A website exploring the novel's themes of climate change and artificial intelligence
The holy grail of 100% renewable electricity for Australia finally appears to be within reach after the premier of the Australian state of Queensland recently announced her government’s ambitious energy and jobs plan. Such an achievement would be a major milestone in reducing global emissions to levels agreed at the Paris Accord. […] Read More
Western urban dwellers like me take for granted that we can buy whatever food takes our fancy by just popping down to our local shopping strip. That’s because every day, like clockwork, around two thousand tonnes of food is transported into cities for each million of its residents. This ‘clockwork’ in the […] Read More
The final iconic scene in the 1960s film Planet of the Apes is one of the most memorable in cinema history. Astronaut Charlton Heston discovers that the planet he’s been marooned on is in fact Earth and he has stumbled on the remnants of his own failed civilization some millennia later. It’s […] Read More
Rome was sacked by Gaul invaders in 390 BC, and in the 210s BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal wreaked havoc on the Italian Peninsula. Yet the Roman Empire survived and flourished over subsequent centuries, only falling to raiding ’barbarians’ more than five hundred years later. Why did the early setbacks not lead […] Read More
How Australians voted at their federal election on 21st May 2022, made headlines across the country and internationally. On election night as the votes were counted, shockwaves rippled across the country. In around ten percent of electorates, the voters had shunned the major parties and elected independent or minor party candidates running […] Read More
Watching your novel transform from words on a page to a three dimensional stage performance is akin to magic. It’s like watching your child grow from infant to teenager in fast motion. When Katie Jones, the artistic director at the North Carolina–based Magnetic Theatre, first told me that she wanted to perform […] Read More
What did the Russian, Ottoman and Chinese empires share in common in the 15th and 20th Centuries? In the 15th century all three shunned the reforms and progress of the trading world. What followed was a multi-century decline, culminating with the collapse of all three empires within the span of a mere […] Read More
In 1621, the Dutch East Indies Company virtually exterminated the native people of the Bandu Islands in order to seize a monopoly on the lucrative nutmeg trade. Amitav Ghosh uses this central story to imaginatively weave together disparate, seemingly unrelated threads to show how our colonial heritage has shaped the climate dilemma […] Read More
Are the cartoons of polar bears clinging onto tiny ice floes becoming so commonplace that they’re losing their impact? Beyond the polar bear, what will the loss of arctic ice actually mean? For many years, climate scientist Paul Beckwith at the University of Ottawa, has been warning that we are losing arctic […] Read More
The setup of the movie Don’t Look Up is recognizable enough: Two low-level astronomers (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a comet which they predict will hit the earth in six months, destroying all life on the planet unless it is deflected. So they try and warn the world, firstly […] Read More