A review by hibiscus
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

4.0

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

You know who

Harari enjoys speculative writing, and what is the future if not speculation? Homo Deus is a futuristic tour de force, just as improbable as unprovable. It's no short of generalisations, it's guilty of blatant reductionism and oftentimes being excessively verbose just to drive some argument home. The reader may be fooled, will surely lose touch with common sense, but will never get bored.

Harari is a master storyteller, his tale is of mankind, of what has passed and what is yet to come. So he starts from the past, reiterating many of his well-received concepts from Homo Sapiens, and leads the charge into the unknown. He's not afraid of ridiculous claims, he almost enjoys them, and wisely enough he talks lighthearted with a pinch of self-irony, a straight face might be too much when discussing dataism, but hey, we too are lost in the fog of technology.

Harari is a dreamer, and what is the future if not a dream? Homo Deus is a warning, beware of your dreams for they may come true. It indulges the wildest fantasies but never forgets to step back and scrutinise the utopian expectations of the sci-fi land of milk and honey. Salvation is close, but as we reach for the tree of knowledge and life, just as we storm the gates of Eden, about to take it back by force and intelligence, our mission on Earth may be over.