"Exterminations." Ugo Bardi's New Book
My new book, Exterminations, is now available in English on Amazon as paperback and e-book. An Italian version is in preparation. As you can see, it is relevant to our current situation, although, honestly, I would have much preferred it to remain an exercise in interpreting ancient history. But so things stand, and we have to face an uncertain world where the unthinkable is becoming not just thinkable but reality.
This book is derived partly from posts published in the “Seneca Effect” blog, but it is a completely new book, where only some chapters find correspondence with blog posts. It is divided into four parts: the first is about historical examples, the second is an examination of what causes exterminations, the third deals with how you may prepare to escape the worst, and the final one discusses possible futures on the basis of models and calculations I have been engaged in. It is a massive 400+ page book, but I hope you’ll find it readable. It is not supposed to be for specialists or for hard-core catastrophists, even though the situation is catastrophic enough.
In time, I’ll see to publish excerpts from the book on this blog. For the time being, here is a discussion on how and why I created it.
How “Extermination” was created
The Internet has made information nearly free for everybody, but, as it often happens, what looks like a good idea generates big problems. One is that more information makes the average quality of information decline. Publishers no longer have the resources they once had to produce high-quality books. The result is a disaster: no more editing, no more good covers, no more dissemination. At the same time, the Internet is invaded by low-quality books that are fully or partly generated by AI programs. Books come and go like leaves pushed away by the wind, leaving no impression on anything.
Yet, I believe there is still space for good books that can go beyond the senseless babble of the current publishing system. Books that deserve to be read and understood. It means, though, that authors must take upon themselves the tasks that publishers once performed. That’s the origin of this book. In many respects, it is an experiment to see whether it is possible to create affordable information by eliminating the expensive and useless publishers and using the tools available for authors today instead.
So, although no part of this book is written by an AI, I wrote it with the assistance of an AI grammar and syntax corrector. That wasn’t sufficient to ensure a “perfect” text, but it made it enormously easier for the work of human editors to smooth the text toward a publishable result. I tried several publishing tools to create a book from a text. Eventually, I saw that regular world processors can be coaxed to create printable books. I used MS Word, but you could do it also using free tools available on the Web, such as Libre Office. I used Word because it supports a good tool to manage bibliographic references, Zotero. Eventually, I even created my own small publishing company, “Kimaira Edizioni.” It is a very small thing, but it can be used to have all my books in the same place on the Web. All the figures in this book are copyright-free or believed to be so. Only one image is made using an AI program (Bing Create).
Then, I am not planning book promotions in terms of ads, lecture tours, interviews, or things like that. Of course, if someone wants to interview me or discuss the book in other forms, it is fine for me, but I am not asking anyone to do that. I even avoided the classic foreword by someone supposed to be important in the field. I am proud to have the foreword written by a purely fictional character, Mera Te Aì 'Enge'ite, a Reptilian Officer (or maybe not fictional, who knows?).
Finally, the book is printed on demand by Amazon, which reduces costs even more and offers a flexibility that traditional publishing cannot even remotely provide. Among other things, printing on demand allows authors to correct the unavoidable errors that accumulate when tens of thousands of words are put together. I am sure that many of you will object to using Amazon as the publisher, but I have no grudge toward Amazon, which I think is doing a good job of making it possible for authors to create and disseminate their works.
And so, here is the book. I hope you’ll like it.
Hey Ugo. I've been following your work for years and greatly appreciate what you do. The new book sounds fascinating. I am currently recording interviews for my new podcast attached to my Zero Input Agriculture substack blog. It will continue my work interviewing amateur crop breeders from the Going to Seed podcast but widen the scope to include big thinkers such as yourself covering relevant topics. The experimental farming work I am promoting is done in the context of the approaching end of industrial civilisation. Would you be interested in recording a podcast episode to help promote the book, delve into tangential topics? I would be very happy to read and review the book beforehand. This is a topic I was very keen to explore myself one day and I am delighted to see you have taken it on first. Let me know if you might have an hour free in October to catch up. It should take me about a week maximum to read your book so I can go in ready to ask all the right questions.
I've read three of your books, which in itself is enough of a recommendation for me to read this one also. Perhaps hard copies of books such as yours will eventually become collectors' items. After reading "The Limits to Growth" in eBook form, I went looking for a hard copy, and was shocked at how much one in good condition costs, considering that it was a best seller in its time. One problem I have with eBooks is that rendering of graphics, maps, and photos is terrible, and many of the books I read are heavy on these (e.g., "Limits to Growth").
It surprised me when you said that "print on demand" was cheaper--I had been under the impression that for an individual copy, "print on demand" was a more expensive way to produce a book. When comparing it to the more traditional process, I guess it depends on whether an entire press run sells out or not--if too many are printed and many later have to be remaindered, that would definitely raise the production cost per copy sold.
Some of your posts comparing ancient Roman history to its modern day near-equivalent are especially interesting. I recently finished reading "The Histories" by Tacitus, and found it just a little creepy to reflect on how close we seem to be to the Year of the Four Emperors in some ways. We are certainly far, far away from the republic that US founders first imagined.