A Summary of "Paradise Made to Order" by Bernard Werber

The French writer has collected seventeen disparate texts under a single cover, where futurological hypotheses sit alongside recollections of his youth as a reporter. The line between fantastical assumptions and memoiristic sketches is drawn through subtitles: some stories are labeled as possible futures, others are relegated to probable pasts. The writer worked on these short stories in Parisian cafés accompanied by instrumental music, and the collection itself was published in 2008 in France (a Russian translation appeared in 2009).

And they will hang those who pollute the Earth…

Manhattan is filled with gallows bearing "Polluter" signs. Blind President Bruce Nimrod has banned gasoline, factory smoke, electricity, and meat, so private investigator Jerome Toledano pedals a lightweight plastic Ford Mustang. He’s hired by subway director John Alvarez to expose the bus company’s covert fuel consumption.

Instead of engines, a five-meter catapult is discovered in Queens. Escaping security, the detective jumps into the chair and flies across the Strait onto a Manhattan trampoline. Soon, the client’s sister, actress Sabrina, comes to him and asks him to talk some sense into her father, a secret biker. Old Alvarez forces the detective to ride a real Harley-Davidson. Toledano is drawn into the roar of the engine, inhaling cigar smoke, accelerating to 220 kilometers per hour, and is ambushed by mounted police. At the trial, Sabrina and her father blame him, and the former detective is hanged in a park in front of his mother.

The truth is in the finger

This short parable explores variations of an old Eastern proverb. The Fool first looks at the pointing finger, then praises the Sage’s speech, becomes timid, and finally listens to his discourse solely on the structure of joints. When the old man dies, his disciple still doesn’t understand why he raised his hand to the sky.

It’s all about respect

A security guard is driving a famous TV presenter along the A13 highway. The movie star sniffs powder, beats two women in the backseat, and breaks their noses. The bodyguard remembers the smell of the chicken slaughterhouse where he used to work and haggles over every favor.

Six mercenaries escort a client to a showdown with a Kosovar drug dealer nicknamed "Rambo." Before their eyes, the TV star knocks out his opponent with a curtain rod, then wreaks havoc at the New Paradise club and bites a dancer’s thigh. A security guard patiently extracts money from an ATM, but declines a new job when the employer calls him a jackass.

Flower sex

Infertility plagued humanity, but in the summer of 10363, a silvery powder began to emerge from men’s bodies instead of normal sperm. Vaginal secretions turned into a sweet syrup. Fertilization only occurred when the monarch butterfly absorbed the dry pollen and digested its membrane with gastric enzymes, flying onto the orange female corollas.

People are converting their homes into solariums and abandoning close-knit families. To ensure the survival of butterflies, fields are sown with milkweed, and the soil is fertilized with tiger worms, which feed on unembalmed corpses. After thousands of years, human limbs finally merge with the earth, transforming into a thriving forest.

A Lost Civilization

An archaeologist climbs the snow-capped Eastern Mountains, burying rebellious colleagues and porters along the way. In a deep cave, the explorer stumbles upon frescoes depicting giants. Descending several stories into a carved basalt city, the traveler examines twisted tubular skeletons, underground boats, and traces of chemical warfare.

The two-legged giants burned their forests, crawled underground, mutated into mole-like quadrupeds, and gassed their fellow tribesmen. A scientist deciphers inscriptions in an abandoned museum: the giants called themselves humans, while his tiny people were considered parasites and poisoned. The author of the notes clutches the manuscript in his antennae and bequeaths it to his fellow ants.

Murder in the Fog

In July 1983, a twenty-two-year-old reporter is on an internship in a northern province. A woman’s arm is severed by a train on the train tracks, but the newspaper hides the photo. Soon, divers recover a body bag from a canal containing the body of a seven-year-old boy, Michel.

A journalist visits the child’s mother, Yolande. The woman calmly pours coffee and confesses that she drowned her son to save money, choosing the more attractive second brother. Editor-in-chief Jean-Paul gets drunk on cherry beer and forbids exposing the child killer: other impoverished mothers in the city might adopt this method. An intern writes an obituary about the accident, and a year later, a similar crime in the Vosges Mountains shocks the country.

Tomorrow only women

Biologist Madeleine Wallemberg is searching for a way to protect living tissue from radiation while global news reports warn of a nuclear threat in Pakistan. Her mother, Karina, presents her dissertation on the Philippine gecko, which reproduces parthenogenetically without males.

A researcher forces lab mice to lay eggs and uses a platypus as a model. Rewarded for her breakthrough, Madeleine escapes from spies with Colonel Gerard Pantel. Her ex-fiancé, Kevin, dies in a shootout.

The laboratory moves into a deep military bunker. A young woman incubates the egg "Eve-103," created from her own cells and the colonel’s sperm, acclimating the embryo to low doses of radiation. Nuclear war breaks out. Ground sensors record the destruction of cities, the wounded Madeleine and Gérard take refuge on the lower horizon, and from the broken white shell emerges the tiny hand of the future progenitor of the female world.

The Price of Glory

A rabbit in a country cage writes a letter to a friend back home. A tuxedoed illusionist takes the little creature into town, shocks it for making a rustling sound, and squeezes it into the tight, round bottom of a perfumed hat.

With a snap of his fingers, the magician yanks the performer by the ears in front of a roaring crowd. The eared prisoner revels in the applause and fancies himself a stage genius. The illusionist begins drinking, drops his pet, and sells the aging circus performer to a dealer in a bloody apron.

Master of Cinema

After the Holocaust, the Council of Wise Men banned history, religion, and nationality, dispersing citizens into villages. The only permitted solace is the films of the secret recluse David Kubrick.

Reporter Victoria Peel enters his fairytale castle through the moat and finds a feeble bearded man. The director leads his guest into the tunnels of the Hadron Collider. Scientists have accelerated particles faster than light, learned to send mechanical flies with lenses instead of heads into the past, and filmed the real suffering of ancient people before the destruction of the planet. Victoria buries the old man, takes control of the controls, and edits the chronicles of bygone centuries herself, until the police confiscate the films and abolish the names.

Sparrow the Destroyer

A young reporter begins an affair with the fragile Sibylline, who hates her mother. The girl complains of an imaginary spasmophilia, faints on the subway, and goes to psychotherapist Maximilian von Schwartz.

The doctor turns out to be a tyrant: he drugs his friend, keeps her locked up, hits children with his car, and terrorizes the narrator with phone calls. Having twice rescued Sibylline from captivity, the hero brings her to the dwarf’s mansion to collect her belongings. When the police pick the lock, the battered victim falls to her knees and swears eternal love to her tormentor. The journalist abandons the girl on the sidewalk, breaking the cycle of someone else’s madness.

Where jokes are born

Stand-up comedian Tristan Magnard burns his concert jacket and goes in search of the author of his signature sketch. A chain of informants leads from a pub regular, through a website administrator, a Breton teacher, and a priest, to a church caretaker in Carnac. He admits that every Saturday he collects handwritten notes from a hiding place under a dolmen.

Having tracked a nocturnal cyclist, Tristan crosses the bay on a catamaran and enters the lighthouse. The Grand Lodge of Humor meets in the underground ring: candidates tell jokes with a revolver to their head, risking death by gunshot when their laughter is detected by sensors. Manyar undergoes rigorous training, defeats his own producer in a duel to the death, and spends the night with his mentor, Beatrice, who wrote that very first joke.

Teeth of the Earth

A twenty-one-year-old student goes into the tropical forest to photograph army ants. In the village, lion-men catch their neighbors from the gazelle-men tribe in nets on holidays, and the servant Kouassi-Kouassi saves up coins for another wife.

A column of millions of insects devours lizards and birds, chewing paths through the undergrowth. A student, barefoot, holds his breath near a giant queen bee while guards reach under his pants and stuff his ears. A servant manages to pull the photographer out of the trench and scrapes hundreds of mandibles from his bloodied skin with a knife.

You will like it

Screenwriter Olivier Rovin brings a clever detective series with scientific mysteries to the network. Young manager Guy Carbonara praises the script but turns it down: opinion polls demand formulaic stories about a police commissioner. The manager takes the writer to a dark basement where hired students spend days watching other people’s soap operas in exchange for sushi.

At home, Olivier receives forced books from a shopping club, and a dating site finds him the perfect companion, Myrtilla, from the bourgeois class. Enraged by the dictates of others’ tastes, the screenwriter storms into the restaurant, shames his neighbors for their choice of potato casserole, and holds a knife to Carbonara’s throat. A year later, a series built on a direct rejection of audience expectations is released and, paradoxically, breaks all popularity records.

Brand War

Corporations have amassed more wealth than governments, replacing flags with flashy logos. Consumers rally around brands of athletic shoes and soda, while politicians are turned into puppets. In 2018, a massacre erupts between mercenaries over kola nut plantations in Senegal.

Disney is building ergonomic settlements with private security, Samsung is launching military submarines, and fast-food bombers are razing other people’s neighborhoods. Earth is losing its clean air, and by 2041, computer giants are dividing up bases on Mars and the Moon, turning their homeland into a sanctuary for handicrafts.

Scarecrow as an element of strategy

The narrator attends his first general meeting of the building’s residents. The manager proposes renting out the first floor to a center for children with developmental delays. Six loudmouths, led by a boor in a green vest, spew saliva and call the patients freaks.

Outraged residents unanimously vote against the insolent protesters, automatically approving an expensive ramp, a glass-shafted elevator, and a salary increase for the manager himself. Later, the author witnesses the chairman ordering champagne and embracing a loudmouth from the opposition at an expensive restaurant: the troublemakers turned out to be hired puppets to manipulate the audience.

Anti-proverb

On a Parisian embankment, former philosophy teacher Orlando shares cheap wine with a homeless boy named Lucien. The old man blasts popular proverbs, arguing that hunger brings appetite, that other people’s goods are used by swindlers, and that the early bird sees only sleepy bakers in the morning. Having refuted a dozen formulas, the vagabond takes a swig and acknowledges the only Latin truth about wine.

Love in Atlantis

A thirty-year-old writer lies down on the hypnotist Stefan Kavalan’s couch, attempting to recall past incarnations. His consciousness transports him to a bridge of vines, beyond which lies the antediluvian island of Ha-Mem-Ptah.

The hero sees himself as a two-hundred-year-old healer, manipulating energy flows with his own hands, without drugs. In a tavern, he meets a young dancer. The couple lives in a world free of jealousy and judgment, perform astral travel, and send their sons to build pyramid-antennas to the east and west. When a tsunami wall obscures the horizon, the husband and wife sit on the sand, hold hands, and plunge into the seething sea.