HUMANITY’S REIGN IS OVER AND
THE ANIMALS REMEMBER
Available February, 2027
The Trial of Humanity
Paul Shapiro
Available February, 2027
For thousands of years, humans built cages, laboratories, and slaughterhouses; they poisoned oceans; leveled forests; exterminated species; and remade the planet in their images. To the animals, what humans referred to as civilization wasn’t civilization at all. It was an unprovoked war.
A DEVASTATING VIRUS THAT BROUGHT THAT REIGN TO AN END
Ten years later, the surviving humans are scattered, starving, and afraid. But the animals remember. And now, in the ruins of a former zoo, the animal kingdom has convened a postwar tribunal. The defendant is humanity itself. The charges: enslavement, torture, and genocide.
Robert Cardin, a grieving survivor, is chosen to represent his species. Nicola Silver, a former prosecutor, is forced into the role of humanity’s defender. But which side of Homo sapiens is worth defending—and who has the right to judge whom?
As witnesses testify and animals and humans across the globe follow along, the trial becomes a final judgment on humanity’s place on Earth. If humans are guilty, do they deserve extinction? And if spared, can they ever learn to live as one species among many?
The Trial of Humanity is a novel about reckoning, mercy, and whether a fallen species can learn to live without dominion over the rest of the living world.
