The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch
Lewis Dartnell
The Bodley Head
Reader, have you considered the apocalypse? You know, the end of days, probably by epidemic or solar flare. The cataclysm. The decimation. *The opening of the seven seals.* Lewis Dartnell has. His book, The Knowledge, acts as both thought experiment and post-apocalyptic guidebook, condensing into 352 pages all the science, technology and homesteading skills you’ll need for Civilisation 2.0. The book investigates the fabric of the new society – we learn to extract salt from seawater, to leaven bread, to raid golf carts for their rechargeable batteries and to avoid rickets at all costs (ain’t nobody got time for that).
Dartnell’s narrative is charmingly erratic. He swings between dry science and fantasies of devastation, at times giving way to talk of a landscape roamed by packs of domestic house-pets gone rogue, or fantasies of opportunist neighbours ‘dining out on the leftovers of our civilisation’.
There is a calm that tempers the horror of this book, a mutual flattery between reader and author. *We will survive, because we are prepared.* Dartnell encourages the reader to make peace with the fact that civilisation is impermanent, and flammable, and frail. In practical terms, the book might have benefited from more diagrams, or more thorough instructions on how to create homespun penicillin with bacteria harvested from the inside of your nose, but The Knowledge makes for an eye-opening dose of fantastical reality.
Words: Roisin Kiberd
