all, what would be the alternative? Waiting for Godot?

Estragon: “I can’t go on like this.” 

Vladimir: “That’s what you think!”

Or, to bring Arthur C. Clarke into the story again, let me paraphrase him: “There are two possibilities: either the world will end, or it will not. Both are equally terrifying.”

That’s a little too downbeat. On second thought, let me conclude with a quote about The End from another great British science-fiction author:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.