In 1972, the Meadows Report threw a spanner in the works of the intoxication of exponential growth. Commissioned two years earlier by the Club of Rome from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, their report — Limits to growth (in a finite world)reissued in 2013 by Écosociété — warned humanity against the possible ecological consequences of limitless economic growth.
Lack of raw materials, exhaustion of resources, demographic crises, armed conflicts: a scientific prophecy that has been received rather coldly by the leaders of our societies obsessed with growth, eaten away by denial and cognitive dissonance.
It is from this report – and from our headlong flight – that we freely draw inspiration Hutthe third novel by Abel Quentin, the pen name of Albéric de Gayardon, a writer born in 1985 in Lyon. He set up his own team of young researchers from the University of Berkeley, in California, who in 1973 produced a report on the future of the world in the 21st century.e century using system dynamics.
After introducing us to each of the protagonists and the context of the writing of “Report 21”, Abel Quentin gives us (with a bit of satire, as usual) portraits of the Dundee couple and Quérillot, characters struggling with the consequences of the report, but also with their own conscience. Paul Dundee will suffer from depression before converting with his partner to pig farming. Quérillot, the Frenchman, initially less naive than his American colleagues, will later go over to the dark side of the force, working for the oil company Elf Aquitaine.
Between autism and sociopathy, responsible for the demographic aspect, Johannes Gudsonn is a Norwegian mathematician terrified by uncontrolled birth rates. In his eyes, man is a kind of superpredator, and famines are means of natural regulation of the planet. After quickly abandoning research and returning to settle in Norway, the man took off and no one, it seems, has crossed his path since 2017.
To mark the 50th anniversary of “Report 21”, in 2023, a French journalist, Rudy Merlin, will embark on an investigation. What happened to “the Berkeley four”? We quickly find him on the trail of the foggy Norwegian, who has become a sort of hermit obsessed with the Fibonacci sequence and tracking magnetic fields while waiting for the end of the world.
Before branching off into philosophical considerations, and presenting, among others, the figures of the founder of deep ecology, Arne Naess, and Theodore Kaczynski (nicknamed “Unabomber”, a mathematician and anarcho-ecologist fond of parcel bombs responsible for several attacks in the United States), the novel then takes on the air of a thriller.
It takes us from Paris to Puy-de-Dôme, via a fjord near Bergen, Norway, to an abandoned cabin where we discover Gudsonn’s journal. And his progressive madness – which is perhaps also ours.
An ambitious and detailed novel, as gripping as it is relevant, inhabited by flesh-and-blood characters, anchored in the reality of technoscience, the fear of collapse and the ecological catastrophes to come.