Nature's End: The Consequences of the Twentieth Century (Hardcover)

~ (Author), James Kunetka (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

YA As in Warday (Holt, 1984), Strieber and Kunetka combine scientific facts with projections of scientific probability in their speculative fiction of the near future. It is 2025 and the planet is rapidly approaching environmental death. Dr. Gupta Singh, a Hindu guru with a Jim Jones-like following, has proposed the suicide, by lottery, of one-third of the world's population. His followers have elected a Depopulationist majority in Congress. Led by journalist John Sinclair, a small group hopes to prove that Singh is a fraud. Singh is a formidable enemy: he cancels the medical-cosmetological treatment that the 72-year-old Sinclair (who looks 46 due to the treatment) receives, causing Sinclair to age rapidly. Singh sets the feared tax police after Sinclair, alters his records, and wipes out his wealth. Tension mounts as Sinclair stalks Singh and gains access to his "conviction"an electronic document into Singh's true identity and character. While this is less straightforward and slower to start than Warday, it is just as sobering in its tragic possibilities. Diana Hirsch, PGCMLS, Md.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The authors of the best seller Warday ( LJ 4/1/84) depict in powerful detail a 21st-century Earth with devastated environment and rampant overpopulation. A rich and comfortable elite coexists with malnourished, pitiful billions, "the victim generation." The rich enjoy youth preservation treatments and other biomedical wonders while the rest just endure the toxicity and pollution. Hero John Sinclair and a few rich companies fight to thwart the leader of a burgeoning Depopulation Movement that would have each third person poisoned to "solve" the population crisis. Readers will follow with grim fascination these struggles to survive in a dying world. Sobering message eclipses story, and the book should strike home with a variety of informed citizens. Strongly recommended. William A. Donovan, Chicago P.L.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 418 pages
• Publisher: Warner Books; 1St Edition edition (April 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 044651344X
• ISBN-13: 978-0446513449
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #118,098 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A horrifying vision of the future., June 2, 2003

By	Roger J. Buffington (Huntington Beach, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Plausible predictions about our near future, April 18, 2002

By	Kim Boykin (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nature's End (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.)

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A horryfying and plausible look at our possible future, January 2, 2000

By	Carlos Baez (Roswell, GA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.