The Last Zookeeper

In looking at a world where surviving a global catastrophe no longer seems to include humans, Becker is as inventive and imaginative as ever, drawing a parallel between future disaster and Noah’s Ark. NOA, a tall, yellow robot, lives – if that’s the word: ‘operates’ might be better – in some partially submerged ruins of what might well be a zoo, tending to pandas and tigers. rhinos and flamingos. NOA is faced with rising sea level (in a subtle but worrying sequence of pictures where one night the robot is sitting on a jetty in the rain and in the morning sits there again, only to find the water has risen). NOA’s ingenuity constructs a boat, and takes the animals away through amazingly depicted seascapes to some little islands. Clearly this is only a stop gap, but a similar robot arrives and together they take the animals to a tall, lush island where the animals can find food and the robots can be friends.

There is so much to take in; the energy sources for the two robots; the remnants of human lives, the gentle anthropomorphism of NOA’s desk and shoulder bag; and whether the robots experience emotion. This book is to be explored again and again, and could serve as a counterpoint to the stories of Noah and of Adam and Eve in Genesis. Perhaps a single age range is insufficient, and this could be seen as a text for Secondary RE as well.

In some ways, of course, we have seen this before; think Disney Pixar’s Wall-E.  The message that it is AI – in the person of the compassionate robots – that will save the world is at least thought-provoking. There is rich material for discussion here, as long as the book is seen as a starting point for a message about the fate of the Earth, rather than simply a parable about how everything will be all right. After all, where are the humans?