Four Who Saw the End

A darkly brilliant novel about the scientists who tried to warn us the world was heading toward collapse. 

“Start reading it—I dare you to put it down.”—Emmanuel Carrère 

Berkeley, 1973. In a cramped university department powered by one of the world’s earliest supercomputers, four young researchers make a terrifying discovery: if industrial and population growth continue unchecked, modern civilization will collapse within a century. 

The group reacts in radically different ways. Idealistic married couple Mildred and Eugene Dundee dedicate themselves to sounding the alarm. Ambitious French economist Paul Quérillot turns catastrophe into opportunity. And Johannes Gudsonn—the team’s enigmatic mathematical genius—disappears entirely. 

Fifty years later, as climate disaster and political instability reshape the planet the academics once tried to save, a journalist sets out to track Gudsonn down, following his trail to a remote Norwegian fjord in search of answers about the prediction that changed so many lives forever. 

Inspired by the true story behind the landmark 1972 report The Limits to Growth, Abel Quentin’s Four Who Saw the End is at once an intellectual thriller, a fierce satire of modernity, and a deeply human portrait of a generation that foresaw catastrophe—and failed to stop it.