Advance Praise for 'The Decline & Fall of the Human Empire'

Put this at the head of your reading lists immediately people. Before it’s too late - Eric Idle, author and comedian. 

With wit, wisdom and erudition, Henry Gee’s Decline and Fall thinks big, laying out a bold and provocative vision for the possible futures of humankind - Philip Ball, author of How Biology Works. 

A fascinating, deeply researched study of our evolutionary journey - Michael Bond, author of Wayfinding.

Compulsory reading for all humans. Mandatory for politicians - John Long, author of The Secret History of Sharks.

 Henry Gee is a sage - Steve Brusatte, author of The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs.

First Review ... and it's a stinker

This book was always going to be controversial. Publisher's Weekly hates it. They write

Without drastic action, Homo sapiens will disappear from the Earth within the next 10,000 years, according to this unpersuasive warning. Nature editor Gee (A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth) argues that modern humans’ relatively limited genetic diversity combined with predicted population declines in most countries risks setting humans on a path toward extinction. He points out how Neanderthals’ even narrower genetic diversity put them at an evolutionary disadvantage when competing for resources with Homo sapiens, forcing them to either mate with sapiens or die out. Unfortunately, Gee’s solution for humanity to avoid a similar fate by establishing space colonies defies logic. According to Gee, the isolation of space would aid humanity’s survival by producing genetically distinct subpopulations that can interbreed with groups on Earth or elsewhere in space to create offspring with the best traits of both communities, in a similar fashion to what happened after Homo erectus diversified into Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, and other human species more than 315,000 years ago. However, this argument is severely undermined by Gee’s discussion of how isolated breeding pools risk concentrating genetic deficiencies and vulnerability to disease, natural disasters, and other mass casualty events, as befell the Neanderthals. This strains credulity. 

Fun in Frankfurt

Those busy bees at PanMacRights have been fighting my corner at the Frankfurt Book Fair. You can pre-order my new book here. For all rights inquiries please email Mairead Loftus here. So far it's sold seven translation deals, which you can see here.

A Deal Is Announced...

 From Publishers Weekly...

Now Available For Pre-order!

It might be a year away, but The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire is now available for preorder from Amazon, Google Books, WH Smiths, The Publisher and other fine emporia.

When Will Humans Be No More?

When will we humans finally disappear? I explain the why's and wherefores of human extinction on the WHY? podcast -- click the link here to find out.

My Next Book Starts Here...

In my last book A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth I assumed that Homo sapiens, like all species, would become extinct – one day. 

I was, however, rather vague about the timescale, in the end noting that the species would become extinct ‘sooner or later’. 

Extinction is the fate of all species, but Homo sapiens is problematic as, pace arguments against human exceptionalism of the kind I put forward in an earlier book, The Accidental Species, Homo sapiens is an exceptional species in many ways, able to modify its circumstances through technology in ways that are unprecedented, as far as we know, in the history of life. 

With the possible exception of the bacteria that evolved oxygenic photosynthesis more than two billion years ago, releasing a highly poisonous gas -- oxygen --  into the atmosphere and precipitating the extinction of life that had evolved in its absence, Homo sapiens is a uniquely disruptive species, both to itself and to the environment in which it lives. 

This makes predicting human extinction very hard. Humans are simultaneously amazingly creative and wantonly destructive. 

I decided, therefore, to look more closely at the factors that might work against the long-term existence of Homo sapiens. The result was an essay in Scientific American entitled ‘Humans are Doomed to Go Extinct’, which was published on 20 November, 2021. This caused consternation in many languages. 

After that I felt that I should extend my essay into a book. My agent, Jill Grinberg at Jill Grinberg Literary Management was interested. So was Ravi Mirchandani at Picador, and George Witte at St Martins Press, who'd published my earlier book. 

So I set to work.

While I was writing, the indefatigable terriers at PanMac Rights sold translation rights for the still-unfinished book to publishers in Italy, Korea, Japan and Romania.

Just over a year later -- 19 December, 2023 -- I've delivered the manuscript of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire...