I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than almost anything.

My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another.

If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying I did, it’s because the trout are gone, every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, cutbows, everyone.

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn’t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.

Melissa, my wife, was an old hippy. Not that old. She looked good. In this story she might have been Eve, but I’m not Adam. I am more like Cain. They didn’t have a brother like me.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That’s where we’re at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water. They said at the end it would get colder after it gets warmer.

Way colder. Still waiting. She’s a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

No more geese. A few. Last October I heard the old bleating after dusk and saw them, five against the cold bloodwashed blue over the ridge. Five all fall, I think, next April none.

I hand pump the 100 low lead aviation gas out of the old airport tank when the sun is not shining, and I have the truck too that was making the fuel delivery. More fuel than the Beast can burn in my lifetime if I keep my sorties local, which I plan to, I have to. She’s a small plane, a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut. Cream and blue. I’m figuring I’m dead before the Beast gives up the final ghost. I will buy the farm. Eighty acres of bottomland hay and corn in a country where there is still a cold stream coming out of the purple mountains full of brookies and cuts.

Before that I will make my roundtrips. Out and back.

*

I have a neighbor. One. Just us at a small country airport a few miles from the mountains. A training field where they built a bunch of houses for people who couldn’t sleep without their little planes, the way golfers live on a golf course. Bangley is the name on the registration of his old truck, which doesn’t run anymore. Bruce Bangley. I fished it out of the glove box looking for a tire pressure gauge I could take with me in the Beast. A Wheat Ridge address. I don’t call him that, though, what’s the point, there’s only two of us. Only us for at least a radius of eight miles, which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain. I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not all. There are patches of green woods, and I am their biggest fan. I root for them out here on the plain. Go Go Go Grow Grow Grow! That’s our fight song. I yell it out the window as I fly low over. The green patches are_ spreading year by year. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. I could swear they hear me. They wave back, wave their feathery arms back and forth down low by their sides, they remind me of women in kimonos. Tiny steps or no steps, wave wave hands at your sides.

I go up there on foot when I can. To the greener woods. Funny to say that: not like I have to clear my calendar. I go up to breathe. The different air. It’s dangerous, it’s an adrenalin rush I could do without. I have seen elk sign. Not so old. If there are still elk. Bangley says no way. Way, but. Never seen one. Seen plenty deer. I bring the .308 and I shoot a doe and I drag her back in the hull of a kayak which I sawed the deck off so it’s a sled. My green sled. The deer just stayed on with the rabbits and the rats. The cheat grass stayed on, I guess that’s enough.

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Before I go up there I fly it twice. One day, one night with the goggles. The goggles are pretty good at seeing down through trees if the trees aren’t too heavy. People make pulsing green shadows, even asleep. Better than not checking. Then I make a loop south and east, come back in from the north. Thirty miles out, at least a day for a traveler. That’s all open, all plains, sage and grass and rabbit brush and the old farms. The brown circles of fields like the footprint of a crutch fading into the prairie. Hedgerows and windbreaks, half the trees broken, blown over, a few still green by a seep or along a creek. Then I tell Bangley.

I cover the eight miles dragging the empty sled in two hours, then I am in cover. I can still move. It’s a long way back with a deer, though. Over open country. Bangley covers me from halfway out. We still have the handsets and they still recharge with the panels. Japanese built, good thing. Bangley has a .408 CheyTac sniper rifle set up on a platform he built. A rangefinder. My luck. A gun nut. A really mean gun nut. He says he can pot a man from a mile off. He has done. I’ve seen it more than once. Last summer he shot a girl who was chasing me across the open plain. A young girl, a scarecrow. I heard the shot, stopped, left the sled, went back. She was thrown back over a rock, a hole where her waist should have been, just about torn in half. Her chest was heaving, panting, her head twisted to the side, one black eye shiny and looking up at me, not fear, just like a question, burning, like of all things witnessed this one couldn’t be believed. Like that. Like fucking why?

That’s what I asked Bangley, fucking why.

She would have caught you.

So what? I had a gun, she had a little knife. To like protect her from me. She maybe wanted food.

Maybe. Maybe she’d slit your throat in the middle of the night.

I stared at him, his mind going that far, to the middle of the night, me and her. Jesus. My only neighbor. What can I say to Bangley? He has saved my bacon more times. Saving my bacon is his job. I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle. He knows I know he knows: he can’t fly, I don’t have the stomach for killing. Any other way probably just be one of us. Or none.

I also have Jasper, son of Daisy, which is the best last line of alarm.

So when we get sick of rabbits and sunfish from the pond, I get a deer. Mostly I just want to go up there. It feels like church, hallow and cool. The dead forest swaying and whispering, the green forest full of sighs. The musk smell of deer beds. The creeks where I always pray to see a trout. One fingerling. One big old survivor, his green shadow idling against the green shadows of the stones.

Eight miles of open ground to the mountain front, the first trees. That is our perimeter. Our safety zone. That is my job.

He can concentrate his firepower to the west that way. That’s how Bangley talks. Because it’s thirty miles out, high plains all other directions, more than a day’s walk, but just a couple of hours west to the first trees. The families are south ten miles but they don’t bother us. That’s what I call them. They are something like thirty Mennonites with a blood disease that hit after the flu. Like a plague but slow burning. Something like AIDS I think, maybe more contagious. The kids were born with it and it makes them all sick and weak and every year some die.

We have the perimeter. But if someone hid. In the old farmsteads. In the sage. The willows along a creek. Arroyos, too, with undercut banks. He asked me that once: how do I know. How do I know someone is not inside our perimeter, in all that empty country, hiding, waiting to attack us? But thing is I can see a lot. Not like the back of the hand, too simple, but like a book I have read and reread too many times to count, maybe like the Bible for some folks of old. I would know. A sentence out of place. A gap. Two periods where there should be one. I know.

I know, I think: if I am going to die – no If – it will be on one of these trips to the mountains. Crossing open ground with the full sled. Shot in the back with an arrow.

Bangley a long time ago gave me bulletproof, one of the vests in his arsenal. He has all kinds of shit. He said it’ll stop any handgun, an arrow, but with a rifle it depends, I better be lucky. I thought about that. We’re supposed to be the only two living souls but the families in at least hundreds of square miles, the only survivors, I better be lucky. So I wear the vest because it’s warm, but if it’s summer I mostly don’t. When I wear it, I feel like I’m waiting for something. Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn’t come for months? Maybe. Sometimes this whole thing feels just like that.

This is an extract from by Peter Heller (Tinder Press), the August read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

was my first novel. It begins nine years after a super-flu pandemic kills off most of humanity. Hig lives with his old dog Jasper at a little country airport in Erie, north of Denver, Colorado, which he shares with a gun nut named Bangley who has been waiting for the apocalypse his whole life. Hig has lost his wife, who was pregnant with their first child, and all his friends, and he and Jasper fly a patrol every day in their 1956 Cessna searching for survivors.

When I sat down to write the book, I didn’t want to plot or outline. I had wanted to be a fiction writer since I was 11, but when I got out of college, I had to make a living and so I wrote for magazines. With every story I wrote I knew the ending, and I knew what was going to happen next, because it happened. It was journalism. Now, I didn’t want to know. I grew up as a kayaker and what I loved about running rivers was that if the stream had never been descended or described, you came around a tight bend in a canyon and there might be a waterfall, or a cougar drinking, or a flight of backlit swallows. I wanted the same thrill writing the novel. I wanted to launch onto a narrative current and follow it into wild new territory.

Also, poetry was my first love. The novels I adored were the most lyrical. Conrad at the height of his power, in the grips of a typhoon. Faulkner following the cadence of the words into the mind of a smitten cow. Welty describing a slow stream. They seemed to be as much about the music of the language as any story. I knew that I would have to be enamoured first, of the sound of my own language, and follow the song into the narrative.

I went to the coffee shop in my neighborhood in Denver and I sat down and told myself, “Don’t think, don’t think, just listen.” I wrote, “I keep the Beast running. I keep the 100 low lead on tap. I foresee attacks…” A few lines later, “My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another. If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying I did, it’s because the trout are gone, every one.”

I sat up. “Speak,” I murmured. “You are a fisherman, just like me.” And then it was as if Hig were on the other side of a campfire on an October night, with the wind blowing the flames around, telling me what had happened to him a few years before. I wrote in a white heat. I was constantly surprised, awed, devastated by what happened. I’d have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table and I knew the other patrons were thinking, “That poor sonofabitch is going through a bad divorce. Or his dog died.” But really, I was completely transported, and more thrilled than I’d ever been in my life.

Hig’s plane, the Beast, is one of the most prominent characters in the novel. Hig and I had a few stories about it to help fill out the novel. Once on a trip to kayak a wilderness river in Montana with one of my oldest friends, we got a ride to the river on a single engine Cessna into a remote backcountry airstrip. This was before I wrote the book. The pilot flew so close to the ridges I could see the elk tracks zigzagging in the snow. I was fascinated. I said, “Hey, how fast could I learn to fly like this? Could I do it for an article?”

The pilot was a cowboy in every sense, had a handlebar moustache and a brash manner. He said, “Gimme five grand and three weeks of your time and we’ll get her done!”

He was fired two weeks later for drinking on the job. But the chief pilot of the little airport was one of the greatest bush pilots alive, and he gave the thumbs up. Dave Hoerner had 30,000 hours flying wildlife biologists into the mountains to track grizzly bears and wolves. The most dangerous kind of flying. I went back up to Kalispell and flew three times a day and studied aviation books at night. I got my pilot’s license in 20 days. I bought a 1956 Cessna 182 single engine plane. The engine was timed out, meaning it had run so many hours I was required to rebuild it, but I thought I could nurse it along. It’s the same plane Hig flies, same colour, same tail number: N6333A. And I kept it in Hig’s hangar at the Erie airport. Soon after I bought the Beast, the engine died, right over the Continental Divide, and we had just enough altitude to glide home. In The Dog Stars, Hig flies past his point of no return looking for human connection.

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Eight years after I published the novel, on a cool day in March of 2020, Denver shut down for the Covid pandemic. I went fishing that afternoon in a state park south of town. There was no ranger at the gate, I just drove in. Eerie. No other fishermen parked in the gravel lot by the river. I waded into a lovely stretch that bends through a grove of old cottonwoods and began to cast. Alone, the way Hig does in the book. And the only fish feeding were white suckers. There were no trout that night, as in the novel. The sun settled on the ridge and the evening chilled and I got goosebumps, and not just from the temperature. I drove home up a large boulevard, the only car, and every business on either side of the road was shut.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. It was as if Hig had transported into my world, or I into his. Again.

by Peter Heller (Tinder Press) is the August read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

The New Scientist Book Club has spent July reading Claire North’s space opera . Set in the far future, it follows the fortunes of a civilisation that has just learned that their planet will be destroyed by a supernova – in 100 years’ time.

“What does it mean to look into the heavens and know the exact date when a star will die and with it, your world?” North wrote in a fascinating essay for book club members on why they started the book with this conceit. “What choices do you make, and what price would you pay to save yourself – or your civilisation?”

Alongside this end-of-the-world tale, Slow Gods is also a love story between North’s protagonist Maw, a pilot who can navigate the dangers of faster-than-light travel but who is a little prone to murdering people, and Gebre, a citizen of that planet on the brink of annihilation, Adjumir.

Our science-fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson had heartily recommended this one: “It has been a while since I have read a piece of science fiction so purely delightful.” I was also enraptured. North’s writing was elegant, insightful and effortlessly funny (I hate try-hard humour in my fiction). And the concept at the heart of the story, the idea of how a civilisation might deal with imminent, but not all that imminent, destruction? It was fascinating and terrifying; as North told me in our interview for book club members, this is a deliberate parallel with climate change. “Subtle metaphor it is not,” they said.

Slow Gods wasn’t only a hit with me and Emily – I think it’s one of our most popular books so far with members. “The writing is gorgeous, and it has the big concept space opera feel that I really like,” wrote adidubey on our . “One of the more satisfying reads we have had,” added Matthew. “This book club usually picks things I wouldn’t and some are good and some less so (none that I have not finished) but there is a lot of variety and it gets me out of my rut of only reading the familiar.”

I did find the opening a little stodgy and slow to get going, which is often a problem for space operas, as the writer looks to set their galactic scene. Butterfly368 was with me on this: “The beginning was a bit slow and confusing, but the deeper I got, the more invested I became. It’s one of those books that gradually pulls you in rather than grabbing you from page one,” they wrote. “I’m also enjoying its commentary on the meaning we create in our lives and on society and culture more broadly. It’s given me quite a bit to think about.” Melissa, however, loved it from the first. “50 pages in and totally engrossed. I’ve felt gut punched with recognition at some of the terrible treatment of people but also laughed into an empty room a couple of times. Whyyyyyy do I have to go to work?” she wrote.

Barbara Howe had some interesting comparisons to make with some of her favourite reads. “Reminded me a bit at the start of [Ann Leckie’s] Ancillary Justice, mainly in how much I was struggling to understand what was going on, and how many questions were raised early on that didn’t get answered until much later – if at all,” she wrote. “Also, whenever [Maw] talked about having trouble with social situations and understanding his feelings, I was reminded of Murderbot ‘having an emotion’.”

North, incidentally, had some interesting things to say in our chat about Maw’s struggle to fit in; he “is the protagonist you write when you are an adult diagnosed with autism late in your life”, they told me. North and I also dug into the multiple pronouns used in this story – something Carrie noted on Discord, writing that “I’m really enjoying the world building and while they can take a little getting used to, feel that the introduction of new pronouns really add to the story and provide insight into the cultures we’re being introduced to”. “People exist on a spectrum,” said North in our chat. “In the English language, we may still only really have ‘he’ and ‘she’ as the commonly accepted expression of gender, but that spectrum is enormous. It ranges from Arnold Schwarzenegger through to Harry Kane through to Alan Carr, then straight on keeps on going. The enormity of that spectrum feels too big for ‘he’ and ‘she’ to actually cover.”

Alan_P was another big fan. “I absolutely loved it. I’m looking up other books by the same author in my library which is something I rarely do,” he wrote. “I also (unexpectedly for me – I’m not a fan of romance in general) found myself really enjoying the love story at the centre of the book. For me it’s the very clever way that the author has woven these different themes of not quite requited love, galaxy spanning science fiction, commentary of contemporary events and a really good story that makes it one of my favourites in a good while.” A bit of a success, then!

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The New Scientist Book Club has been reading Claire North’s space opera Slow Gods, in which a civilisation has to work out how to deal with a supernova that will kill everyone on a planet – but not for 100 years. Claire joined us to dig into the details of the book, chatting about everything from how their hero “is the protagonist you write when you are an adult diagnosed with autism late in your life” to the parallels between the climate crisis and the book’s world-ending supernova (“subtle metaphor it is not”). We also get into their terrifying version of faster-than-light travel – and how even the “science-iest” science fiction can need a little magic.

This is the story of the supernova event known as Lhonoja. By the end of it, several planets will have burned, a couple of civilisations will have fallen, and I will have spoken to an entity some consider a god, and whose theological status will remain in question throughout.

Before then, I must explain how I came to be, and for that, I must take you back several centuries, to Glastya Row.

��

Glastya Row started as a landing strip on the planet Tu-mdo.

Most urban establishments on most colonised worlds begin this way. Tu-mdo had been a prime terraforming candidate – comfortable gravity, good magnetic shield, not too hot, not too cold, not tidally locked and already possessed of a moon which, once water was thawed out in sufficient volume, would serve to stir the great big mixing bowl of Tu-mdo’s freshly churning oceans. The first colonists didn’t even need to spend five centuries in arcologies waiting for atmospheric conditions to settle, but were out and breathing without aid within a couple of pioneering generations. Two millennia later, Glastya Row had been transformed from pioneer’s outpost to merely another borough of some few million in the great city of Heom, a middling hub of profit and endeavour within the interplanetary-spanning United Social Venture.

They say you can tell a lot about a Venture based on how its employees name their children.

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In Antekeda, the Venture that ran my city, these were the most common middle names given to children at birth:

Chairman – 15 per cent

Entrepreneur – 10 per cent

Director – 9 per cent

Abundant – 5 per cent

Diligent – 4 per cent

In Theymann, a Venture specialising in deep space habitation, the distribution skewed towards Pioneers and Engineers, while in Halsect there was an almost sentimental emphasis on children called “Aspiring”.

My parents had all the ambition you might expect of residents of Glastya Row, combined with a grim realism. Thus when I was born, my name was registered as Mawukana “Respected” na-Vdnaze. I might never achieve dazzling heights or have great Shine, but dammit, my neighbours would at least know that I was respectable.

It would be fair to say that things went downhill from there.

Deep-space sci-fi novel is delightful, profound and not to be missed

A planet is about to be destroyed by the collapse of a binary star system in Slow Gods, Claire North’s first venture into classic science fiction. Read it! says Emily H. Wilson

I am told that I cried an unhallowed amount when I was born, though no one seems able to clarify what “unhallowed” means. I imagine my scream rose a little in volume as they implanted my Chint in the top of my plump left bicep, already embedded with the debts I had accrued to the Venture that ran the hospital that sheltered me – 400 Glint for a standard birth, plus another 1,873 Glint for basic costs such as bedding, vaccinations, postnatal checkups, vitamin shots, etc. . . .

Thus, before I was placed upon my mother’s breast, I was marked with the overriding feature of life on Glastya Row – the debt I owed.

As befits two individuals who named their child “Respected”, my parents were not irresponsible. They had carefully saved for this moment, and were between them able to bring my initial debt down to a mere 700 Glint, and keep on top of the 1.5 per cent child-rate interest payments my existence accrued. Moreover, to welcome me into the world, Antekeda gifted me with fifty shares, my ownership marking me as a citizen of the Venture. By the time I turned fifteen and sat my assignment exams, those shares were worth nearly 600 Glint – though my educational and civic debts were well in excess of 92,000.

This system, we were taught, was about fairness. We were pioneers and our world was a place of scarcity, hardship and struggle. Everything the Venture gave us – the air we breathed, the roads we walked down, the schools we learned in – had been sweated for, bled for, and our debts were a marker of the needful labour we would give back in return.

All are born equal, and by their labours shall they rise.

This philosophy was the underlying constitution of the United Social Venture. Both it and the more anthropologically engaging qualities of social and economic status that arose from it were known as Shine.

��

We were not a high-Shine family. My parents ran a small restaurant that served cold-broth dumplings to hot middle Managers too tired and busy to cook. They did their best to improve their Shine, constantly cooing over difficult, well-dressed customers and putting themselves forward to run catering events in Shiny houses or at Shiny events, but nothing could really wipe the smell of Glastya Row off their grease-stained aprons and soap-scoured fingers. Every six months, an Antekeda representative would come by and offer them another course or long-distance learning diploma in business growth and radical enterprise, and sometimes my mother, always the more energetic of the two, would sign up and do her coursework and pay her fees, and talk at the table about how this was it. This was the change we needed to get out, move up. It never came to anything.

During my “cute” years, which I was told were seven to eleven years old, I worked as a waiter in the shop in the hope someone would give me that most wondrous of miracles, a “tip” for my services. By the time I was twelve, you could see the shape of the adult I was going to be. My father’s thick, straight black hair was overgrown around my mother’s sunset-through-smog face. I was always a little short, with green-grey eyes that narrowed to almost impossible lines when I squinted in confusion (as I did a lot) and pale lips that didn’t smile enough, or smiled wrong, or just didn’t quite get the smiling business right, whenever I tried to move them.

“Smile with your eyes,” my mother commanded, during one of her we-shall-advance phases. So I stood in front of the mirror in the grubby upstairs bathroom and squeezed my eyelids tight and waggled my eyebrows and tried to inventory every tiny muscle about my growing grubby dishcloth of a face, until I could at least achieve something that didn’t seem to upset people too badly.

Despite, or perhaps owing to, these efforts, I was relegated to the back of the kitchen so that my mother could stay out front, charming and occasionally bamboozling the customers. By the time I was fourteen and my schooling was getting unfeasibly expensive, it was already apparent that I would not have a Shiny life. Most of my classmates were starting to drop out into the menial labour that was the heart of every Venture, and those who remained were preparing for adulthood with an endless dance of alliances, enmities, petty acts of cruelty and theft, out-daring each other in who could game the system. Bullies thrived – so long as they were not caught. Being caught was far worse a sin than being a thief, a liar or simply cruel.

Many economists, observing the Shine, have marvelled at the low levels of educational obtainment common across its population. The circular economies of most other worlds, powered by the sunlight or atomic reactors and fed by agricultural systems whose architects can sit in their pantries dispatching drones to the harvest, consider education not merely of primary importance to the success of their systems, but as frankly the most interesting thing the population can do with their expansive time.

However, education breeds curiosity. And curiosity is one of the very first qualities that the leaders of the Shine seek to eliminate from the population.

This is an extract from by Claire North (Orbit), the New Scientist Book Club’s pick for July. Sign up for the Book Club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

When I decided to write a space opera, I wanted to start with a supernova. There is no force in the universe like it, either in scale or destructive power – but though it is irrefutably dramatic, it’s also something you can see coming. As a writer, I find this fascinating. What does it mean to look into the heavens and know the exact date when a star will die and with it, your world? What choices do you make, and what price would you pay to save yourself – or your civilisation?

This is the story of Slow Gods.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you are one of these astronomers, watching the stars that will soon destroy your world. For millennia, you’ve known the supernova is coming, and for millennia your people have ignored it. It’s a difficult sell: “Let’s fundamentally transform our entire society to save the lives of billions of people… in about 500 years’ time.” Everyone agrees in a “rhubarb-rhubarb” sort of way that fine, yes, this is a good idea. For someone else. Later.

Well shucks. Suddenly millennia became centuries, became decades. Time is running out. Perhaps you are looking at your newborn grandchild when you realise: you know how, and when, this babe will die. Perhaps they suffocate as the oceans boil, burn alive as the atmosphere ignites or simply die from radiation sickness, skin and organs slowly liquefying. All the incremental changes you made down the years – a distant colony here, a bit of a space elevator there? Not enough. It’s time for your entire civilisation to re-tool around the grim but inescapable premise of saving what you can in the time that remains.

Deep-space sci-fi novel is delightful, profound and not to be missed

A planet is about to be destroyed by the collapse of a binary star system in Slow Gods, Claire North’s first venture into classic science fiction. Read it! says Emily H. Wilson

Some hasty maths ensues. You’ve got a century to rescue a population of 5 billion before your planet burns. You build space elevators and vast motherships to carry people across the stars, and at the height of the project can evacuate almost 50 million people a year. (You are going to ignore the perpetual danger of the things lurking in the monstrous dark, infesting the crew with madness, playing tricks with biology or simply gobbling a ship whole. Such creatures defy computation, after all.)

In 100 years you can maybe, in a pinch, get everyone off-planet – but of course it’s never that simple.�� Children are still being born, the population renewing itself faster than you can evacuate. Perhaps you try to limit population growth? But no – a childless century is as sure a death for your civilisation as fire itself. Life must continue, even if you know that for every child saved, another will die when the planet burns.

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Perhaps you are selective about who’s evacuated, and in what order. Do you prioritise the educated, the most fertile, the famous? And by implication, are you going to leave the disabled, the vulnerable, the marginalised behind? This is a genocide by omission, civilisational eugenics – is that who you are?

Fine – a lottery system. At least people can agree it’s fairer, even if no one wants to accept their own powerlessness. You hope and hope that your number will be called, but as the years tick by, that hope begins to slip away. Your people expect you to die quietly, all because of a simple bit of bad luck. Do you?

Even if you escape, where do you go? Some worlds straight up reject your people, leaving millions stranded in the endless dark. Others are more willing to accept you, but only a few hundred thousand at a time, shoved into the most desolate corners of an unwelcoming planet that your biology simply isn’t adapted to. Your people are being scattered into tiny enclaves across the stars, cut off from each other, forgetting their own customs, languages, ideas. You have saved lives, certainly – but you haven’t saved your civilisation. Historians leap into action, bickering over what songs and stories are most quintessentially you. You watch as your society is put into a museum, history sold to the highest bidder, and know that whatever is displayed is only a fraction of who you are.

Or maybe you don’t. This is after all just one story in the galaxy of Slow Gods.

Maybe instead you downplayed the crisis and said “someone else will sort it out”, as if anyone can out-bluff a supernova, and now you’ve got less than a decade before your seas boil, and there are billions of people with nothing to do except die. The richest and most powerful have saved themselves, but they still need income, and for that they need people. Desperate, terrified people who will do anything to survive.

You eye up your gunships. You eye up other worlds – vulnerable worlds, outside the blast radius. And you maybe make a choice to save your own children, even if that means someone else’s child will die, because what parent will do less? Choosing between guaranteed annihilation or violence without end, perhaps you choose a war that will burn the galaxy, having decided that this is no choice at all.

Claire North’s ��(Orbit) is the July read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up here, and come and discuss the book on our Discord channel .

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The��New Scientist Book Club��has been reading a popular-science classic in June: Richard Dawkins’s��, which celebrates its 50^th��anniversary this year.

I hadn’t previously read this one – it had always intimidated me (an English graduate). But my colleague Rowan Hooper, a behavioural ecologist as well as our podcast editor, reread it to see how it holds up today and concluded it pretty much did. He had a few issues with the biology and said it “feels its age” – Dawkins himself admits to “sexist pronouns” in a 1989 preface – but Rowan found that “the core message remains relevant not just because genes being selfish is a brilliant meme (a term Dawkins coins at the end of the book), but because it is such a powerful way to understand how evolution operates: the metaphor makes us think as if genes behave selfishly”.

Read an extract from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Dive into the opening of The Selfish Gene's first chapter 'Why are people?', the New Scientist Book Club’s read for June to mark 50 years since the popular science classic was first published

It was time to gird my loins and embark on a book I’ve always been a bit embarrassed for omitting. I have to admit to being a little exhausted at first: there was preface after preface in my edition, in which Dawkins was arguing with all sorts of people about how the book had been received. This was somewhat confusing, given I hadn’t – yet – ��read it. I should have skipped straight to the first chapter.

Once I got into it, though, I found myself (mostly) carried along swimmingly by Dawkins’s writing. He certainly has a knack for a good metaphor – I particularly liked the idea of our bodies as “survival machines” for genes. Without having studied any biology after the age of 16, I got my head around his central point: that natural selection works because genes, or copies of them (replicators, as he calls them), are out to survive, building the optimal bodies (or survival machines) in order to do so.

I did find his tone a little irascible and hectoring at times. It was like he was having conversations with various colleagues/rivals about his points, rather than the general reader. For example, talking about how “one gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies”, he writes that “it is an argument that some of my most respected colleagues obstinately refuse to agree with, so you must forgive me if I seem to labour it!”. We’re also firmly told about the correct pronunciation of “algae” (a hard “g”, people). There’s a lot of that sort of thing, but I finished feeling pleased to have got my head (mostly) around his argument.

Book club members were less impressed – this is, I think, the book that has received the most negative comments of any we’ve read, with a handful of members deciding not to join us in reading it at all, as they disagreed with some of Dawkins’s personal views. (I share the perspective of member pwhipp, who wrote on our channel: “I don’t think we should reject serious scientific writing simply because the author is combative, controversial, or personally irritating. If we did that consistently, the shelves would become very thin indeed.”) Pwhipp, by the way, called The Selfish Gene “an important and very well-written book, whatever one thinks of Dawkins’ public persona or his outspoken atheism”.

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Pwhipp was in the minority, however. Alan P was one re-reader who felt “underwhelmed” by The Selfish Gene. “The text is (as he admits himself but doesn’t change) sexist throughout. It’s not just the assumption of male pronouns for general statements, but there are some comments in the end notes and the text of the book itself that even for the eighties are questionable,” he wrote. “The tone is argumentative – sometimes I’m not clear that it isn’t argument for its own sake – but it’s definitely jarring. The endless footnotes contradicting the text are really difficult to follow. If the science has changed then the text of the book needs to change as well. So it may be that it was a masterly summary of the known science in its day – but now it’s a bad tempered, difficult to follow, mess.”

Alan did enjoy the new chapter “Nice guys finish first”, added to later editions: “I was always of the opinion that genes don’t make ethics so it’s nice to have the idea that even if genetic determinism was a thing, that cooperation is a successful strategy in the wild.”

The Selfish Gene at 50: Why Dawkins’s evolution classic still holds up

When Richard Dawkins’s first blockbuster book was published half a century ago, few genes had ever been sequenced or studied in detail. Yet the book’s gene-centred view of evolution still has much to teach us in today’s genetic age

Dee55, meanwhile, first read The Selfish Gene back in the early 80s and found it “an absolute revelation” at the time. Going back to it was “interesting”, but, as a humanities graduate, Dee55 found “specific challenges in following some of the arguments”. “I enjoyed the Chapter 5 stuff on the ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) as a fun ride, but I think I need to reread it before continuing. I am very aware that I am just not in a position to assess RD’s ideas in the context of other evolutionary biology thinking,” Dee55 wrote.

Rowan took a deeper dive into the book in a longer piece for New Scientist, speaking to biologists about its message and what still stands today. Taking into account developments in the field that have happened over the past 50 years, Rowan wrote that “all the evolutionary biologists I spoke to for this piece struggled to find major problems with The Selfish Gene”. There was one exception: the idea of the meme, which, despite its memetic proliferation today, “doesn’t hold up”, he was told.

Overall, then, a thorny choice: this particular piece of popular science was notedly unpopular for the New Scientist Book Club.

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Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’ Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair, others had had inklings of the truth, but it was Darwin who first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist. Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious child whose question heads this chapter. We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: ‘The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely’.*

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun, but the full implications of Darwin’s revolution have yet to be widely realized. Zoology is still a minority subject in universities, and even those who choose to study it often make their decision without appreciating its profound philosophical significance. Philosophy and the subjects known as ‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived. No doubt this will change in time. In any case, this book is not intended as a general advocacy of Darwinism. Instead, it will explore the consequences of the evolution theory for a particular issue. My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism.

The Selfish Gene: Still one of the most thrilling evolution books ever

Fifty years ago, Richard Dawkins shared an irresistible scientific metaphor with the world that modernised and democratised evolutionary biology. Half a century on, The Selfish Gene remains powerfully insightful, finds Rowan Hooper

Apart from its academic interest, the human importance of this subject is obvious. It touches every aspect of our social lives, our loving and hating, fighting and cooperating, giving and stealing, our greed and our generosity. These are claims that could have been made for Lorenz’s On Aggression, Ardrey’s The Social Contract, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s Love and Hate. The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works. They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene). It is ironic that Ashley Montagu should criticize Lorenz as a ‘direct descendant of the “nature red in tooth and claw” thinkers of the nineteenth century . . .’. As I understand Lorenz’s view of evolution, he would be very much at one with Montagu in rejecting the implications of Tennyson’s famous phrase. Unlike both of them, I think ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably.

Before beginning on my argument itself, I want to explain briefly what sort of an argument it is, and what sort of an argument it is not. If we were told that a man had lived a long and prosperous life in the world of Chicago gangsters, we would be entitled to make some guesses as to the sort of man he was. We might expect that he would have qualities such as toughness, a quick trigger finger, and the ability to attract loyal friends. These would not be infallible deductions, but you can make some inferences about a man’s character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered. The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. ‘Special’ and ‘limited’ are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.

This brings me to the first point I want to make about what this book is not. I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.* I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. I stress this, because I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case. My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true. This book is mainly intended to be interesting, but if you would extract a moral from it, read it as a warning. Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.

As a corollary to these remarks about teaching, it is a fallacy— incidentally a very common one — to suppose that genetically inherited traits are by definition fixed and unmodifiable. Our genes may instruct us to be selfish, but we are not necessarily compelled to obey them all our lives. It may just be more difficult to learn altruism than it would be if we were genetically programmed to be altruistic. Among animals, man is uniquely dominated by culture, by influences learned and handed down. Some would say that culture is so important that genes, whether selfish or not, are virtually irrelevant to the understanding of human nature. Others would disagree. It all depends where you stand in the debate over ‘nature versus nurture’ as determinants of human attributes. This brings me to the second thing this book is not: it is not an advocacy of one position or another in the nature/nurture controversy. Naturally I have an opinion on this, but I am not going to express it, except insofar as it is implicit in the view of culture that I shall present in the final chapter. If genes really turn out to be totally irrelevant to the determination of modern human behaviour, if we really are unique among animals in this respect, it is, at the very least, still interesting to inquire about the rule to which we have so recently become the exception. And if our species is not so exceptional as we might like to think, it is even more important that we should study the rule.

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The third thing this book is not is a descriptive account of the detailed behaviour of man or of any other particular animal species. I shall use factual details only as illustrative examples. I shall not be saying: ‘If you look at the behaviour of baboons you will find it to be selfish; therefore the chances are that human behaviour is selfish also’. The logic of my ‘Chicago gangster’ argument is quite different. It is this. Humans and baboons have evolved by natural selection. If you look at the way natural selection works, it seems to follow that anything that has evolved by natural selection should be selfish. Therefore we must expect that when we go and look at the behaviour of baboons, humans, and all other living creatures, we shall find it to be selfish. If we find that our expectation is wrong, if we observe that human behaviour is truly altruistic, then we shall be faced with something puzzling, something that needs explaining.

© Richard Dawkins

Extract from ) in June 2026, available in hardback, paperback, and ebook formats, £25.00

The New Scientist Book Club is reading The Selfish Gene in June. Sign up for the Book Club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

The New Scientist Book Club had quite a change of science-fictional pace in May, moving from the wilds of space in our April read, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, to a much closer-to-home future in Silvia Park’s Luminous.

Like another of our reads this year, Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot, this imagines a world where robots are integrated into society – and explores how we might deal with this on many different levels: emotionally, spiritually, practically, sexually. Set in a reunified Korea, it’s a compelling blend of three storylines: a police procedural, in which detective Jun is out to discover what might have become of a robot girl who has gone missing; a ragtag bunch of kids on an adventure, in which Ruijie and her schoolmates find an abandoned robot boy in a scrapyard; and a tale of a dysfunctional family. Jun and his younger sister Morgan grew up with a third sibling, a robot who disappeared when they were young, fracturing their family. They’re still estranged today.

Author Silvia Park: ‘No one is your enemy, not even death’

Silvia Park, author of the May read for the New Scientist Book Club, 'Luminous' on emotional artificial intelligence, our inevitable love for robots and coping with grief.

I found Luminous refreshing and thought-provoking. The various strands combine to create a sensitive exploration of what it means to love somebody and what it means to lose somebody. Park, who wrote us a great essay about how the novel started out as a children’s book but became something much darker, is a confident and elegant writer, and I can’t wait to read what they write next (they told me in our video chat – which covered everything from robot consciousness to Peter Pan – that it’s about man-eating mermaids, so that’s a definite yes from me!).

Our book club members found different things to enjoy about Luminous. For TheGosia, it was Park’s writing about disability. “I’m loving it! Really good characters and I’m immediately gripped. What jumped out at me so far was bionic modification of humans portrayed in a positive way,” TheGosia wrote on our . “Super interesting as given the opportunity I would happily abandon most of my very broken meat suit for a more functional, bionic one. But often it’s written through the lens of what you’d lose.”

Exoi was also a fan. “I find it densely packed with so many thought-provoking ideas and stances on robotics and what it means to be a valued entity on our planet. There seem to be more ideas and themes in this book than some authors use in a lifetime, making it intelligent and nuanced. I’m loving it so far.”

So was Karen Warren. “Of course this is only one version of the future, but I could see the seeds of this scenario in our current society. And it got me thinking about how humans have always anthropomorphised inanimate objects (we give names to our cars, and children play games with teddy bears) – it shows how desperate we are for connection,” she wrote. “I found this quote from the author: ‘How do we define what is real? So many of us spend most of our hours either asleep – unconscious or dreaming – or locked in a world that exists on a tiny screen. How can we say, then, that we live in reality’, which I think sums up much of the book.”

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Read an extract from Luminous by Silvia Park

In this extract from Luminous, the May read for the New Scientist Book Club, we meet a mysterious robot discovered in a salvage yard in Seoul, in a future reunified Korea

Alan_P was less taken with this latest read. “Just finished Luminous – and possibly I didn’t pay enough attention, but when enough people have read it so it’s not a spoiler, someone is going to have to explain to me what was going on,” he pleaded on . “It’s beautifully realised, but as I mentioned I’ve got no idea what the ending was all about. And why were the kids so keen to hand around that damaged robot? … Why did years of therapy not help either brother or sister with their father issues?”

Matthew was also a little lukewarm. “I found it slow going and really only finished it because I was two thirds of the way through waiting for something happen. Things happen sure, but they seem to be disconnected events rather than plot. Any plot twists and turns are signalled well beforehand.” Interestingly, Matthew did find the robot identities in Luminous “better realised than in Annie Bot, where Annie was too human” – but said that Iain M. Banks’s Culture universe has “the best robots”. Well, you can’t compete with a Mind. Having read Banks’s 1988 novel The Player of Games with the book club back in December, I’m certainly finding it fascinating to compare his ideas with our current anxiety about artificial intelligence and how it is being reflected in our fiction, from Annie Bot to Luminous.

The New Scientist Book Club has been reading Luminous, Silvia Park’s near-future story set in a reunified Korea in which robots are fully integrated into society. Head of books Alison Flood caught up with Silvia to talk about how this increasingly dark story began as an idea for a children’s book, whether the advent of large language models affected their writing, and whether robots might one day achieve consciousness.

Read more: Why I explore our inevitable love for robots in my novel Luminous