Looking back from deep time: ‘The Ancients’, a reading list

John Larison’s latest novel The Ancients is a richly imagined epic set in a post-climate apocalypse world, which weaves together three narratives to tell a story of human resilience, hope and the stewardship of our world for future generations. Here, Larison discusses some of the books that influenced his work, and how looking to the deep past can give a sense of where we might be heading.

As a novelist, my totem might be the countertop sponge. Writing fiction often feels like soaking up influences, then learning – over months or years – how to squeeze those influences in new forms onto the page. While researching a novel, I trust my intellectual curiosity to curate the influences the project needs. Here are some of the titles that proved vital while writing The Ancients, a novel that is as much about humanity’s deep past as it is about our possible futures. 

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
I first encountered the writing of the Indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer in an essay she published called ‘The Language of Animacy,’ which argues that English itself inaccurately frames our understanding of the natural world. That essay led me to her seminal work of non-fiction, one that helped me see (among other things) how creation stories can shape a culture’s perception of the physical qualities of their world long after the culture itself has moved on from a literal understanding of that creation story, à la Adam and Eve. This book is rich with plain-spoken wisdom that I continue to ponder years later.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind by Yuval Noah Harari
I was working on the early versions of The Ancients when I first encountered Harari’s nonfiction bestseller in 2016. The book moves at a breakneck speed that offends some of my academic friends but that allows Harari to achieve a wide-angle view on our species. There’s something thrilling about holding the entirety of human history in the palm of one hand. I wanted my novel to deliver a similar effect but with the added emotional register that is available to works of fiction. Over the years, Sapiens became a double inspiration: I came to feel that Harari offers a certain version of the human story, and I knew I wanted my novel to offer a visceral counterpoint.

The Epic of Gilgamesh in multiple translations
The oldest source material for this singularly influential epic of Mesopotamia are clay tablets pressed with cuneiform that date back 4,000 years. The archaeological record suggests that the story continued to be rewritten and translated and discussed for 2,000 years across the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean. The story centers King Uruk who, after the death of his intimate friend, embarks on a quest to discover the source of eternal life. In these pages, I was excited to discover the precursor to the Noah of Genesis, as well as striking resonances with the story of Adam and Eve and those epics attributed to Homer. I returned to the poem many times to better understand how ancient myths continue to shape modern narratives. In a sense, The Ancients pushes this lineage forward: what will the echoes of this 4,000-year-old story sound like in another four (or six) thousand years?

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline
Cline’s book offers the general reader an engaging and compelling glimpse into the collapse of the globalized Bronze Age economy, the reasons why it happened, what the experience might have felt like from the ground level and how the failure of an economic system can spark regression in culture and technology for centuries. We learn that ‘collapse’ can be a slow process, one that an individual might not recognize, and how even large-scale military victories can lead to disaster. The echoes to the present are at times haunting. This book helped me visualize the all-too-likely processes that could cause the human future to look more like The Flintstones than The Jetsons.

The Odyssey, translations by Robert Fagles and Emily Wilson
I feel very lucky to teach this epic each spring to undergraduate students at an American university. Each time I re-enter the narrative, I find myself more deeply affected by the potency of the humanity in these pages, which has somehow transcended millennia, culture and translation to reach us in English. While writing The Ancients, I read from the poem as part of my regular diet to remind myself that human beings have more in common than we do in difference, and that works of literature can succeed in centering those commonalities, even across three millennia. The rhetorical context of the poem’s creation was also a major source of insight into how human communities make, shape and congeal around their stories of the past. (In short – because I can’t resist – the poem appears to have been conveyed orally for centuries after the collapse of the Late Bronze Age before being transcribed sometime around 750 BCE; the poem as we have it celebrates a mythic version of ‘Greek’ history much like the cowboy Western functions for American audiences.)

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
This list gives the false impression that I’m most inspired by either old poems or new non-fiction titles, but the truth is that bulk of my reading time is devoted to novels of the 20th and 21st century. When I encountered Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr in 2021, for the first time I felt that I was reading a novel written from a similar geist as The Ancients. The story transcends time to centre the humanity of divergent characters; it is written in prose that is as informed by ancient literary works as it is by modern sensibilities; most of all, the novel offers a hopeful vision of human resilience in the face of catastrophic change. At a perilous moment in the process, this novel gave me the courage to keep pressing ahead into the unknown.