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Hi, you may remember me from such Retro Reviews as NYPD 2025, a work of historical fiction set way back in 2025 when Captain Death and the good guys of NYPD Combat Operations Police (COP) had to keep the smog-shrouded streets of New York safe from the savage hoards unleashed by a commie liberal pinko president (endorsed by the ACLU!) and his open borders policy.

No.

I am not making any of that up.

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/814174.page

Well I'm back with another work of historical fiction, set in the distant past of 2025 telling the tale of environmental degradation and extinction, complete with more than it's share of anti-India racism. I am of course talking about Nature's End!



In grim darkness of the near future (and/or recent past) there is only pollution!

A handful of Americans fight a terrifying worldwide movement to depopulate an earth that is on the brink of environmental collapse

https://www.amazon.com/Natures-End-Whitley-Strieber/dp/0446343552

That doesn't even start to describe it.

The forests are dead! The midwest a dustbowl! Cities are choking under smog! AIs have taking the jobs of accountants and lawyers! The President is a crook! A crazy Indian Swami wants to save the world by killing half (or is it a third?) of the population! And the only one who can save us is...

An 80 year old AI programmer who wants to create a simulation of the aforementioned swami which will discredit him? And his family? And his dead son? And a talking gorilla?

It is... A lot better than I expected.

I read this in college when it was less than a decade old and coming back to it now that is nearly 40 years old is certainly interesting.

After NYPD 2025 I went on the hunt for other 2020s books I remembered and spend literally days trying to remember its name, I got Earth's End, Planet's End, all sort of depressing terminal names before at 3am one night the excavators returned from deep in my brain with "Nature's End" and I downloaded it the next day.

It's still available in both digital and print so pick up a copy and read along as we enter the world of ...

NATURE'S END!

All right, imm'a let you finish, but i just wanted to say that i absolutely love your retro reviews, especially the ones that delve into obscure 80s stuff!

THE WORLD

In the distant future/past year 2025 Earth is becoming uninhabitable. Acid rain had killed the forests, the Amazon has been burnt to ash, pollution kills people in the streets of Denver if they don't have gas masks. Food is ultraprocessed and synthetic.



Meanwhile mass migration and overpopulation has turned cities into refugee camps as people live anywhere they can find room.



Northern New Jersey has been declared a "national sacrifice zone" since the cost of cleaning it up would exceed the value of the region. As a New Yorker this does my heart good and is a favorite part of the book.



Meanwhile computer technology particularly what we would call cloud computing and AI have progressed to slightly better than the real world. One character is mugged and surprised the attackers want his $20 tablet rather than something valuable. Later a villain smashed the hero's computer and he shrugs since it's just a terminal, all the data is uploaded somewhere else.

A program called "Delta Doctor" can simulate people's personality and know them better than they know themselves. Basically an ask my anything version of the President, or the Pope or whomever living in your pocket. It's already brought down one President when people found out what he really thought.



Genetic tech has advanced far beyond where we are, with intelligence-enhanced primates and even humans.

With individualized and expensive care someone can be kept young for decades, our main character John Sinclair is in his 70s or 80s but looks like he's in his 40s.

Space tech is also up there with lunar colonies and the Soviets (qv) terraforming Mars. And discovering extraterrestrial artifacts, this i just mentioned in passing.



There are some bright spots, we see a tree lab where they are working to create pollution resistant breeds and reintroduce them. But overall things are bleak. Deforestation means the Earth may not have enough oxygen for its human population in a few years.

Into this comes the Depopulationist Movement, looking to kill off a third of the Earth's population (through poison drinks distributed randomly) headed by Indian holy man Gupta Singh.



The book is thoroughly researched and does this odd thing where it will cite real world articles along with real-seeming ones from the future. As a reader living in THE FUTURE you have to keep in mind that citations before 1987 are real, and post 1987 are made up. A clever technique in 1987, annoying in 2025.

THE PLOT

As mentioned our hero John Sinclair makes AI simulations and he has now set out to do one of Gupta Singh and expose him. He is joined by his wife Allie, his son Scott, and his daughter in law Bell. The four trade off narrating with other characters also narrating parts as they are interviewed as part of the project. Another character of importance is the late Tom Sinclair who died saving people during deadly smog in Denver. He left behind encrypted notes which form the main McGuffin of the story.

The Sinclairs go from rich upperclass New Yorkers enjoying genetic treatments, extended youth, self-driving cars and screened air, to hunted fugitives as Gupta Singh goes after them. Their quest takes them from New York to Calcutta, and across the ravaged wastes of America.

In the process they learn that Gupta Singh is... actually a white dude! Which none of the billion plus Indian people noticed.

Finally they arrive at Magic a commune founded by the late Tom Sinclair where humans and primates with enhanced intelligence are working to save the world without a Thanos-like solution.

In the end Gupta Singh is defeated at the cost of John's life, and we are left wondering if humanity will safe itself.

A LOT to unpack there, which I will.

Tomorrow.

I do wonder if the Indian connection was inspired by the Rajneeshee bioterror attacks that occurred only three years previously in Oregon.

I'll have to look into this book as I really enjoyed the other book Warday.

OK, so the 12 time zone trip took more out of me than expected but now it's time for...

THE GOOD

Short answer is this is an interesting book, more for the IT and social predictions than the environmental ones.

Longer answer is that Nature's End holds up surprisingly well. The changing narrators and the use of real and fictional news stories keeps things going. And some passages make me smile.

Trans Atmosphere Vehicles (TAVs) have replaced airplanes and can make the India to New York flight in 2 hours. At the minor cost of tearing holes in the ozone lair and causing cancer for the plebes below. There's a bit where the narrator waxes nostalgic about the good old days of sipping white wine and chatting with your neighbor on a long flight and how that's been lost. Having just done that trip twice... bring on the TAVs and the skin cancer!

No not really.

There's also a mention of someone not having smelled tobacco in 25 years which is surprisingly accurate. And a couple of mentions of Hyundais, which only appeared in the US in 1986. There's a long scene set during California wildfires burning down a neighborhood. When the narrator returns a few years later they've been rebuilt perfectly. No one learned anything. Ouch.

Another great scene is when the heroes are reflecting on their New York apartment, their filtered air and water and realize you have to be rich to live the way they thought all Americans live. That one hit all the feels.

Note that the population in the dying world of Nature's End is 7 billion, the reality is 8 billion, take that however you will.

THE BAD

Wow the writer hates India, he really, really hates it.

Lemme quote:

There is no housing in Calcutta, except for the rich and the lucky. The local definition of prosperity is a piece of tin over one's head and a bicycle chained to one's arm. Theft is, quite simply, the primary means of exchange. Even in western-style hotels anything left unattended will be stolen.

Show me on this doll where India hurt you?

Jobs are "divided" with the original holder selling parts of the work. Thus even in the rather modest Star of India Hotel where we stayed I counted six maids at work in my room, two making the bed, two cleaning the rug with small brushes and pans, two more polishing and cleaning everything else. The original jobholder has not worked in years; she lives in an air-conditioned apartment and collects a portion of each salary.

This is just a weird bit and a really common left-wing idea that jobs are some sort of finite resource and that the only way to make more jobs is to divvy them up into smaller portions. And not needed. I mean look, yeah, there is cheap labor in India, six maids in a foreign hotel room would be only a bit crazy.

Contrasted with the environmental research it seems the authors didn't spend too much looking at India. They mention the only cars are limos and pedicabs. No Indian brands, non of the ubiquitous tuk-tuks or 2-wheelers. Come on, even James Bond did better than that.

Lacking either bells or horns, the cabbies made a mouth noise, a sort of sharp bark which they repeated continually, their heads down, their backs running with sweat and flies.

Again, a graphic description that has nothing to do with reality. I mean, OK, underdeveloped country, but motor rickshaws have been around since the 1950s (starting in Japan) and yeah horns and bells are not some rare technology only available to Americans.

Here in Calcutta, it is ironic, I cannot telephone my neighbor but I can in an instant reach New York, Moscow, Peking.

So, America has internet, cell phones, etc, (very well predicted IMHO) but not India? I remember articles as early as the mid 90s about how cell phones were changing life and business in India. Yes the digital divide is real, but the book makes a point of how cheap computing is in the distant future/past year of 2025. So I am deducting points for a failed prediction here!

overall I would guess that India in 1987 (and still?) was just an easy catch all for third world hellhole. At least it got off better than China where we only get a passing reference to millions of people fleeing the "Chinese miracle".

THE UGLY

When we get the plot point that the evil Gupta Singh was actually a white dude, I kind of figured it had to be the late great Tom Sinclair (having faked his death) since he got so much build up. Or that Tom would turn out to have uploaded his mind to the cloud, or something. In the end one of the genius kids at Magic casually mentions that Tom had a self destructive steak and that's about all the deconstruction/clay feet he gets.

Instead we get the evil Indian dude who's really a white dude and talks like a fortune cookie version about "The Orient"...

Gerontological manipulations is not popular in India. Who wants to live beyond his time? To the Hindus, it is an abomination. To the Moslems, something odd and hard to fathom.

And it goes on and on...

Eventually we find out he's really the white dude scientist who created intelligence upgrade technology and was so disappointed he decided to pose an India guru and try to kill a third of the human race. His true identity was mentioned/foreshadowed a few times in passing in the world-building bits but y'know, he never appeared.

And somehow the 35 million Indian people in Calcutta never noticed? Not once? Even when Gupta Singh badmouthed Cricket?

that damned English cricket that some Indians also pretend to play

Thems fighting words "Gupta"

Which brings up the question of why include that plot point at all? Couldn't Gupta Singh just be a villain? Or couldn't the scientist dude just transition to genocidal villain? Why this plot twist?

I wonder if this isn't an example of what my lit teacher would call Orientalism which comes in two flavors. The good people of the Orient are too pure and good to ever come up with this genocidal plan, and/or too simple to ever be the real masterminds. Both the idealized version and the racist version end up in the same place.

Regardless it stuck in my craw as an annoyance.

So to answer the only real question when reviewing a book, is it worth your time?

Yes.

With an open and critical mind comparing the grim darkness of Nature's End and the grim darkness of 2025 it is interesting. Not great, not the train wreck of NYPD 2025, but interesting.