All Tomorrows: A Billion Year Chronicle of the Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man (C. M. Kösemen) "The story begins in the near future, as burgeoning population pressures force humanity to terraform and colonize Mars. After a brief but violent civil war between the two planets, the genetically engineered survivors begin a new wave of colonization, spreading across the galaxy. Everything is looking up for the human race… until the colonies encounter the Qu, technologically advanced aliens on a religious mission to remake the universe. Although humans fight valiantly, the Qu easily overpowered humanity; as punishment, these aliens decide to genetically modify the survivors, turning most of them into mindless, animalistic creatures before departing. Evolution kicks in, with these terraformed post-humans continuing to breed and evolve, some regaining sapience in the process, some do not, and many others simply going extinct.
The book covers roughly a billion years of humanity's future descendants evolving into various new species and going through mass extinction after extinction, before finally revealing that the author is an alien paleontologist writing on humanity's fossil remains, with no idea what finally drove the clade to complete extinction."
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Kate Brown) "The book is a comparative history of the cities of Richland, in the northwest United States adjacent to the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Site plutonium production area, and Ozersk, in Russia's southern Ural mountain region. These two cities were home to the world's first plutonium production sites, and in Plutopia Brown charts the environmental and social impacts of those sites on the residents of and the environment surrounding the two cities. Brown argues that the demands of plutonium production – both the danger of the physical process and the secrecy required in the Cold War context – led both US and Soviet officials to create "Plutopias," ideal communities to placate resident families in exchange for their cooperation and control over their bodies. This entailed creating significant state-run welfare programs along with high levels of consumerism in both places. However, each city witnessed what Brown terms "slow-motion disasters" via the slow, and usually controlled, release of high levels of radiation into their surrounding environments."
Extinction Leitner Bracket Round 2 Bout 2
All Tomorrows (C. M. Kösemen)
Plutopia (Kate Brown)












