Pepe Escobar: The Chronicles of Liquid War

Rule-based international order, or brutal hypocrisy?

Over the past seventeen years I have published seven books by globe-travelling journalist Pepe Escobar that offer a completely different view of modern history than is afforded by conventional Western sources. He explains things from the point of view of residents of the Global South and “sovereign civilizational states” such as Russia, China, and Iran. What the West sees as “rules-based international order”, many elsewhere see as brutal hypocrisy. Even if you completely disagree with this dark view of US and NATO motivations, the best way to understand the world around you is to inhabit a completely different perspective for a time.

I am proud of the contribution to viewpoint diversity that I have made by bringing printed and ebook versions of these deeply out-of-the-mainstream views to English-speaking readers. With Pepe’s seventh book, Eurasia v. NATOstan, dropping in a few days, I thought it was time to make a more concerted effort to bring Pepe’s work to the attention of global audiences. So I loaded all seven books into Google’s Gemini Pro 1.5—700,000 tokens—and asked Gemini to write an “international rights offering sheet.” After a bit of editing, what resulted is presented in Appendix A below.

Some AI niceties for the curious:

• I asked Gemini 1.5 to create Amazon Buy links for the books. She (they?) did so successfully on the first try, which I found impressive because GPT-4 is not consistently successful for me.

• Pepe coins a lot of vivid neologisms, so I asked 1.5 to create a glossary for me focused on his neologisms (as opposed to neologisms in general). Gemini did a very good job on this task, with only two minor caveats.

  • The current max output window of 7192 tokens is too short to create full-scale extractive analyses of such a lengthy corpus. Gemini suggested a process for iteratively creating topical sub-glossaries, which was a good idea. The alternative is a lot of chunking and looping.

  • There was one phrase she identified that wasn’t a Pepe coinage just the name of a project he talks about a lot.

• I used ChatGPT for the cover illustration of a “dragon-bear hybrid” facing off with an eagle. It took about ten revisions of the prompt to get something suitable and I have to say that generative AI art still needs a lot of improvement in steerability. ChatGPT could not reliably follow simple instructions such as “now put the eagle on the left and the dragon-bear on the right.”

• I needed to plug in cover thumbnails into the document, and rather than rummaging through my files and doing a lot of image resizing, the fastest way was for me to ask Gemini to write a simple Python script using the isbnlib library (which I already knew about). I’ve appended the script below the paywall as a bonus for paying subscribers.

Future AI application possibilities:

• Machine-speeded translation for additional languages

• Liquid War, the chatbot

• Appendices, Indexes, and Glossaries (volume 8)

• Chronicles, the YA novelizations for readers in the Global South

Eurasia v. NATOstan will be available in a few days at fine booksellers everywhere.

Cordially,

Fred Z.

Appendix A. International Rights Offering Sheet

Pepe Escobar's Chronicles of Liquid War

Nimble Books LLC is pleased to offer the international language rights for Pepe Escobar's Chronicles of Liquid War, a collection of seven insightful and thought-provoking books that provide a unique perspective on the complex and ever-shifting nature of conflict in the 21st century.

The Chronicles of Liquid War series comprises the following titles:

• Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (2007) (ISBN: 978-0-9788138-2-0) Amazon Link

• Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge (2007) (ISBN: 978-0-9788138-9-5) Amazon Link

• Obama Does Globalistan (2009) (ISBN: 978-1-934840-83-2) Amazon Link

• Empire of Chaos (2014) (ISBN: 978-1-60888-231-1) Amazon Link

• 2030 (2015) (ISBN: 978-1-60888-035-5) Amazon Link

• Raging Twenties: Great Power Politics Meets Techno-Feudalism in the Era of COVID-19 (2021) (ISBN: 978-1-60888-220-5) Amazon Link

• Eurasia v. NATOstan (2024) (ISBN: 978-1-60888-293-9) Amazon Link

Books by Pepe Escobar

Why This Series is Valuable to International Audiences:

Chronicles of Liquid War offers a unique and critical perspective on the changing nature of conflict in the 21st century, moving beyond simplistic narratives and exploring the complex interplay of geopolitics, economics, and technology with complete disregard for conventional Western and mainstream media narratives.

Through his peripatetic travel, outstanding sources, deep culture, and his pointed writing, Escobar sheds light on:

• The shift from conventional warfare to "Liquid War": Escobar argues that the traditional model of state-on-state warfare is being replaced by a more fluid and multifaceted form of conflict, encompassing economic sanctions, cyberwarfare, information warfare, and proxy conflicts.

• The rise of new power centers: The series examines the growing influence of non-Western powers, particularly China and Russia, and their challenge to the US-led "Empire of Chaos."

• The struggle for control of resources and trade routes: Escobar explores the crucial role of Pipelineistan and the New Silk Roads in shaping the geoeconomic landscape of Eurasia and beyond.

• The Global South's quest for autonomy and self-reliance: The series highlights the increasing desire of Global South nations to break free from Western dominance and chart their own destinies.

Escobar's work resonates with international audiences seeking to understand the complexities of the current global order and the potential for a more just and equitable future.

Rights Available:

Nimble Books LLC is offering the international language rights for the entire Chronicles of Liquid War series or individual titles. We are open to discussing various licensing options with interested publishers.  We offer a standard contract.  License fees are based on a tiered system that combines market size and expected revenue from first print run.

Contact:

For further information about the Chronicles of Liquid War series and to discuss rights, please contact:

Fred Zimmerman
Nimble Books LLC
wfz@nimblebooks.com
+1.734-545-5369

We believe that Chronicles of Liquid War offers an absolutely essential perspective on the changing world order and will resonate with readers across the globe. We look forward to partnering with international publishers to bring these important works to new audiences.

Appendix B. Gemini script to pull book cover images