Craig Childs
Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth
Pantheon / Random House
US Hardcover First Edition
350 Pages; $27.95
Index: Non-Fiction Science Fiction
The end of the world is much discussed and often forecast. What's not so well known is that it has already happened, more than once. Craig Childs' 'Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth' is a rip-roaring, gorgeously written look at the deep nature of the death of the planet by ice, fire, heat, species extinction — and these are just some of the ends that have already come to pass. Part travelogue, part thought-experiment, a good dose of craziness with regards to going into very dangerous places without preparation, 'Apocalyptic Planet' is a planet-smashing success in its ability to annihilate your cozy notions of stability.
From the outset, Childs reminds us that original definition of "Apocalypse" is "a lifting of the veil, or a revelation," and this proves to be pertinent. We then meet his aunt who is unaware that she is in the midst of a personal apocalypse as she seeks to write her own book about the coming end, a scene that sets this book into motion as Childs decides to explore landscapes of the present that speak to apocalypses in the past.
Childs goes on to take readers to the Sonoran desert, the frozen wastelands in the upper Andes, the Bering Strait, even the, as it happens, appropriately-named city of Phoenix, Arizona, which happens to rest on the remains of a city whose eventual near-erasure from existence does not bode well for the modern overlay. In the course of the book, we visit nine environments and look at a variety of ends that have already come to pass and left nothing or little to speak of what came before. With each exploration, Childs reveals (remember the original definition of Apocalypse) the impermanence of what to us seems endless, changeless — forever. That's not the case. The earth is ready to shake us off like a dog shakes off fleas, hopefully with the same relative level of success.
'Apocalyptic Planet' is driven first and foremost by Childs' entertaining, and intense and beautiful prose. He knows how to craft a scene, whether he's stumbling across the desert, rambling through a city or hitting up an expert for information relevant to the place he is currently examining. Reading the book is a pleasure, no matter what Childs is writing about, because he crafts one great sentence after another to lead us to the end and beyond.
Childs also offers us a gallery of great characters. As a narrator, we enjoy Childs for his often-shambolic under-preparation as he embarks upon an adventure. He knows how to show himself in a light that makes his own presence really enjoyable without inflating either his self-worth or his inclination to take risks. Moreover, we meet a lot of great partners in his travels, from Devin, who accompanies him on a fairly terrorizing trek across the desert, to his mother, who accompanies him to the Bering Strait to look at what rising sea level really means. His sense of the dialogue-to-description ratio is keenly honed. Even his data dumps are entertaining and well-woven within the narrative.
As we move from one ending to the next, Childs very effectively messes with our sense of time scale, showing us how quickly a desert can overtake a forest, and how long the long run really is. 'Apocalyptic Planet' is all unleavened non-fiction, but given the subject and the perspective, it is not surprising that it reads now and again like a Golden Age science fiction novel, with the weary remnants of mankind looking back on the lifetime of a species wasted in moments that are more ephemeral than it is almost possible to imagine.
The true power of this book is that it will indeed change the readers' sensibility of time, of the importance of what is happening at this moment, of this sense that everything happening now matters so damn much. In 'Apocalyptic Planet,' Childs pulls back the camera and gives us a sense of a big picture in which our lives, our oh-so-important times, are merely a pixel.