Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari review – chilling

The epic, widely celebrated Sapiens gets the sequel it demanded: a breathless, compulsive inquiry into humanity's apocalyptic, tech-driven future

Yuval Noah Harari began his academic career as a researcher of medieval warfare. His early publications had titles like "Inter-frontal Cooperation in the Fourteenth Century and Edward III's 1346 Campaign" or "The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles". Then, the story goes, having won tenure at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he embarked on a crusade of his own. He was invited to teach a course that no one else in the faculty fancied - a broad-brush introduction to the whole of human activity on the planet. That course became a widely celebrated book, Sapiens, championed by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Barack Obama, and translated into 40 languages. It satisfied perfectly an urgent desire for grand narrative in our fragmenting Buzz-fed world. The rest is macro-history.

Related: Yuval Noah Harari: The age of the cyborg has begun - and the consequences cannot be known