Petrified

by Joshua Wodak

2025 · Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Lyrical, playful, and deadly serious, Petrified brings our ideas about the unfolding climate crisis into play with Earth’s ability to unleash its own crises, time, and time again... A rupture of life on Earth is currently unfolding. What, then, does this rupture signify, not only in terms of being alive during such an upheaval, but also in terms of being alive to upheaval itself? Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth takes the reader on a journey deep into the nature of our home, to give us the tools to learn how, in the middle of that rupture, to comport ourselves with honesty, clarity, culpability and intelligence. The purpose of this journey is straightforward: to formulate the basis of a philosophy for living during this rupture of life on earth. A philosophy for living in the twenty-first-and-last century of life as we have known it on our planet. A toolkit, as it were, for living at the confluence between being petrified at the prospect of extinction, and becoming petrified in the most real and physical sense. Lyrical, playful, and deadly serious, Petrified aims to provide a new worldview for a new world coming, creating a present-day fable about achieving fidelity to the vicissitudes of the cosmos. Wherein, the book asks: if desperate times call for desperate measures, how can the response be measured against its only true correlate – the cosmos?

Wild East

by Joshua Provan

2020 · Fonthill Media

For over two centuries Japan had been hidden behind a veil of seclusion. This changed in when Commodore Perry arrived in 1853. Unsurprisingly for a world power, Britain was fast to get in on the action. But unknown to the intruders their sudden appearance had accelerated the pace of political change in Japan. The newcomers found themselves increasingly out of their depth in a power struggle that they did not understand. The Shogun and the Emperor were at each other's throats, factions were jockeying for position, and the foreigners were at the centre of it. Britain's first diplomats found themselves the targets of assassins and to their confusion discovered that the Emperor had no legislative power and the Shogun's word was no longer law. Yet with the lessons of the Opium Wars still in recent memory, a slew of British soldiers, ambassadors, interpreters and adventurers attempted to protect imperial interests in Japan without causing outright war. This is the story of the rocky beginning of Anglo-Japanese relations, a story of the 'wild east', full of political schemes, Gunboat diplomacy, assassins and samurai, set in the dying days of the Edo period and the twilight of the last Shogun.