In ‘Terrestrial History,' humans head for Mars

Washington Post

07-04-2025

In 2012, I took my 6-year-old twins to a space-exploration exhibition at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History. A gallery highlighted Mars: solar-panel technologies, rovers in dioramas, even a display on 'terraforming,' the intricate, lengthy process by which humanity would transform a cold, dusty, oxygen-starved sphere into an Earthlike Eden. A life-size astronaut knelt on a boulder, its torso and visor hollowed out; each boy scrambled inside the suit, posing as I snapped photos. Today they're college students. Time flies!
I recalled that afternoon while reading Joe Mungo Reed's lyrical, heady 'Terrestrial History,' which skitters amid the coming century and four generations of a family to reveal a world in crisis and a desperate colonization of the Red Planet. (The novel's structure nods to a quote from an Albert Einstein letter: 'the difference between past, present, and future is only a 'stubbornly persistent illusion.'') In the summer of 2025, Hannah, a physicist, leaves her husband and young son in Edinburgh and travels to a remote island off the northern coast of Scotland, where she mulls the mechanisms of fusion reactors. Her sole company is her dog, Jasper, who joins her on sunset walks along the craggy beach near her cottage. One evening she sees a flash in the sky, an eight-foot-tall spacesuit emerging from the waves. An image of a freckled child's face glows within the visor. A visitor from 2110, he knows who she is, has come to tell her about her own future research so that they may stave off a climate apocalypse.
Hannah's taken aback. 'I'm not the kind of person to tell a story like this,' she notes. 'I've always been irritated by mysticism, by blithe statements about inexplicable phenomena. At dinner parties, say, when people start to recount spooky, inexplicable events, I'm the one with their teeth gritted, calculating privately the way in which the experience being spoken of could be accounted for by suggestion, by mist, by a bird loose in the attic, by strong painkillers.' Yet in the blue dusk she's a true believer, escorting him to a stone shed where they'll work. Reed then plaits in other narratives, set decades later: Andrew, Hannah's widowed son and a rising progressive politician; Kenzie, his aloof daughter and math prodigy who finds love with Justine as they collaborate on a Mars project for a ruthless entrepreneur; and Roban, Kenzie and Justine's sickly boy, born and raised in a far-flung community and longing for an Earth he's never known.
There's no place like Home, the Martian Colony's term for the mother planet. The migrant cohort, known as Homers, mourn the everyday pleasures lost, 'the games, the sayings, the funny voices.' Their children, the First Gens, painfully adapt to low gravity and atypical diets and movement, with 'surgeries to help our joints bond properly,' Roban says, and 'bone supplements and courses of hormone therapies to promote growth.' The Colony shuttles among modules and 'transitways.' They mine the ruddy cliffs outside. Reed leans into world-building, conjuring 22nd-century life on the fourth rock from the sun.
In 2057, Andrew and his daughter struggle to salve their volatile relationship, seeking refuge on the island as Hannah attends to her notebooks and calculations. Reed writes a quicksilver line: 'When we reach the open sea the water is dark, rougher. The wake of the ferry is wide and flat, like a thumbprint dragged across butter.'
As the impact of climate change spreads, as wars immolate nations, both Andrew and Kenzie feel compelled to act. He challenges an incumbent for First Minister, canvassing the country, including its renowned St. Andrews resort: 'This is the first golf course, after all: the template from which others are made, so that now simulacra of this link land outside this small Scottish city are peppered over the whole globe, in deserts, on mountainsides, in swampland and tundra. A strange, nostalgic, colonial impulse . . . the making, the mastery of the land, is part of the point.' Kenzie opts for a job at Tevat, run by Axel Faulk, a renegade mogul and expatriate American. Faulk makes her an offer she can't refuse. 'The difference between my and Dad's responses lies in our perspectives,' she opines. 'He, a moralist at heart, is only appalled. I am an admirer of systems. I can't help but be thrilled by their cold foresight.' As Reed suggests, the future is now.
For a slender book, 'Terrestrial History' delivers an enthralling plot; complex, realized characters; and a wealth of fine-cut sentences. Reed's great theme is Time, how our species is a microscopic blip in the biosphere's 3.5 billion years. Can the arrow of chronology shoot off in various directions simultaneously? There are shout-outs to Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Sir Isaac Newton. The novel plays with the motif of an hourglass — how Roban and other First Gens are grains trickling through the pinch — and also Hannah's wristwatch, now an heirloom (and an allusion to Quentin Compson's broken watch in 'The Sound and the Fury').
The book closes with a wrenching crescendo, positing that time itself splinters, ambiguous, our fates 'just a symptom. The result of a larger failure.' Writers as diverse as Chang-rae Lee, Jennifer Egan and Ali Smith have circled around a pair of perplexing questions: What does the near-future wish to tell us? And can we save ourselves? 'Terrestrial History' is Joe Mungo Reed's piercing, poetic answer. This summer we are all Hannah, poised on a beach, glimpsing a flash in the sky and staring, astonished, as a figure in a spacesuit staggers from the sea.
Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of 'This Boy's Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.' He lives in Brooklyn.
By Joe Mungo Reed
W.W. Norton. 256 pp. $29.99