Origin Story
David Christian, the Oxford-trained historian who founded the Big History Project with Bill Gates funding, traces the entire 13.8-billion-year story of the universe through eight thresholds of increasing complexity. The book starts with the Big Bang, moves through the formation of stars, planets, and life, then arrives at human history and looks ahead to the Anthropocene future. Christian wrote Origin Story to bring his university-level Big History course to a general audience, condensing the cosmic-to-civilizational arc into a single 350-page volume that reads as the textbook predecessor to Sapiens.
Where Origin Story keeps showing up
Two of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about Origin Story
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The historian who founded Big History as a discipline traces 13.8 billion years through eight thresholds of complexity, from the Big Bang to the Anthropocene.
Yes, broadly. David Christian is a respected historian, and the book draws on contemporary cosmology, geology, and paleoanthropology. The Big History framing is interpretive rather than empirical, but the underlying science is mainstream.
Origin Story was written by David Christian, published in 2018 by Penguin Books, Limited.
Origin Story is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Origin Story takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Origin Story is a standalone novel by David Christian, not part of a series.
Origin Story is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
