- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd (11 Sep 1986)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0246130261
- ISBN-13: 978-0246130266
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.3 x 4.1 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,430,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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20 reviews
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful
A horrifying vision of the future.
2 Jun 2003
Format:Hardcover
This is one of those books that is quite literally unforgettable. It is set circa 2025. In this future, the world is horrendously overpopulated, and has been devastated by ecological havoc and neglect to the point where Earth's biosphere is in jeopardy of collapse. A new world politician, Gupta Singh, believes he has the answer: the "Draft." Under this proposal, which has been secretly adopted by the United States and other countries, on a certain day all human beings would be required to simultaneously take a drug. One third of the doses will be fatal, thereby reducing the world's population by a third in a single day, alleviating the world's population problems.
The authors do a wonderful job projecting current technology and ecological trends in a manner that projects a nightmarish future American and world society. The rich enjoy extended life spans, penthouse living, and the benefits of high technology including sentient laptop computers and refrigerators that talk. The rest of the world including most of America (which seems largely to be comprised of illegal aliens) lives in grinding poverty supported by a government dole. Freedom is largely a thing of the past, the Tax Police have the power to effect summary arrests, and society in general is teetering on collapse.
This novel is intended to be a cautionary novel warning us against neglect of the world's ecology, and it delivers this message successfully, and in my opinion, devastatingly. I am a conservative Republican, (a school of thought not always noted for its ecological conciousness) but nevertheless I admit that this novel heightened my concern for our preservation of the world's forests, oceans, and ecology. Although I doubt that the future will be as grim as the authors show in this novel, nothing in the novel struck me as impossible, and much of it was too plausible for comfort. This is a book that is worth reading because it will challenge the reader to think "outside the box" and examine his or her belief system.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Plausible predictions about our near future
19 April 2002
Format:Paperback
In 2025 the environment is on its way to being unable to support human life, and the Depopulationists are campaigning for a plan of voluntary suicide of a third of the people on earth. The air in some cities actually suffocates people. Trees are a rarity. The American Midwest is mostly desert. The gap between rich and poor has widened even further. Gerontology has developed to the point where seventy-year-olds can look and feel thirty--if they have the money. Trans-atmospheric vehicles can get you from L.A. to New York in half an hour--if you have the money. We've been tinkering with chimps, apes, and human children to enhance their intelligence, with mixed results. Drugs are available to induce any mood.
The book occasionally got a bit too pedantic and polemic, and I wished the pieces of the story had been woven together more smoothly, but all in all I found it an interesting and thought-provoking read.
(I also recommend Strieber and Kunetka's "Warday," which I liked even better, about the aftermath of a "limited" nuclear war.)
The book occasionally got a bit too pedantic and polemic, and I wished the pieces of the story had been woven together more smoothly, but all in all I found it an interesting and thought-provoking read.
(I also recommend Strieber and Kunetka's "Warday," which I liked even better, about the aftermath of a "limited" nuclear war.)
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
A horryfying and plausible look at our possible future
2 Jan 2000
Format:Hardcover
If we continue to consume and destroy as we have in the 20th century, we may face the hell that Strieber and Kunetka describe in the 21st in Nature's End. The book's dramatic elements are exciting, and the story of fugitves on the run from a sort of mutated Ghandi/Hitler hybrid is fun and though-provoking, but it is the depictions of everyday life in the 2020s with the terrifying consequences of over 100 years of environmental degradation that both enthrall and alarm. This book should be made into a movie by Steven Spielberg and star Tom Hanks. Maybe the attention it would thus receive will serve as a warning call to the world that we may be entering a time of living (or more likely, dying) in a poisoned planet unless we do something about it. An amazing and shocking vision of what may await us all in a few decades, many of the predictions of events in this book (written in the 80s) have come to pass with alarming accuracy.
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