‘Brave New Wild is both a fascinating and provocative exploration of the unspoken assumptions underpinning many of our ideas about nature and the environment and a roadmap to a new and better future.’ James Bradley
‘This book tackles a terrifying subject: the possibility of technoscience conquering both nature and humanity. King’s genius is to turn this into an entertaining as well as thought-provoking read. His humour and folksy erudition reminds me at times of the late Stephen Jay Gould. This is a book that comes thoroughly recommended. Timely and confronting. A brave new work.’ Dave Witty
‘Frightening and inspiring … Brave New Wild presents the most radical account I have read of why the humanities must urgently reconstitute themselves to deserve the ear of scientists who are intoxicated by the prospect of “reconstituting nature itself” in order to “protect ourselves and nature from climate change”. That is the brave new wild.’ Raimond Gaita
Corporations and governments are increasingly turning to powerful technologies – to geoengineering, biotech and AI – to address our ecological crisis. But in bending nature to our will, could we break humanity?
Amid a climate emergency, bad news comes fast: the last decade has been the hottest on record. Venezuela is the first modern country to see its glaciers disappear. One in five migratory species faces extinction.
A band of technoscience enthusiasts – politicians, scientists and tech billionaires like Musk, Bezos, Gates and Thiel – are rushing to solutions. There are promises to resurrect the dire wolf and the Tasmanian tiger, to remake the world at the atomic level. Ideas once the stuff of science fiction are on the agenda: brightening marine clouds to reflect sunlight back into space; shooting sulphur into the stratosphere to mimic the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption. New forms of nuclear power are hyped as ‘clean’ despite uranium having a half-life of thousands of years.
The rulers in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World sought to engineer humans to fit the world they wanted to see, rather than create a society based on human needs. Technoscience enthusiasts today evince the same perilous logic: instead of developing ways to protect nature, they are investing in ways to remake it. In line with the motives of power and profit, hubris has come to define the fight against climate change.
Only a form of environmentalism that puts human justice, equity and posterity at its centre can create the conditions to truly avert our disastrous course. Insightful and urgent, Brave New Wild calls for a radical rethink to bring about a richer and more humane future.
PRAISE FOR HERE BE MONSTERS
‘King make[s] news out of culture, and without trivialising the second thing in favour of the first.’ Clive James, critic
‘Endlessly fascinating. An extraordinary inquiry into the hidden ways in which technology shapes and reshapes human being and our world, by one of our most stylish and elegant writers.’ Guy Rundle, journalist and critic
‘Like a cave-diver, Richard King steadily explores his way through the chambers of consequence that lie beneath, around, above and within our relationship with technology. Some are easily illuminated; others keep their shadows, but King sounds out the dimensions, the contours and the crags of this world in which human and machine are together becoming more and more submersed in unknown waters. Concerned and sceptical but not unjust, King surveys both the big innovations and the philosophical legacies of this tech age, somehow finding space for meditations on humanity, an astute grasp of upcoming invention, and the posing of fierce, urgent questions. It is, he says, “humanity’s ability to ask what is suitable – what is good, what is bad, what is progress, what is regress – that separates it from other species.” In this excellent, very readable, and laudably ambitious work, Richard King takes nothing for granted, but gives us a portrait of a species in the act of utterly changing itself, a terrible beauty being born.’ Kate Holden, journalist and author of the Walkley Award–winning The Winter Road
‘Technologies like artificial intelligence are changing our world. But all too often, technology is seen as destiny. Here Be Monsters is an important and engaging look at how these tools are using us, and how we must act to regain our essential humanity.’ Toby Walsh, chief scientist at UNSW AI Institute and the author of Machines Behaving Badly
‘Here Be Monsters asks us to resist the urge to damage our very nature to accommodate technology’s unchallenged march.’ Geordie Williamson, The Australian
‘Here Be Monsters is an intelligent and thoughtful meditation on the relationship between technology and humanity. Pulling together tech criticism, literary theory and history, King has created a text that is bigger than the sum of its parts. This thoroughly enjoyable text gives the reader the confidence to commit to a bold ambition for a more democratic technological future.’ Lizzie O’Shea, lawyer, activist and author of Future Histories and Empowering Women
