In 50 million years, will we leave a trace?

This stark imagining of humanity’s future fossils is too melancholy for its own good, says Steven Poole

IFOOTPRINTS: IN SEARCH OF FUTURE FOSSILS by David Farrier 320pp, Fourth Estate, £16.99, ebook £9.99

n 50 million years, what will a race of superintelligent bees be able to glean about the extinct species Homo sapiens from studying the sediments in rock? It will be obvious to the bees that we used a lot of plastic, and were capable of making metal tools. There might even be a few of the bacteria that currently live in our bodies miraculously preserved and viable in crystals of salt. But of our cities and our culture, nothing will survive.

Such is the thought experiment offered by one scientist interviewed in this fascinating book, in which the literature academic David Farrier wanders the world in a kind of imaginative fugue, transforming the scenes he witnesses into a post-apocalyptic dreamscape. In the perspective of “deep time”, much will not last, and there is an elegiac poetry to Farrier’s pronouncements. “The roads that connect our towns and cities,” he remarks, “will be abandoned. The plant life we cut back to their edges will creep unchecked; their surfaces will split and rupture.” Particles from car tyres will end up at the bottom of the ocean, and so in time will whole cities, as legend has it Atlantis did: Shanghai, New Orleans and Venice are sinking inexorably on their swampy ground, while coastal cities such as New York and London will be drowned by sea level rises. These metropolises, Farrier notes with what passes for optimism, have “the best chance of being fossilised” if they are swiftly covered over with a preserving layer of clay.

His most gloomy chapter is on plastic, the ubiquitous and in many ways miraculous substance that seems to exist outside ordinary time and yet is, too, depressingly eternal. “The cumulative output for the plastic age so far exceeds six billion tonnes,” Farrier records, “and it is likely that every single piece of plastic ever produced and not incinerated still exists somewhere in some form.”

Particles of plastic end up choking birds and poisoning fish the world over, and they are in us too. Gone are the innocently futuristic days of 1997, when it was still possible for a pop star to sing: “Life in plastic/ It’s fantastic.”

Farrier’s journey also takes him to a laboratory in Australia where ice cores are drilled from the Antarctic: another way of peering into the deep past, as changes in the composition of the atmosphere are preserved in the ice layers over hundreds of millennia. He tells, too, of the subterranean city built under the ice of Greenland by the US military in the Sixties: as the ice there melts and retreats, as it is doing everywhere, the noxious substances of this abandoned facility will gradually leach, as does everything else, into the long-suffering sea.

Perhaps the most enduring sign of advanced human civilisation, though, will be the presence in tree rings and lake beds and ice layers of plutonium-239, an element vanishingly rare in nature but which was produced in large quantities in the explosive orgy of nuclear weapons testing during the middle of the 20th century. There is also, as Farrier discusses, the problem of “spent” nuclear fuel, which is very much not spent in its capacity to harm living things for tens of thousands of years hence. Should we build elaborately symbolic warning signs to instruct our descendants to keep away, as some Americans propose, or alternatively, as the Finns are doing, bury it miles deep in the bedrock and then deliberately forget about it?

In the long run it won’t matter, since – as Keynes famously observed – in the long run we are all dead. Eventually another ice age will arrive and bury Europe once again under miles of ice, if anyone is still living there to be buried. This book is rather extinctionhaunted, indeed, to an extent that comes to seem not purely rational. More cheerful observers might posit that adaptable and intelligent modern humans, for all the challenges we will face in adapting to the damage we have wrought,

Plutonium-239 will be left in tree rings and ice layers by the 20th century nuclear orgy

The dystopian thriller is a vulnerable genre, readily hijacked by those who would rather be hailed as prophets than storytellers: see Apocalypse How?, by former MP Oliver

Letwin, which betrays its cogent arguments about our over-reliance on technology by failing to work as fiction. Your time will be more profitably spent engaging with the less obvious lessons of Andrew Hunter Murray’s debut novel.

The book is set in 2059, some 30 years after a haywire white dwarf star has caused the Earth to stop turning. Britain, lucky enough to have been sunny side up at the time of “The Stop”, is in “the Goldilocks zone”, one of the few places left on the planet warm enough to grow crops but not too hot for habitation.

Exposition is painlessly filtered through the perspective of Dr Ellie Hopper, a scientist newly returned to London after years of studying tides (and occasionally disposing of passing shipfuls of dead refugees) on a rig in the North Atlantic. She’s on a McGuffin hunt, searching for the mysterious object belonging to her old Oxford tutor that could bring down Britain’s autocratic leader.

You can nitpick when it comes to some of the internal logic of this dystopia, but Murray should be commended for going into the nitty-gritty of how his postdisaster society functions; the book is a lot less nebulous in this respect than John Lanchester’s The Wall, which explored similar territory to much acclaim. The plot unfolds with a certain cheesiness that might have been less jarring in a novel that wasn’t so strikingly original in its setting, but it certainly holds the attention.

What really distinguishes the book, though, is the creative energy of its world-building: it demonstrates the virtue of using the future as a playground for the imagination rather than trying to second-guess it.