John Michael Greer

The Best of the Archdruid Report

Thanks to our reliance — and addiction — to petroleum, industrial civilization is collapsing. But rather than the sudden mass calamity imagined by Hollywood films and prophets of doom, it’s a “long descent,” a series of systemic catastrophes which we can no longer prevent.

What can we do in such a time? With wit, kindness, and an astounding understanding of history and political forces, John Michael Greer suggests, “collapse now, and avoid the rush.”

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush collects thirty one of Greer’s best essays from the wildly popular Archdruid Report, each even more timely than when they were first written and selected to give readers a practical understanding of humanity’s situation and what can be really done.

Available both as hardcover (digital cloth with dust jacket) and softcover (perfectbound), each printed on a heavier, archival-quality paper.

(for digital edition, go here)

An Ariel Moravec Occult Mystery

Book Three in the Ariel Moravec Series

Occult detective Ariel Moravec investigates an ancient artefact and a disappearing dog...

When Ariel Moravec and her grandfather are called to investigate the provenance of an ancient relic at the Heydonian Museum, it hardly has the makings of a thrilling or dangerous case.

But mysterious happenings are afoot across town; there have been sightings of a shadowy dog that disappears when photographed, and as she goes about her business, Ariel has the distinct feeling that she is being followed.

Drawn deeper into the case, Ariel can't help but wonder what relation these happenings have to Leonora Blake, Dr Moravec's deceased tutor of magic, who penned the mysterious novel 'The Carnelian Moon'.

As it approaches full moon, Ariel and her grandfather race against unknown forces to unveil the conspiracy surrounding the relic before it disappears forever...

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link)

Envisioning of a Post-Peak World

How to survive and thrive in the post-industrial age

In response to the coming impact of peak oil, John Michael Greer helps us envision the transition from an industrial society to a sustainable ecotechnic world-not returning to the past, but creating a society that supports relatively advanced technology on a sustainable resource base.

Fusing human ecology and history, this book challenges assumptions held by mainstream and alternative thinkers about the evolution of human societies. Human societies, like ecosystems, evolve in complex and unpredictable ways, making it futile to try to impose rigid ideological forms on the patterns of evolutionary change. Instead, social change must explore many pathways over which we have no control. The troubling and exhilarating prospect of an open-ended future, he proposes, requires dissensus-a deliberate acceptance of radical diversity that widens the range of potential approaches to infinity.

Written in three parts, the book places the present crisis of the industrial world in its historical and ecological context in part one; part two explores the toolkit for Ecotechnic Age, and part three opens a door to the complexity of future visions.

For anyone concerned about peak oil and the future of the industrial society, this book provides a solid analysis of how we got to where we are, and a practical toolkit to prepare for the future.

Economics as if Survival Mattered

Renowned political theorist and author proposes a bold new economic paradigm based on the value of sustainability.

The Wealth of Nature proposes a new model of economics based on the integral value of ecology.

Building on the foundations of E.F. Schumacher's revolutionary "economics as if people mattered", this book examines the true cost of confusing money with wealth.

By analyzing the mistakes of contemporary economics, it shows how an economy centered on natural capital—the raw materials that support human life—can move our society toward a more productive relationship with the planet that sustains us all.

The Wealth of Nature suggests public policy initiatives and personal choices that can help alleviate the economic impact of peak oil. These strategies must address not only financial concerns, but the issues of resource depletion and pollution.

Profoundly insightful and impeccably argued, this book is required reading for anyone interested in the intersection of the environment and the economy as we enter the twilight of the Age of Abundance.

A User's Guide to the End of the World

The visionary classic that traces out the twilight of the petroleum age

In 2008, as the price of crude oil spiked to record levels, John Michael Greer's The Long Descent pushed past the stereotyped debates of the time to offer a harrowing but hopeful vision of the future of industrial society.

As believers in perpetual progress insisted that something would turn up to replace depleting petroleum reserves, and believers in apocalypse insisted just as fervently that the spike in oil prices would send industrial society crashing down in ruin overnight, Greer's epochal book reframed the entire debate in terms of the great rhythm of rise and fall the marks the history of civilizations.

The Long Descent follows the ragged course of decline that has brought every previous civilization to its end, and is doing the same with ours.

It takes the average civilization one to three hundred years to descend from its peak into a dark age out of which new civilizations will be born, and that same process is visibly under way in our own lives.

The global challenges facing industrial civilization are not problems that we can solve, but predicaments that all of us must live with, as our societies stumble down the long slope to the deindustrial future.

Much can still be done as the petroleum age winds down, and the interval between one spike in oil prices and the next offers opportunities that will no longer be available when the price of everything made from petroleum starts soaring again — as it will.

The Long Descent offers crucial insights into what individuals, families, small groups, and local communities can do to brace themselves for the changes to come.

Looking to the Past to Reinvent the Future

An examination to discover a solution for the troubles of our modern age: technical regression.

To most people paying attention to the collision between industrial society and the hard limits of a finite planet, it’s clear that things are going very, very wrong. We no longer have unlimited time and resources to deal with the crises that define our future, and the options are limited to the tools we have on hand right now.

This book is about one very powerful option: deliberate technological regression.

Technological regression isn’t about “going back”—it’s about using the past as a resource to meet the needs of the present. It starts from the recognition that older technologies generally use fewer resources and cost less than modern equivalents, and it embraces the heresy of technological choice—our ability to choose or refuse the technologies pushed by corporate interests.

People are already ditching smartphones and going back to “dumb phones” and land lines and e-book sales are declining while printed books rebound. Clear signs among many that blind faith in progress is faltering and opening up the possibility that the best way forward may well involve going back.

A must-read for anyone willing to think the unthinkable and embrace the possibilities of a retro future.

Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age

The acclaimed climate futurist examines our unquestioning faith in progress, and its limits in the face of peak oil and climate change.

Since the Industrial Age began, scientific and technological progress has been nothing short of miraculous. As a result, progress itself has become the new religion of the West. Our faith in it is so complete that many of us ignore the perils of peak oil and climate change, believing that our lab-coated high priests will surely bring forth yet another miracle to save us all.

Unfortunately, progress as we've known it has been entirely dependent on the breakneck exploitation of half a billion years of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels. As the age of this cheap, abundant energy draws to a close, progress is grinding to a halt. Unforgiving planetary limits are teaching us that our blind faith in endless exponential growth is a dangerous myth.

After Progress addresses this looming paradigm shift, exploring the shape of history from a perspective on the far side of the coming crisis. With a startling examination of the role our belief systems play in our collective fate, John Michael Greer makes a persuasive argument for seeking new sources of meaning, value, and hope for the era ahead.

An Ariel Moravec Occult Mystery, #1

Occult detective Ariel Moravec investigates the strange forces stirring in the little farm town of Criswell, where a famous witch lived in colonial times.

Eighteen-year-old Ariel Moravec doesn't expect much from a summer with the grandfather she hasn't met in years: a respite from her dysfunctional family, perhaps, and a brief delay before she has to face an uncertain future.

A few days after her arrival, however, she learns that her grandfather is an occult investigator tasked with hunting down the perils of the Unseen — and he offers Ariel the chance to assist him on a case.

Strange forces are stirring in the little farm town of Criswell, where a famous witch lived in colonial times. Has old Hepzibah Rewell's curse awakened, or is the evil magic the work of someone living?  

Caught in a tightening net of bitter local rivalries and strange happenings, Ariel has to find out...or her own life may be at risk.

This is the updated edition. Available now in both hardcover (grey digital cloth with dust jacket) and paperback.

A Fantasy with Shifting Shapes

A Haliverse fantasy: A legacy from the Eldritch past...

Asenath Merrill, sixteen years old, spends her summers studying witchcraft in the village of Chorazin and her nights traveling the uncanny kingdoms of the Dreamlands.

It’s all perfectly ordinary, if it so happens that you belong to one of the secretive cults that worship the Great Old Ones, your mother comes from Innsmouth and has tentacles for legs, and your grandmother is the Black Goat of the Woods herself.

When Asenath encounters a mysterious girl in the stone circle atop Elk Hill, however, her prosaic existence begins to stretch and blur into patterns she must struggle to master.

A century before, a family tragedy in the little Massachusetts town of Dunwich spun out of control and nearly plunged the world into chaos. Four centuries before that, armed men came to the Norse settlements in Greenland and slaughtered every person they could find, leaving a legacy that still troubles the family of Asenath’s new friend. A secret from the ancient world connects those events with the girl.

Asenath will need all her courage and her fledgling powers as a witch in training to unravel the mystery – and open the way to her own unguessed destiny...

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link.)

A Fantasy with Gill Slits

A Haliverse fantasy: Beneath Greenland's glaciers...

All Toby Gilman wants is a postdoc position where he can pursue his studies in ancient Arctic linguistics and keep the secret of his nonhuman ancestry safely hidden.

The bitter academic politics in his field leaves him only one option: a Miskatonic University expedition to an isolated station on the eastern coast of Greenland. The station needs a a linguist who can decipher the language of the long-vanished Hyperborean civilization.

Having no other choice, he sails with the advance party to the wilderness on Tornarssukalik Inlet. But the expedition is more than it seems, and he is not the only nonhuman among its members.

A lethal peril threatens the survival of Earth itself, and the Great Old Ones and their deadly enemies are both in motion…and they are not alone.

When disaster strikes Tornarssukalik Station, Toby must make his escape across arctic wasteland, sail on a ship crewed by undead pirates and captained by the Terrible Old Man, and face all his deepest fears in a journey in which love, betrayal, and death are constant companions.

It is a journey that will end in the caverns far below Mount Voormithadreth, where the nightmare-being, Abhoth, guards secrets that could end the world...

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link.)

A novel of the deindustrial future…

More than four centuries have passed since industrial civilization stumbled to its ruin under the self-inflicted blows of climate change and resource depletion.

Now, in the ruins of a deserted city, a young man mining metal risks his life to win a priceless clue.

That discovery will send him, and an unlikely band of seekers, on a quest for a place out of legend, where human beings might once have communicated with distant worlds…to a place called Star's Reach…

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link)

A Fantasy with Pseudopods

A Haliverse fantasy: In the Shadow of Hob’s Hill...

Brecken Kendall doesn’t plan on becoming a composer. She also doesn’t expect to encounter one of the eldritch realities H.P. Lovecraft borrowed for his weird fiction.

A sophomore at Partridgeville State University on the edge of the New Jersey pine barrens, she’s trying to leave behind the bitter memories of her childhood and get a degree in music education.

Lovecraft? He’s just one of the authors discussed in a class she’s taking that semester, where she learns about the polymorphous monsters called shoggoths. Those are nothing but an old legend, she thinks...until a young shoggoth, traumatized by a night of fire and death, appears in the kitchenette of the converted garage where Brecken lives.

A lucky chance – or is it more than that? – allows Brecken to communicate with the creature, and she decides to give it the food and shelter it so desperately needs. Over the weeks that follow, an unlikely bond grows between them.

Brecken will need all the help the creature can give her, for her plans for her future are shattered by the awakening of an unexpected talent for music composition; her selfish and abusive boyfriend is seeking power in strange tomes of eldritch lore; the secret organization that annihilated all but one of the shoggoths under Hob’s Hill is still hunting for survivors of that terrible night; the living darkness the old books name Nyogtha, The Thing That Should Not Be, is weaving its own cryptic plans…

…And from beyond the boundary where curved time meets angular time, the terrible Hounds of Tindalos have scented their prey...

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link.)

An ancient evil is stirring…

Centuries after the death of Earth, something unbidden and wicked is beginning to awake on the colony world of Eridan.

Six killing machines have lunged out of the northern barrens to annihilate an isolated community.

The one clue to the motive behind the killings is locked within the shattered mind of the only survivor.

As helicopters race through the skies of Eridan and the warrior mystics of the Halka order brace themselves for the struggle, the survivor, Jerre Amadan, is flung headlong into a journey of transformation and terror.

He will be taken to the core of his own mind, to the hiding place of a long-forgotten nightmare, and to the ultimate confrontation with the fires of Shalsha…

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link)

A journey forward into the past…

The year is 2065. Decades ago, the United States of America fell apart after four brutal years of civil war, and the fragments coalesced into new nations divided by economic and political rivalries.

Most of the post-US America is wracked by poverty and civil strife, with high-tech skyscrapers rising above crowded, starving slums.

But one of the new nations, the Lakeland Republic of the upper Midwest, has gone its own way, isolated from the rest by closed frontiers and trade embargoes.

Now Peter Carr, an emissary from the newly elected administration in the Atlantic Republic, boards a train to cross the recently reopened border into Lakeland territory, on a mission that could decide the fate of his nation.

Ahead of him lies a cascade of experiences that will challenge his most basic assumptions about economics, politics, and the direction history is moving.

Alone among the post-United States republics of North America, the Lakeland Republic has achieved prosperity and internal peace, and it’s done so by modelling it’s future on the past…

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link)

A Fantasy with Pseudopods

A Haliverse fantasy: A whisper from Carcosa...

Five years have passed since Brecken Kendall met the shoggoth she nicknamed Sho and began to discover the unnerving realities hidden behind the stories of iconic weird-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft.

Now Brecken and Sho live in Arkham, Massachusetts, where Brecken juggles the demands of her day job with the early stages of her career as a Baroque composer and musician. She helps Sho stay hidden from the human world, raising six unruly shoggoth broodlings.

The mysterious powers and uncanny beings she encountered five years back have faded into the background of her life, and so has the Radiance, the powerful and secret organization that seeks to exterminate shoggoths and all other Eldritch beings.

But strange forces are moving through the narrow streets of witch-haunted Arkham, as Brecken is drawn into a tangled web of plot and counterplot in which the stakes are hidden and friend is indistinguishable from foe.

At the heart of the conflict is her latest musical project, a Baroque chamber opera based on the brilliant and haunting play The King in Yellow. As the opera moves toward its first performance in Arkham, the Radiance is in motion and so are its enemies, the secretive warriors who serve the Yellow Sign.

But other things are also stirring…the living darkness that the old books call Nyogtha, The Thing That Should Not Be...and the Great Old One Hastur, the King in Yellow himself...

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link.)

A race for survival…

Twenty years have passed on the colony world Eridan since the end of the war between the warrior mystics of the Halka and the heirs of the tyrannical Planetary Directorate.

With the Directorate and its lethal battle-drones gone, the Halka have turned all their strength to the struggle against the cannibalistic Outrunners, so that Eridan can finally be made safe for human settlement.

Yet new forces are moving as the last Outrunner bands are hunted down, and one of the survivors, an Outrunner girl whose body contains an artificial symbiotic life form, may hold the key to Eridan's survival.

As strange signals arrive from space and dissension spreads through the ranks of the Halka, the girl, the symbiont, and the last heir to the Directorate's secret knowledge must reach Journey Star, the starship that brought humanity to Eridan.

What they find there may begin a new era for Eridan...or could it destroy the Halka and everything they hope to defend…?

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link)

A cli-fi thriller in a gritty future

Meet Jerry Shimizu. He's a tough, two-fisted fixer who works for the boss of Habitat Four, one of five Japanese refugee communities built on abandoned oil platforms off the coast of the United States in a hard-edged dystopian future of technological decline and climate chaos. His beat is Shoreside, the bustling, brawling, anything-goes temporary port on the beach two miles from the Habitats.

He's trying to bust a robbery ring that's preying on Shoreside gambling money when he encounters a mysterious woman with strange mental abilities. Before long he's having to dodge hoods sent after him by Shoreside's crime lord, agents of the US government, and spies from its archrival, the European Union. Does all this have anything to do with rumors of a secret supercomputer project in the now-abandoned country inland from Shoreside -- a project that once left a string of corpses behind it, and now might yield a fabulous trove of old world technology? Jerry's going to find out...if he can survive long enough.

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link)

The Weird of Hali

Book Seven in the Weird of Hali Series.

A thrilling adventure on the other side of the Cthulhu Mythos: the stars are right at last...

Twenty years have passed since the ancient war between the Great Old Ones and their bitter enemies swept Owen Merrill away from the world he thought he inhabited.

As a seventh-degree initiate in the Starry Wisdom Church, he knows that the time is close when Great Cthulhu will awaken in his temple-tomb in drowned R’lyeh and end the war once and for all.

Neither he nor any of the servants of the Great Old Ones is prepared, however, for the last desperate counterstroke of the Radiance—the unleashing of the Color out of Space, an alien form of matter that can end all life on Earth.

As the final conflict looms, Owen flings himself on a last desperate quest to stop the descent of the Color out of Space.

His journey will take him from the ruins of a New Jersey college town to a long-forgotten stair descending into a Virginia graveyard, and then to the Dreamlands and beyond.

Helping him are a renegade Radiance negation team commander, a sorcerer out of archaic legend, the youngest of the Great Old Ones, and his own witch-daughter Asenath, but against him stands the massed might of the Radiance, a being of the outer voids summoned by the enemies of the Great Old Ones, and the Color out of Space itself...

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link)

The Weird of Hali

Book Six in the Weird of Hali Series.

A thrilling adventure on the other side of the Cthulhu Mythos: beneath Brooklyn’s sidewalk...

The last thing Justin Martense wants to do is fling himself back into the ancient war between the Great Old Ones and their relentless enemies.

Now that his family’s inherited illness has shown up, he wants nothing more than to wrap up eleven years of farming in the Catskill town of Lefferts Corners and figure out what to do with the rest of his life.

Suddenly a letter from his old friend Owen Merrill shatters those plans. Owen is in terrible danger in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, and the letter carries a cryptic call for help.

With his friends Arthur and Rose Wheeler, Justin hurries south through a half-ruined landscape to try to answer the call.

But more waits beneath the crumbling sidewalks of the decaying Red Hook neighborhood than Justin can imagine: a half-human sorceress with strange powers, shapeless horrors from the deeps of time, and a colossal device left buried in the living rock by the serpent folk of ancient Valusia, which may hold the key to the fulfillment of the Weird of Hali.

The enemies of the Great Old Ones are in Red Hook as well, searching for the device, and for Owen and Justin.

Before he can overcome the dangers that surround him, Justin must gather the clues from a century-old mystery, journey through time into the forgotten past of New York City, obtain a key of silver from a long-dead witch, bring that back to his own time, and then take it into the deep places under Brooklyn, down a stair that no living person can descend...

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link)

The Weird of Hali

Book Five in the Weird of Hali Series.

A thrilling adventure on the other side of the Cthulhu Mythos: in a handful of dust…

As the ancient war between the old gods of Earth and their bitter enemies rises toward a final confrontation, Owen Merrill sets out from his new home in Arkham to Rhode Island, seeking the ultimate weapon in that war: the spells that might succeed in calling Great Cthulhu from his temple-tomb in drowned R’lyeh to fulfill the terrible prophecy of the Weird of Hali.

The threads of evidence he and Jenny Chaudronnier have traced through years of hard work all lead to a young man named Charles Dexter Ward, who lived in Providence a century earlier and may have received copies of the rituals from the elderly scholar George Gammell Angell.

As he plunges into the mysteries surrounding Ward and the rituals, he finds himself entangled in a web of peril reaching far beyond the urban landscape of Providence.

The Starry Wisdom Church there is racked by rivalries no member will discuss, and the Radiance and the Fellowship of the Yellow Sign are closing in.

Owen’s one hope lies with a young woman named Hannah Ward—Charles Dexter Ward’s great-granddaughter—who is in Providence on a mission of her own.

She has learned the same terrible secrets of alchemy her great-grandfather mastered, and plans on using them to revive the one person on Earth who might know the location of the rituals Owen needs so badly: Charles Dexter Ward himself...

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link)

The Weird of Hali

Book Four in the Weird of Hali Series.

A thrilling adventure on the other side of the Cthulhu Mythos: onwards, to a country of dreams…

For five and a half years, since the mysterious disappearance of two of her graduate students, Professor Miriam Akeley of Miskatonic University has pursued her own covert researches into the forbidden lore underlying the seemingly fantastic tales of H.P. Lovecraft.

The clues she has gathered all point to the shocking reality behind those tales, but it takes an unexpected encounter with a creature out of ancient legend and the discovery of a cryptic letter by Lovecraft’s cousin and fellow author Randolph Carter to lead her to the answers she hoped and feared to find.

Miriam finds herself thrust her out of the reality she knows, and into the impossible world that Lovecraft and Carter called the Dreamlands.

She is not the only one to pass through that forgotten portal, however. The ancient war between the Great Old Ones and their enemies has spilled over into the lands of Dream, and an agent of the Radiance now seeks the Temple of the Singing Flame in the far west.

Guided by the oracle of Nodens, Lord of the Great Deep, Miriam and Randolph Carter must stop him—for he carries the Blade of Uoht, one of the three sorcerous treasures of drowned Poseidonis, and if he reaches the Temple and extinguishes the Flame, the Dreamlands and all within them will cease to exist forever...

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link)

The Weird of Hali

Book Three in the Weird of Hali Series.

A thrilling adventure on the other side of the Cthulhu Mythos: something sleeps with the hill…

A last desperate hope brings Justin Martense to the little town of Dunwich in the Massachusetts hills.

Justin’s family lies under an ancient curse brought down on them by an ancestor’s terrible deed. Once in each generation, one of the descendants of Gerrit Martense is summoned in dreams to Elk Hill, near the town of Chorazin in western New York, never to return.

Now Justin has received the summons; a cryptic message from Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the Great Old Ones, sends him to Owen Merrill, who might be able to solve the riddle of the Martense curse soon enough to save Justin’s life.

As the two of them travel to Chorazin and begin to trace tangled clues reaching deep into the region’s colonial past, strange forces gather, and so do the enemies of the Great Old Ones.

Far below the brooding stone circle that crowns Elk Hill, one of the forgotten powers of the ancient world turns in restless sleep—and before they can unravel the secret of Chorazin, Owen and Justin will have to face archaic sorceries, monstrous beings, and the supreme nightmare chronicled centuries before in Ludvig Prinn’s The Mysteries of the Worm...

(This is for the print edition. For the digital edition, see this link)