Afterword

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

Ivan’s map mostly corresponds to reality. However, in Going Forth’s leg of the trousers of time, Chernobyl still had functioning nuclear reactors in 1990, Yugoslavia hadn’t started to break up, and East Germany was still firmly in the grip of the Soviet Union.

All the towns and nuclear sites mentioned in the whole book are real, and you really could trace almost all of the expedition’s journey on the ground, in considerable detail.

The derelict factory in the photograph on the cover of the book is not actually on the route. It’s really in Armenia, at Tumanyan^[1]. It’s been abandoned since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The places that are ruins covered in vegetation in the book mostly aren’t yet ruins in the real world.

Laima and Persie’s understanding of the hazards posed by abandoned nuclear reactors, uranium mines etc. is entirely accurate.

Their speculations about climate are reasonable, and could well be generally correct – see How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate? by William F. Ruddiman (Scientific American, March 2005). However, while a cessation of fossil fuel burning in 1990 and a worldwide regrowth of forests probably would eventually result in a resumption of a normal cycle of recurrent ice ages, it’s unlikely (though we don't know enough to be sure) that cooling would really have been so noticeable within a span of only 34 years. (If these things happened today, global warming would most likely continue for a considerable period before starting to reverse. Levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are significantly higher today than they were in 1990.)

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[1] I took that photograph in 2011. What it’s like there now I don’t know.