Rescuing an old book

I’ve rescued an amazing old book: “The End of the World” (1930) by Geoffrey Dennis. It’s interwar pop-science in the form of a sermon (the best sermon you’ve ever heard).

Flourish of nominal trumpets over, real arguments enter the field.

It’s very early for a study of existential risk. The field’s great scholar, Tom Moynihan, notes that Dennis was the same year that Haldane & Bernal first really pulled the field together.

It’s also the latest anyone could write such a book without mentioning technological risks.

It is the best prose I have read all year. (Yes, purple; yes, classics-sotten, but I dare you to think he doesn’t carry it off.) He was a civil servant, and it is a pleasure to imagine him writing office memos like this.

It’s hard to know how serious he’s being. Most of the book is history and poetry. He spends a lot of time mocking stupid millenarian calculations. But then the last chapter goes mental. (A comical solution to the question “when will the world end?” is “it can’t, it’s not real”)

Thanks to Paul and Rian for OCR and to Mark Pilgrim for CSS.