An American Orwell for the age of Trump, Roy Scranton faces the unpleasant facts of our day with fierce insight and harrowing honesty. We’re Doomed. Now What? penetrates to the very heart of our time.
The time we’ve been thrown into is one of alarming and bewildering change–the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Now what?
We’re Doomed. Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation. Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic, preparing for Houston’s next big storm, watching Star Wars, or going back to the streets of Baghdad he once patrolled as a soldier, Roy Scranton handles his subjects with the same electric, philosophical, demotic touch that he brought to his ground-breaking New York Times essay, Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.
“Roy Scranton writes with angry passion about the various ways we fail to confront reality.”
—New York Times
“Based on its title, some readers might expect We’re Doomed to function as an unremitting rant against the people and agencies actively destroying the environment. But Scranton is a more subtle and versatile writer than that. While he has many disturbing factoids about climate change at his fingertips—and deploys them with precision and accuracy—the essays benefit from the author’s tendency toward self-deprecation.”
—Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club
“Roy Scranton is one of the most gifted writers of his generation.”
—Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
“Roy Scranton is our Jeremiah of the anthropocene and a brutally honest chronicler of American violence in all its forms. His message is as urgent as it is discomfiting. Hear him.”
—Andrew J. Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater East: A Military History
“These are thoughtful, powerful essays from the extremes of geography and experience. Not easy reading, but electric and worthwhile.”
—Mark Greif, author of Against Everything and The Age of the Crisis of Man
”Scranton’s warnings must be heeded.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Difficult, noble in intention, and brilliant in execution.”
—The Gazette