'The Doomsday Key' by James Rollins and End of World Scenarios

This action-adventure end of the world novel is quite well written. The author writes in a Clive Cussler style with the technical knowledge and historical insights a reader enjoys. Its fun to have some vitamins amidst the cereal.

There could be a new fiction writers genre of end of the world or nearly end of the world novels. End of the world scenarios have been with us since at least the ancient prophecies. Before those there were oral and later written histories of end of the world floods that cover vast areas of land suddenly.

End of the world scenarios today often are developed within over-population parameters. Malthus was the first of the west to formalize the relationship of human population to an inadequate planetary ability to produce enough food. Today there are redundant end of the world criteria simultaneously stimulating interesting yet plausible fiction scenarios in which the human population of the world is about to be culled by about 99%.

The Doomsday book has it all; history, pagan symbols, Christian Saints, Norway, high tech spooks, several continents, water, caves, tombs, thermite bombs, Viking ships, a U.S. Senator and a clock ticking down on the survival of the human race.

One of the paradoxical things about these nearly end of the world novels in which evil villains, secret societies and misguided would be benefactors of humanity fail at getting rid of most of the human population in order to prevent humanity from perping cataclysmic global warming or over populating the world and destroying Gaia or just overstripping the food supply is that when the plot is thwarted humanity continues on its march as lemmings to the edge-if there is an edge to the world metaphorically speaking. Thus the paradox arises that the good guys are really dummies and the villains are actually good with 'tough love' or 'good hatefulness for mankind.

The way the cookie crumbles if humanity continues its mass extinction of species and the world ecosphere deflates and shrinks to a small enough area that only maybe 100 million people could survive on Earth-that is thought to be a long way off yet-maybe 100 years ahead I believed Lovelock's Book 'The Vanishing Face of Gaia; The Final Warning' mentioned as a distinct possibility is hard to predict. It not necessary as a component of any of the world's major religions that humanity destroy its own ecosystem and collapse the world population and prospects as an eschatological event. When the time for the end of human experience arrives it won't be avoidable, yet that could be a trillion years ahead-space-time is malleable. Probably when humanity becomes really dumb and useless for anything beside ignorance and self-destruction God will wrap it up.

Sometime it might be useful to develop a checklist for end-of-the-world content for novels in order that readers might find the sort of end of the world things they like in the book they consider buying. It is useful to know if the villains are secret societies, left-wing, right-wing, or from other space-time continua. One should know if humanity will suffer famine, plague or be enslaved by apes, eaten by insects or turned to stone with a particle beam.

If there are heroes or heroines that save mankind and some chimpanzees so they may live in peace and harmony or go on normally in corporate fealty with a robust rate of global economic growth we should be able to see that in a checklist sticker on the cover. The 'Doomsday Key' would have a lotta checks.

Perhaps the optimal solutions to the end-of-the-world scenarios because of the destruction of Gaia, pervasive pollution of our precious bodily fluids, overpopulation and wars and chaos with famine, global warming and etc. require not just defeat of the villains that seek to cull humanity in order to save a remnant of it, but a kind of ecospheric hero-a Dmitri Ecoskoy figure- who finds a way to defeat evil global villains and also eliminate federal debt, create full employment and restore the ecosphere with brilliant macro-engineering projects paid for with tax dollars or not.