Let’s begin by stating that Tom Ough’s The Anti-Catastrophe League is rather a triumph, the sort of book that one imagines being read in a comfortable armchair, with a roaring fire, a glass of excellent port, and perhaps an escape plan in case the supervolcano erupts mid-sentence.
Mr Ough has set himself the enviable task of cataloguing the most stylish ways civilisation might be abruptly curtailed. He takes us from cosmic billiards (asteroids) to the wrath of the Earth’s own plumbing (supervolcanoes), with diversions into nuclear brinkmanship, pestilence, and that most fashionable of modern nightmares, rogue artificial intelligence. The effect is that of being conducted through the end of the world by a well-bred don, precise, unflappable, and quite untroubled by the prospect of annihilation, save for the faintest tightening around the eyes.
Particularly splendid are the set-pieces, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, where humanity at last swatted a celestial fly, is described with the understated pride of a headmaster announcing that one’s son has been made captain of the cricket XI. The Supercritical chapter on geothermal energy reads like an engineering Boy’s Own adventure, involving drilling to the Earth’s molten heart with a casual “let’s see what happens” bravado. And in Disease X, we meet the germ-slaying champions of ultraviolet light, who wage their war against microbes with all the gallantry of a cavalry charge.
Yet, and it is the sort of “yet” that invites a discreet clearing of the throat, one cannot help but feel that Ough is, at heart, the gentleman lecturer rather than the bugler at the head of the charge. He presents the threats with admirable rigour, but refrains from leaping onto the desk and shouting, “Follow me, men! We’re off to save the species by teatime!”
There are, too, absences worth noting. Nowhere in this otherwise exhaustive atlas of peril does one find a chapter on economic collapse and the slow suffocation of opportunity. Ough nods towards technological stagnation, but never quite confronts the notion that a society bankrupt in both coin and confidence may be unable to muster the resources for asteroid deflection or pandemic control. Surviving the rock is all very well, but rather a hollow victory if we’ve already sold the observatory to fund the electricity bill.
Similarly, in his chapters on artificial intelligence, Ough pursues the grand question of alignment, how to prevent the Shoggoth from deciding it would prefer us non-functional, yet neglects the quieter catastrophe of deskilling. A civilisation that cannot read a map without satnav, multiply without a calculator, or write without autocorrect is one mild power cut away from being reduced to a state of helpless mumbling. In that sense, over-reliance is not merely a social nuisance but a slow burn existential fragiliser.
Still, one must not be churlish. The Anti-Catastrophe League is a marvellous work of synthesis and storytelling, the very thing to press upon a bright nephew who insists the world will muddle along without any particular effort. It is lucid, humane, and just whimsical enough to make its parade of hazards rather enjoyable, the literary the equivalent of a garden party in full bloom, when a guest, between sips of Pimm’s, casually remarks on how pretty the approach of a rather large, fast-moving rock is.
If there is to be a next instalment, and one rather hopes there will, I should like to see Ough mix the meticulous scholarship with a dash of rousing bravado, a celebration of genius to match the catalogue of threats. Let us have our triumphs rendered not as polite footnotes but as full-throated victories; our innovators toasted as if they had just wrestled a thermonuclear warhead into submission.
Final judgment: 4 out of 5 rockets, awarded with enthusiasm, the deduction offered not as reproach but as a gentleman’s wager that next time, Mr Ough will let slip the dogs of rhetoric and produce a volume to make the League not merely a catalogue of the great and the good, but the rallying cry of a civilisation that fully intends to have the last laugh.