In the heat-suffocated alleys of São Paulo, plastic mountains have replaced gardens. The Tietê River no longer flows; it oozes sludge through a desert of petrified birds. Food is synthetic, water is rationed, and real plants exist only in the private collections of an elite class. Welcome to Brazil in the 2030s, as imagined by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão in his dystopian novel Não Verás País Nenhum—translated into English as And Still the Earth.

When the book was first published in 1981, Brazil was emerging from the suffocating grip of a military dictatorship. The novel, initially banned, slipped through the cracks of a system that was just beginning its so-called "opening up." It was, at the time, a bold critique of authoritarianism, environmental destruction, and the false promises of technocratic progress.

More than four decades later, Brandão’s nightmare doesn’t just feel relevant—it feels disturbingly imminent.

A Desert of Our Own Making

In Brandão’s Brazil, progress devours itself. The Amazon is gone, auctioned off in eight short years to feed the global hunger for commodities. What remains is a vast, corporate-owned desert, celebrated by the regime as the "Ninth Wonder of the World," a marketing stunt that turns annihilation into tourism. The Northeast—Pernambuco, Maranhão, Ceará—is uninhabitable. Its people are deformed by industrial toxins, their bodies melting under the weight of unchecked capitalism.

This is not speculative fiction for the sake of entertainment. It is what Brazilian scholar Saulo Gouveia calls "a collision of disparate historical timescales"—a brutal juxtaposition of ecological collapse, authoritarian resurgence, and corporate colonization. The narrative reads like a chronicle of global extraction politics, stretched to grotesque extremes.

Brandão’s protagonist, Souza, is a history professor turned bureaucrat. He remembers a time when life wasn’t synthetic, when food wasn’t a tranquilizer-laced facsimile, and when São Paulo’s suffocating heat wasn’t lethal. His journey through Brazil’s compartmentalized wastelands reveals a system that has eliminated history, memory, and even language itself—replacing words with visual codes, early precursors to today’s emoticons. Literacy has been replaced by semiotic control.

Sound familiar?

The Speed Trap of Modernity

Brandão’s dystopia is not just about ecological ruin or totalitarian rule. It is about the acceleration of time—what sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls "social acceleration." In the relentless race toward "progress," moments collapse into one another, and the future arrives too fast to process. Technology promises convenience but delivers alienation. Growth promises prosperity but brings annihilation.

This is not just Brazil’s predicament. It is ours.

In the Anthropocene, time has lost its linearity. The glaciers of Greenland melt at a pace unseen in 1,500 years, while corporate profits accumulate in fractions of seconds via algorithmic trading. Virilio’s "racing stagnancy" becomes our lived reality: faster, faster, faster—until we crash into stillness.

Brandão captures this paradox in the rhythm of his narrative. His characters live in a perpetual state of anxious waiting, hoarding empty moments, stretched thin by a rubber-band temporality that threatens to snap. There is no present, only a collapsed future swallowing the now.

"We lived in anticipation of the someday that would have to arrive. And so our life expanded like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point, a state of tension, nerve-racking anxiety."

The tragedy is not just that the planet is dying—it is that we’ve engineered a system incapable of pausing long enough to prevent it.

The Brazilian Mirror

Brazil, as Brandão depicts it, is a test lab for hypermodern catastrophe. From the colonial rupture of 1500 to the national hubris of the 20th century, Brazil has been trapped in cycles of compressed developmental time. Politicians like Juscelino Kubitschek promised "fifty years of progress in five," building Brasília as a modernist utopia. Brandão responds with the Grand Marquee—a dystopian canopy meant to shield citizens from the sun as "heat pockets" fry the earth beneath.

Today’s Brazil still carries this temporal wound. From Jair Bolsonaro’s deforestation of the Amazon to the techno-optimism of global agribusiness, the nation oscillates between resource exploitation and environmental collapse. But it’s not just a Brazilian story—it’s a global one. The rest of the world has caught up.

Climate refugees now outnumber political refugees. "Heat pockets" are no longer science fiction; they are mapping onto real-world temperature data. The Marquee may be metaphorical, but geoengineering experiments that aim to control the climate are already underway.

Beyond Dystopia?

Brandão refuses to offer a solution. Unlike Orwell’s 1984 or Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, And Still the Earth doesn’t end with the glimmer of rebellion or the hint of systemic collapse that could lead to rebirth. It ends with annihilation on the horizon.

Yet perhaps the power of Brandão’s work lies in this very absence of redemption. By confronting the reader with total collapse, he forces us to ask: What is left to save? And how much time do we have to do it?

The theorists of acceleration—Virilio, Rosa, and others—warn that modern society’s obsession with speed and growth leads not just to environmental ruin but to a breakdown of meaning. When everything happens at once, when space shrinks to a screen and time shrinks to a notification, the very fabric of human existence unravels.

In Brazil, the consequences of this are literal: deserts where rainforests once stood, and plastic mountains replacing ecosystems. But it is also psychological and existential. As Souza observes, we are no longer living through history—we are racing toward the abyss.

A Global Parable

Brandão’s novel may have been written in 1981, but it reads like a field report from 2025. The collapse of nature, the commodification of catastrophe, the manipulation of language, and the erosion of memory—these are not futuristic warnings; they are lived realities.

After 60,000 years of human existence, the question remains: Can we slow down in time to preserve what’s left of life? Or are we destined, like Brandão’s Brazil, to sell off the last tree, photograph the last desert, and call it progress?

The clock is ticking. And as And Still the Earth reminds us, there may not be a tomorrow to postpone this reckoning.