Publisher Lightning Books
Published 16th August 2021
Number of Pages 304
Available in EBook and Paperback
SYNOPSIS
Mel Winterbourne’s modest map-making charity, the Orange Peel Foundation, has achieved all its aims and she’s ready to shut it down. But glamorous tech billionaire Joey Talavera has other ideas. He hijacks the foundation for his own purpose: to convince the world that the earth is flat.
Using the dark arts of social media at his new master’s behest, Mel’s ruthless young successor, Shane Foxley, turns science on its head. He persuades gullible online zealots that old-style ‘globularism’ is hateful. Teachers and airline pilots face ruin if they reject the new ‘True Earth’ orthodoxy.
Can Mel and her fellow heretics – vilified as ‘True-Earth Rejecting Globularists’ (Tergs) – thwart Orange Peel before insanity takes over? Might the solution to the problem lie in the 15th century?
Using his trademark mix of history and satire to poke fun at modern foibles, Simon Edge is at his razor-sharp best in a caper that may be more relevant than you think.
MY THOUGHTS
This highly entertaining book is an interesting study of how an agenda, however outlandish, unlimited money, the call of “alternative facts” and the power of social media can replace the truth through the erosion of trust in accepted facts. Having read this book and now writing this review I’m not sure that this isn’t a story and that the world is actually flat!
It addresses the question of how to dupe the world into believing alternative facts.
The subject, flat-Earthers, is current and real and living on social media. The story follows the subversion of an organisation, Orange Peel, originally built to correctly map the spherical world by a tech billionaire with limitless money to spend and an agenda to fulfil.
Shane Foxley takes on the project to save his job, but is drawn into a murky world of twitter bots and subterfuge and gradually, almost imperceptibly turns Orange Peel from the respected totem of mapping the spherical globe to the standard bearer for flat-earthers and building this as a new belief .
The book is lightly written, almost as a farce, but all along the way it is very believable, partly because the power of social media is already clear and because the escalation of events in the story, from low key allowing of extreme and unproven points of view as credible to vilifying historical characters like Columbus, is sharply observed.
Funny, entertaining and too believable!
Many thanks to Dan of Eye and Lightning Books for my EBook copy to read and review.
Praise for The End of the World is Flat: ‘I laughed so hard I nearly fell in my cauldron. A masterpiece’ Julie Bindel ‘A bracingly sharp satire on the sleep of reason and the tyranny of twaddle’ Francis Wheen ‘Animal Farm for the era of gender lunacy, with jokes’ Jane Harris, author of Sugar Money ‘Skewers the insanity of gender ideology with the wit and brilliance of a modern-day Swift’ Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality ‘This merry romp punctures the idiocy that would turn language and good sense upside down and divide us all into true believers or bigots’ Simon Fanshawe ‘Very, very funny – and a completely believable account of how this kind of ideology could seep into great institutions’ Gillian Philip |
Babbage and Sweetcorn 
Fab review you’ve definitely intrigued me!
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