Ascension is a story at the end of Nature—or rather, the end of three “natures”: the 1800s just before Darwin changed the natural world forever; the 1980s just as the digital and genetic revolution begin to replace “nature” with “environment”; and today, a time when we have the ability to manipulate “nature” at both the scale of the planet and at the scale of the genome.

 

The novel follows three biologists, each of which is living in a world on the brink of extinction. It is a story of how “Nature” exists in our imaginations, and how our imaginations bring the natural world, and our place in it, into existence.

 

First using 19th-century engraving and paintings to depict the natural world, the novel opens with a natural philosopher struggling to read the natural history of a Divinely created world as theories of evolution, photography, and the rest of the modern world are beginning to change the very meaning of “Nature.” His Indigenous-Spanish guide feels his own natural world coming to a close under encroaching pressures as he leads the natural historian to a rumored fossil of an enormous bird in the primordial forests of Paraguay.

 

Chapter 2 jumps to the mid-1980s: a time when the forest peoples encountered in Chapter 1 are on the verge of extinction due to genocides carried out by military leaders who were paid in the natural resources of large tracts of land. Against this backdrop comes Jane, a 20th-century entomologist, and Arthur, a film maker sent to make a video about her, the “Jane Goodall” of the feather-lice world, ridiculed for suspecting that birds descended from dinosaurs.

 

The final chapter, set fifteen minutes from now, a time when humans have placed their finger on the fast-forward button of evolution, unable or unwilling to comprehend what will follow. That is, Ascension uses the materials of three eras to tell a story of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and the natural world, from the first realizations that we are both of nature, as well as in nature, to the sharpening awareness that we cannot escape nature: our fates are bound together even if our actions repeatedly usher in a kind of end-time(s). Ascension ultimately asks, If we can accept our own end by understanding it as part of a larger whole, can the same be said for our planet?

 

Like the eras they depict, Ascension tells its story through the materials and tools available to people of the time, which in turn colored the natural world and their understanding of their place in it. Chapters 1 and 2 are set in a world of print, and are published as a print book: Ascension: A Novel. A hybrid of print and other media, the third chapter appears in the printed book as well as here, online. The entire novel is available where ever books are sold.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

An online version of Chapter 3 follows.

​

​