SAPIENS

A graphic adaptation of Harari’s 2015 deep-history masterwork concludes by carrying the human story from medieval times to the present and a little beyond.

Though forced by a narrative more focused on broad trends and big ideas than specific events—portraying the author, his niece Zoe, and other inserted characters standing in historical settings or sitting in study halls or around cafe tables beneath heavy blocks of discourse—the book’s illustrator and colorist have done wonders to lighten the load. What better way, for instance, to encapsulate the modern impacts of science, capitalism, and empire-building than to have the Grim Reaper lying on a couch regaling a therapist with sharply falling child mortality statistics and complaining that the only ideology that gives death a central role any more is nationalism? Or to have Tweedledum and Tweedledee debate whether any revolutions have actually made people happier? Following the metaphorical same-sex coupling of costumed superhero “Scientifik” and “Lady Empire,” the discourse moves past a startling if unconvincing quiz pushing the notion that today’s liberals and conservatives are mostly on the same page, to a vision of a speculative near-future in which “nonorganic AIs” have superseded human mores, agendas, and paradigms with ineffable ones of their own. Readers of African descent will have difficulty finding themselves or their forebears here, aside from brief mentions of the Atlantic slave trade as a great investment, and Asians and Indigenous Americans are even less visible. Still, debatable as Harari’s ingenuous assertion that humans have “conquered the world” may be, his suggestion that if our days as “irresponsible gods” are numbered, then it’s imperative to decide what we want to become—or, put another way, what we “want to want”—merits urgent consideration.

Provocative and disarming—like the original.